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Diaspora studies is an academic field established in the late 20th century to study dispersed ethnic populations, which are often termed diaspora peoples. The usage of the term diaspora carries the connotation of forced resettlement, due to expulsion, coercion, slavery, racism, or war, especially nationalist conflicts.
Academic institutes
The International Institute for Diasporic and Transcultural Studies (IIDTS) — a transnational institute incorporating Jean Moulin University (Lyons, France), the University of Cyprus, Sun Yat-sen University (Guangzhou, China) and Liverpool Hope University (UK) — is a dedicated research network operating in a transdisciplinary logic and focused on cultural representation (and auto-representation) of diasporic communities throughout the world. The institute sponsors the trilingual publication Transtext(e)s-Transcultures: A Journal of Global Cultural Studies.
Nehru University's School of International Studies, www.jnu.ac.in has a strong research programme, DIMP (Diaspora and International Programme) and its faculty run a network www.odi.in (Organisation for Diaspora Initiatives), an international network of higher academic researchers focused on studying Diaspora from International Perspective and examining diaspora as a resource in international relations. ODI publishes a research journal www.tandfonline/rdst with Routledge, London.
Golong Gilig Institute of Javanese Diaspora Studies, Indonesia.
Select Bibliography
Hall, Stuart (1990). "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." From Jonathan Rutherford, e.d, Identity: Community, Culture, and Difference (Lawrence & Wishart), pp. 222-37. Available online. (Also available here.)
See also
Diaspora politics
References
Ethnology
Anthropology | [
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This is a list of dog breeds, including extant breeds and extinct breeds, varieties and types.
Extant breeds
A–C
D–K
L–R
S–Z
Extinct breeds, varieties and types
Notes
References
Citations
Bibliography
Breeds
D | [
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Dimmu Borgir () is a Norwegian symphonic black metal band from Jessheim, formed in 1993. The name is derived from Dimmuborgir, a volcanic formation in Iceland, the name of which means "dark cities" or "dark castles/fortresses" in Icelandic, Faroese and Old Norse. The band has been through numerous lineup changes over the years; vocalist Shagrath and rhythm guitarist Silenoz are the only original members who still remain, with lead guitarist Galder being a longstanding member.
History
For All Tid and Stormblåst period
Dimmu Borgir was founded in 1993 by Silenoz and Tjodalv. Shagrath, Brynjard Tristan, & Stian Aarstad later joined Dimmu Borgir, and then released an EP in 1994 entitled Inn i evighetens mørke ("Into the Darkness of Eternity" in English). This short EP sold out within weeks, and the band followed up with the 1994 full-length album For All Tid ("For All Time" in English). This album featured vocal contributions by Vicotnik of Ved Buens Ende and Dødheimsgard and Aldrahn of Dødheimsgard and Zyklon-B. The initial line-up consisted of Shagrath playing drums with Tjodalv on guitar and Silenoz contributing lead vocals. This line-up changed before the release of Stormblåst ("Stormblown" in English) on Cacophonous Records in 1996, an album considered by many to be their finest. It is also the last album which features all lyrics written and sung in Norwegian.
Enthrone Darkness Triumphant period
After Stormblåst, keyboardist Stian Aarstad left the band due to his obligation to serve in the Norwegian army, thus being unable to participate in the 1996 recording of Devil's Path. That period was also marked by the departure of bassist Brynjard Tristan and the arrival of Nagash. Stian Aarstad returned for the recording of 1997's Enthrone Darkness Triumphant. He had trouble attending rehearsals and was unable to tour. He was then subsequently dismembered and replaced by Kimberly Goss for their 1997/1998 world tour. Enthrone Darkness Triumphant was a huge success for the band, and was their first release signed to Nuclear Blast, a German record label. The album was recorded in the Abyss Studios, owned by Hypocrisy's frontman Peter Tägtgren. After the release of Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, the band went on tour with In Flames, Dissection and other bands who were prominent in the scene at the time.
Spiritual Black Dimensions and Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia period
After the tour for Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, the band recruited new members Mustis on keyboards and Astennu on lead guitar. Dimmu Borgir's following full-length albums Spiritual Black Dimensions in 1999 and 2001's Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia, both met critical acclaim. However, another line-up change occurred between the two albums; Nagash quit and was replaced by new bassist/singer ICS Vortex, and Tjodalv left due to his family commitments, and to form the subsequent band Susperia, only to be replaced with Nicholas Barker of Cradle of Filth. Astennu was fired from his guitar duties as well due to creative differences, and was replaced by Galder.
Death Cult Armageddon and Stormblåst MMV period
Despite the regular video play on MTV2 and Fuse that their follow-up album would receive, the band stated that they were not "commercially-oriented", and instead, they 'simply wished to spread their message to more people'. In 2003, Dimmu Borgir recorded Death Cult Armageddon. Death Cult Armageddon was recorded with the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Adam Klemens. All orchestrations were arranged by Gaute Storaas (who had previously worked with Dimmu Borgir on the album Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia). In 2004, Dimmu Borgir performed on the mainstage at Ozzfest.
In 2005, the band did a complete re-recording of the Stormblåst album, featuring Hellhammer of Mayhem fame as the session drummer. The album also featured a DVD with a live performance from the 2004 Ozzfest tour.
In Sorte Diaboli period
Dimmu Borgir's eighth studio album, In Sorte Diaboli, was released on 24 April 2007. A special edition version was released in a boxed case with a DVD, backward-printed lyrics, and a mirror. The album artwork was released on 14 February 2007 on a promotional webpage for the album. This album features once more the drumming of Hellhammer of Mayhem. Blomberg left the band in mid-tour in 2007 because of a neck injury that resulted in limited movement of his right arm. With the release of this album, Dimmu Borgir became the first black metal band with a number one album on the charts in their native country. In October 2008, they released their second live DVD set titled The Invaluable Darkness, which was based on several shows during the world tour supporting 'In Sorte Diaboli'.
In 2009, members ICS Vortex and Mustis independently announced their departure from Dimmu Borgir. Mustis released a statement claiming his disfavor with the band, stating that he was not properly credited for his writing contributions to the band's music, mentioning possibly taking legal action.
Dimmu Borgir soon after confirmed the pair's dismissal from the band, releasing a statement explaining why the two were fired. Shagrath, Silenoz and Galder wrote: "Funny then, how the new album is half-way finished written already by the rest of us without any of these guys' input, still having all those elements we're known for." Many fans were quite disappointed, however, without the composition of Mustis, and soaring signature voice of ICS Vortex.
Abrahadabra period
Dimmu Borgir's ninth studio album, Abrahadabra, was released on 24 September 2010 in Germany, 27 September 2010 for the rest of Europe and 12 October 2010 in North America. Silenoz explained that the growing periods of time between albums was because the band had stopped writing music while touring, which was affecting the quality of the music. He described the new album as having an "eerie and haunting feel to it", adding that the material is "epic", "primal", atmospheric and ambient. A promotional image released with the statement showed Shagrath returning to the keyboards. The album features an ensemble orchestra, the Kringkastingsorkestret (the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra), as well as the Schola Cantorum choir, totaling more than 100 musicians and singers.
Gaute Storaas, composer of the orchestral arrangements, released a statement on his role in working on the album. "Their music is epic, thematic and symphonic already from the creation; they are clearly having an orchestral approach to composing. My role in this is sometimes just to transcribe their themes, sometimes to take their ideas, tear them apart and build them back up in ways that are true to the band's intentions. The music must also be both interesting and playable for the musicians, and hopefully, meet the quality standards of the orchestral world."
On 8 July the band confirmed that they had tapped Swedish multi-instrumentalist Snowy Shaw (Therion, Dream Evil) to replace bassist/clean vocalist ICS Vortex on their then-upcoming album, Abrahadabra, and world tour. On 25 August it was announced that Snowy Shaw had left Dimmu Borgir to rejoin Therion. On 17 September 2010 Dimmu Borgir released the song "Born Treacherous" from Abrahadabra on their official Myspace page. Then on 24 September the band announced they would stream Abrahadabra in its entirety until 7 p.m. EST that evening. The keyboards and bass are currently played by Gerlioz from Apoptygma Berzerk and Cyrus of Susperia respectively, and the clean vocals are sampled.
28 May 2011 saw Dimmu Borgir, for the first time in the band's career, perform live with a full symphony orchestra and choir in a one-off show with the Norwegian Broadcasting Orchestra and Schola Cantorum Choir (who collaborated on Abrahadabra the previous year) at the Oslo Spectrum entitled "Forces of the Northern Night". This was broadcast live on Norway's main national TV carrier NRK. The setlist for this show consisted of tracks from the band's recent transfiguration Abrahadabra, leading tracks "Vredysbyrd" and "Progenies of the Great Apocalypse" from Death Cult Armageddon, as well as newly updated versions of tracks from their standard back catalog; "The Serpentine Offering", "Kings of the Carnival Creation", and "Mourning Palace" which were re-orchestrated by Gaute Storaas. The band played a similar show the following year at the Wacken Open Air festival, having yet performed a second live show with a symphony orchestra and choir. This time, they were accompanied by the Czech National Orchestra with the same choir, being the second band in the festival's history to play with a live orchestra and choir (next to German power metal band Rage's 2007 performance). The show was broadcast live on Germany's Kultur TV arts channel. Silenoz has also said in several recent interviews that both live sets have been fully mixed and will be accompanied by a feature-length documentary and bonus material when released. In late 2011-2012 the band went on a special tour for fans in various European countries, including playing in some small, intimate venues celebrating their 1997 album Enthrone Darkness Triumphant by playing the album in its entirety, alongside an additional set of various fan favourite tracks, following a poll to fans directly, asking which of their first 3 albums would they want to see played in full on their next European tour.
Forces of the Northern Night and Eonian
The band originally announced in August 2013 that work had commenced on the band's next album. However, the production and release of the album has faced numerous delays. It will mark the longest ever gap between each studio release. Following various delays, The Oslo and Wacken Orchestra performances, recorded between 2011 and 2012, were released on CD/DVD/Blu-ray format on 28 April 2017 worldwide as their third live video release titled 'Forces of the Northern Night'. Silenoz recently revealed that the band is in the mixing stage of the follow-up to Abrahadabra. Ten songs will feature on the next album and they have said it has since been completed. On 18 December 2017 it was announced that the first single from the new album will be initially released on a 7-inch vinyl EP, and will be titled 'Interdimensional Summit', and was released on 23 February 2018. The new album was titled Eonian and was released on 4 May through Nuclear Blast, and marked the band's first new release of original material in almost eight years. A second song from the new album, 'Council of Wolves and Snakes' was made available for streaming online on 30 March. On 28 May, it was announced that Victor Brandt (Entombed A.D., Firespawn) had officially joined as the band's new bassist.
Eleventh studio album
According to recent updates on the band member's Instagram accounts, the band are now in the process of writing and pre-production for their eleventh studio album. Silenoz has stated in a recent interview that the band would not take as long to release their next album.
Influences and musical style
Dimmu Borgir's older releases (since 1994 to 1999) are, according to AllMusic journalist Bradley Torreano, strongly influenced by Darkthrone, Mayhem, Bathory, Emperor, Celtic Frost, Immortal, Venom, and Iron Maiden. The band became more progressive and symphonic through the years; many black metal purists consider the band's second album, Stormblåst, to be "the act's last true contribution to black metal". Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, Dimmu Borgir's third album, "distinguished itself in two important areas, firstly forgoing their native language for English and secondly for its dramatic increase in synthesizer content." Significant experimentation began with 1999's Spiritual Black Dimensions (due to the addition of Vortex's clean vocals, and the variety of musical ideas from then-new member Mustis), as well as Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia due to addition of influences from composers such as Antonín Dvořák, Enya, Richard Wagner, and Frédéric Chopin. As the music strongly differed from the older, rawer black metal style, Jon "Metalion" Kristiansen called Spiritual Black Dimensions "a fine case of melodic, over-produced symphonic metal. If you like this melodic style I can't really think of anyone doing it better [...]. No, I wouldn't call this black metal. Read the interview with Funeral Mist for the right definition of black metal."
Discography
For all tid (1995)
Stormblåst (1996)
Enthrone Darkness Triumphant (1997)
Spiritual Black Dimensions (1999)
Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia (2001)
Death Cult Armageddon (2003)
Stormblåst MMV (2005)
In Sorte Diaboli (2007)
Abrahadabra (2010)
Eonian (2018)
Members
Current official members
Silenoz – rhythm guitar , lead vocals
Shagrath – lead vocals , drums , lead guitar
Galder – lead guitar
Current session/touring members
Daray – drums
Gerlioz – keyboards, synthesizers
Victor Brandt – bass guitar
References
External links
Norwegian symphonic black metal musical groups
Musical groups established in 1993
1993 establishments in Norway
Spellemannprisen winners
Musical groups from Oslo
People from Jessheim
Nuclear Blast artists
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The Dutch Football League is organized by the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB, Koninklijke Nederlandse Voetbalbond).The most successful teams are Ajax (35), PSV (23) and Feyenoord (15). Important teams of the past are HVV (10 titles), Sparta Rotterdam (6 titles) and Willem II (3 titles).
The annual match that marks the beginning of the season is called the Johan Cruijff Schaal (Johan Cruyff Shield). Contenders are the champions and the cup winners of the previous season.
Dutch professional clubs
Former Dutch league teams
Koninklijke HFC
RAP (of Amsterdam) were the first official champions of the Netherlands in 1899. The club however became a Cricket club in 1916 following a total of 5 national football titles.
Fortuna 54 (of Geleen) and Sittardia (of Sittard) merged to form Fortuna Sittard in 1968.
Blauw Wit, DWS and De Volewijckers merged to form FC Amsterdam in 1972, which ceased to exist in 1982.
PEC and the Zwolsche Boys merged to form PEC Zwolle in 1971, which became FC Zwolle in 1990.
Sportclub Enschede and the Enschedese Boys merged to form FC Twente in 1965.
DOS, Elinkwijk and Velox merged to form FC Utrecht in 1970.
GVAV became FC Groningen in 1971.
Alkmaar 54 and FC Zaanstreek merged to form AZ in 1967.
Roda Sport and Rapid JC merged to form Roda JC in 1962.
BVC Rotterdam and BVC Flamingos merged to form Scheveningen Holland Sport in 1954, which merged with ADO in 1971 to form FC Den Haag, which became ADO Den Haag in 1996.
SVV and Dordrecht '90 merged to form SVV/Dordrecht '90 in 1991. The club has since been renamed FC Dordrecht.
VC Vlissingen (from Flushing) became a professional club in 1990, changed its name to VCV Zeeland a year later, and became an amateur club again in 1992.
FC Wageningen (founded in 1911) won the Dutch cup in 1939 and 1948, joined the Dutch professional league when it was formed in 1954, and remained professional until the club went bankrupt in 1992.
HVC of Amersfoort was formed in 1905, joined the league in 1954, was renamed to SC Amersfoort in 1973 and went bankrupt in 1982.
Fortuna Vlaardingen (formed in 1904) joined the professional league in 1955, was renamed to FC Vlaardingen in 1974 and went bankrupt in 1981.
HFC Haarlem (formed in 1889) joined the professional league in 1954 and remained professional until the club went bankrupt in 2010.
RBC Roosendaal (formed in 1927) joined the professional league in 1955 till 1971 and 1983 and remained professional until the club went bankrupt in 2011.
AGOVV Apeldoorn (formed in 1913) joined the professional league in 1954 till 1971, but returned on 1 July 2003 until the club went bankrupt in 2013.
SC Veendam (formed in 1894) joined the professional league in 1954, but went bankrupt in 2013.
Zwart-Wit '28 won the national amateur championship in 1971 and the national cup for women in 2000. Went bankrupt in 2004.
See also
Eerste Divisie
Eredivisie
List of football stadiums in the Netherlands
References
External links
Midfield Dynamo's list of the Dutch football league's 'Big 3' and 'Best of the Rest' of the other clubs, midfielddynamo.com
Orange Football Blog - Weekly summaries from the Eredivisie and other articles, nlplanet.com
Official Eredivisie site
Official Eerste Divisie website
League321.com - Club stats records.
Netherlands
Football Clubs
Football clubs
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In modern physics, the double-slit experiment is a demonstration that light and matter can display characteristics of both classically defined waves and particles; moreover, it displays the fundamentally probabilistic nature of quantum mechanical phenomena. This type of experiment was first performed, using light, by Thomas Young in 1801, as a demonstration of the wave behavior of light. At that time it was thought that light consisted of either waves or particles. With the beginning of modern physics, about a hundred years later, it was realized that light could in fact show behavior characteristic of both waves and particles. In 1927, Davisson and Germer demonstrated that electrons show the same behavior, which was later extended to atoms and molecules. Thomas Young's experiment with light was part of classical physics long before the development of quantum mechanics and the concept of wave–particle duality. He believed it demonstrated that the wave theory of light was correct, and his experiment is sometimes referred to as Young's experiment or Young's slits.
The experiment belongs to a general class of "double path" experiments, in which a wave is split into two separate waves that later combine into a single wave. Changes in the path-lengths of both waves result in a phase shift, creating an interference pattern. Another version is the Mach–Zehnder interferometer, which splits the beam with a beam splitter.
In the basic version of this experiment, a coherent light source, such as a laser beam, illuminates a plate pierced by two parallel slits, and the light passing through the slits is observed on a screen behind the plate. The wave nature of light causes the light waves passing through the two slits to interfere, producing bright and dark bands on the screen – a result that would not be expected if light consisted of classical particles. However, the light is always found to be absorbed at the screen at discrete points, as individual particles (not waves); the interference pattern appears via the varying density of these particle hits on the screen. Furthermore, versions of the experiment that include detectors at the slits find that each detected photon passes through one slit (as would a classical particle), and not through both slits (as would a wave). However, such experiments demonstrate that particles do not form the interference pattern if one detects which slit they pass through. These results demonstrate the principle of wave–particle duality.
Other atomic-scale entities, such as electrons, are found to exhibit the same behavior when fired towards a double slit. Additionally, the detection of individual discrete impacts is observed to be inherently probabilistic, which is inexplicable using classical mechanics.
The experiment can be done with entities much larger than electrons and photons, although it becomes more difficult as size increases. The largest entities for which the double-slit experiment has been performed were molecules that each comprised 2000 atoms (whose total mass was 25,000 atomic mass units).
The double-slit experiment (and its variations) has become a classic for its clarity in expressing the central puzzles of quantum mechanics. Because it demonstrates the fundamental limitation of the ability of the observer to predict experimental results, Richard Feynman called it "a phenomenon which is impossible […] to explain in any classical way, and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains the only mystery [of quantum mechanics]."
Overview
If light consisted strictly of ordinary or classical particles, and these particles were fired in a straight line through a slit and allowed to strike a screen on the other side, we would expect to see a pattern corresponding to the size and shape of the slit. However, when this "single-slit experiment" is actually performed, the pattern on the screen is a diffraction pattern in which the light is spread out. The smaller the slit, the greater the angle of spread. The top portion of the image shows the central portion of the pattern formed when a red laser illuminates a slit and, if one looks carefully, two faint side bands. More bands can be seen with a more highly refined apparatus. Diffraction explains the pattern as being the result of the interference of light waves from the slit.
If one illuminates two parallel slits, the light from the two slits again interferes. Here the interference is a more pronounced pattern with a series of alternating light and dark bands. The width of the bands is a property of the frequency of the illuminating light. (See the bottom photograph to the right.) When Thomas Young (1773–1829) first demonstrated this phenomenon, it indicated that light consists of waves, as the distribution of brightness can be explained by the alternately additive and subtractive interference of wavefronts. Young's experiment, performed in the early 1800s, played a crucial role in the understanding of the wave theory of light, vanquishing the corpuscular theory of light proposed by Isaac Newton, which had been the accepted model of light propagation in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, the later discovery of the photoelectric effect demonstrated that under different circumstances, light can behave as if it is composed of discrete particles. These seemingly contradictory discoveries made it necessary to go beyond classical physics and take into account the quantum nature of light.
Feynman was fond of saying that all of quantum mechanics can be gleaned from carefully thinking through the implications of this single experiment. He also proposed (as a thought experiment) that if detectors were placed before each slit, the interference pattern would disappear.
The Englert–Greenberger duality relation provides a detailed treatment of the mathematics of double-slit interference in the context of quantum mechanics.
A low-intensity double-slit experiment was first performed by G. I. Taylor in 1909, by reducing the level of incident light until photon emission/absorption events were mostly non-overlapping.
A double-slit experiment was not performed with anything other than light until 1961, when Claus Jönsson of the University of Tübingen performed it with electron beams. In 1974, the Italian physicists Pier Giorgio Merli, Gian Franco Missiroli, and Giulio Pozzi repeated the experiment using single electrons and biprism (instead of slits), showing that each electron interferes with itself as predicted by quantum theory. In 2002, the single-electron version of the experiment was voted "the most beautiful experiment" by readers of Physics World.
In 2012, Stefano Frabboni and co-workers eventually performed the double-slit experiment with electrons and real slits, following the original scheme proposed by Feynman. They sent single electrons onto nanofabricated slits (about 100 nm wide) and, by collecting the transmitted electrons with a single-electron detector, they could show the build-up of a double-slit interference pattern.
In 2019, single particle interference was demonstrated for antimatter by Marco Giammarchi and coworkers.
Variations of the experiment
Interference of individual particles
An important version of this experiment involves single particles. Sending particles through a double-slit apparatus one at a time results in single particles appearing on the screen, as expected. Remarkably, however, an interference pattern emerges when these particles are allowed to build up one by one (see the adjacent image). This demonstrates the wave–particle duality, which states that all matter exhibits both wave and particle properties: the particle is measured as a single pulse at a single position, while the wave describes the probability of absorbing the particle at a specific place on the screen. This phenomenon has been shown to occur with photons, electrons, atoms and even some molecules. Success was achieved with buckminsterfullerene () in 2001, with two molecules of 430 atoms ( and ) in 2011, and with molecules of up to 2000 atoms in 2019.
The probability of detection is the square of the amplitude of the wave and can be calculated with classical waves (see below). Ever since the origination of quantum mechanics, some theorists have searched for ways to incorporate additional determinants or "hidden variables" that, were they to become known, would account for the location of each individual impact with the target.
Mach-Zehnder interferometer
The Mach–Zehnder interferometer can be seen as a simplified version of the double-slit experiment. Instead of propagating through free space after the two slits, and hitting any position in an extended screen, in the interferometer the photons can only propagate via two paths, and hit two discrete photodetectors. This makes it possible to describe it via simple linear algebra in dimension 2, rather than differential equations.
A photon emitted by the laser hits the first beam splitter and is then in a superposition between the two possible paths. In the second beam splitter these paths interfere, causing the photon to hit the photodetector on the right with probability one, and the photodetector on the bottom with probability zero. It is interesting to consider what would happen if the photon were definitely in either of paths between the beam splitters. This can be accomplished by blocking one of the paths, or equivalently by detecting the presence of a photon there. In both cases there will be no interference between the paths anymore, and both photodetectors will be hit with probability 1/2. From this we can conclude that the photon does not take one path or another after the first beam splitter, but rather that it is in a genuine quantum superposition of the two paths.
"Which-way" experiments and the principle of complementarity
A well-known thought experiment predicts that if particle detectors are positioned at the slits, showing through which slit a photon goes, the interference pattern will disappear. This which-way experiment illustrates the complementarity principle that photons can behave as either particles or waves, but cannot be observed as both at the same time.
Despite the importance of this thought experiment in the history of quantum mechanics (for example, see the discussion on Einstein's version of this experiment), technically feasible realizations of this experiment were not proposed until the 1970s. (Naive implementations of the textbook thought experiment are not possible because photons cannot be detected without absorbing the photon.) Currently, multiple experiments have been performed illustrating various aspects of complementarity.
An experiment performed in 1987 produced results that demonstrated that information could be obtained regarding which path a particle had taken without destroying the interference altogether. This showed the effect of measurements that disturbed the particles in transit to a lesser degree and thereby influenced the interference pattern only to a comparable extent. In other words, if one does not insist that the method used to determine which slit each photon passes through be completely reliable, one can still detect a (degraded) interference pattern.
Delayed choice and quantum eraser variations
Wheeler's delayed choice experiments demonstrate that extracting "which path" information after a particle passes through the slits can seem to retroactively alter its previous behavior at the slits.
Quantum eraser experiments demonstrate that wave behavior can be restored by erasing or otherwise making permanently unavailable the "which path" information.
A simple do-it-at-home illustration of the quantum eraser phenomenon was given in an article in Scientific American. If one sets polarizers before each slit with their axes orthogonal to each other, the interference pattern will be eliminated. The polarizers can be considered as introducing which-path information to each beam. Introducing a third polarizer in front of the detector with an axis of 45° relative to the other polarizers "erases" this information, allowing the interference pattern to reappear. This can also be accounted for by considering the light to be a classical wave, and also when using circular polarizers and single photons. Implementations of the polarizers using entangled photon pairs have no classical explanation.
Weak measurement
In a highly publicized experiment in 2012, researchers claimed to have identified the path each particle had taken without any adverse effects at all on the interference pattern generated by the particles. In order to do this, they used a setup such that particles coming to the screen were not from a point-like source, but from a source with two intensity maxima. However, commentators such as Svensson have pointed out that there is in fact no conflict between the weak measurements performed in this variant of the double-slit experiment and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Weak measurement followed by post-selection did not allow simultaneous position and momentum measurements for each individual particle, but rather allowed measurement of the average trajectory of the particles that arrived at different positions. In other words, the experimenters were creating a statistical map of the full trajectory landscape.
Other variations
In 1967, Pfleegor and Mandel demonstrated two-source interference using two separate lasers as light sources.
It was shown experimentally in 1972 that in a double-slit system where only one slit was open at any time, interference was nonetheless observed provided the path difference was such that the detected photon could have come from either slit. The experimental conditions were such that the photon density in the system was much less than unity.
In 1999, a quantum interference experiment (using a diffraction grating, rather than two slits) was successfully performed with buckyball molecules (each of which comprises 60 carbon atoms). A buckyball is large enough (diameter about 0.7 nm, nearly half a million times larger than a proton) to be seen under an electron microscope.
In 2005, E. R. Eliel presented an experimental and theoretical study of the optical transmission of a thin metal screen perforated by two subwavelength slits, separated by many optical wavelengths. The total intensity of the far-field double-slit pattern is shown to be reduced or enhanced as a function of the wavelength of the incident light beam.
In 2012, researchers at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln performed the double-slit experiment with electrons as described by Richard Feynman, using new instruments that allowed control of the transmission of the two slits and the monitoring of single-electron detection events. Electrons were fired by an electron gun and passed through one or two slits of 62 nm wide × 4 μm tall.
In 2013, a quantum interference experiment (using diffraction gratings, rather than two slits) was successfully performed with molecules that each comprised 810 atoms (whose total mass was over 10,000 atomic mass units). The record was raised to 2000 atoms (25,000 amu) in 2019.
Hydrodynamic pilot wave analogs
Hydrodynamic analogs have been developed that can recreate various aspects of quantum mechanical systems, including single-particle interference through a double-slit. A silicone oil droplet, bouncing along the surface of a liquid, self-propels via resonant interactions with its own wave field. The droplet gently sloshes the liquid with every bounce. At the same time, ripples from past bounces affect its course. The droplet's interaction with its own ripples, which form what is known as a pilot wave, causes it to exhibit behaviors previously thought to be peculiar to elementary particles – including behaviors customarily taken as evidence that elementary particles are spread through space like waves, without any specific location, until they are measured.
Behaviors mimicked via this hydrodynamic pilot-wave system include quantum single particle diffraction, tunneling, quantized orbits, orbital level splitting, spin, and multimodal statistics. It is also possible to infer uncertainty relations and exclusion principles. Videos are available illustrating various features of this system. (See the External links.)
However, more complicated systems that involve two or more particles in superposition are not amenable to such a simple, classically intuitive explanation. Accordingly, no hydrodynamic analog of entanglement has been developed. Nevertheless, optical analogs are possible.
Classical wave-optics formulation
Much of the behaviour of light can be modelled using classical wave theory. The Huygens–Fresnel principle is one such model; it states that each point on a wavefront generates a secondary wavelet, and that the disturbance at any subsequent point can be found by summing the contributions of the individual wavelets at that point. This summation needs to take into account the phase as well as the amplitude of the individual wavelets. Only the intensity of a light field can be measured—this is proportional to the square of the amplitude.
In the double-slit experiment, the two slits are illuminated by the quasi-monochromatic light of a single laser. If the width of the slits is small enough (much less than the wavelength of the laser light), the slits diffract the light into cylindrical waves. These two cylindrical wavefronts are superimposed, and the amplitude, and therefore the intensity, at any point in the combined wavefronts depends on both the magnitude and the phase of the two wavefronts. The difference in phase between the two waves is determined by the difference in the distance travelled by the two waves.
If the viewing distance is large compared with the separation of the slits (the far field), the phase difference can be found using the geometry shown in the figure below right. The path difference between two waves travelling at an angle is given by:
Where d is the distance between the two slits. When the two waves are in phase, i.e. the path difference is equal to an integral number of wavelengths, the summed amplitude, and therefore the summed intensity is maximum, and when they are in anti-phase, i.e. the path difference is equal to half a wavelength, one and a half wavelengths, etc., then the two waves cancel and the summed intensity is zero. This effect is known as interference. The interference fringe maxima occur at angles
where λ is the wavelength of the light. The angular spacing of the fringes, , is given by
The spacing of the fringes at a distance from the slits is given by
For example, if two slits are separated by 0.5 mm (), and are illuminated with a 0.6 μm wavelength laser (), then at a distance of 1 m (), the spacing of the fringes will be 1.2 mm.
If the width of the slits is appreciable compared to the wavelength, the Fraunhofer diffraction equation is needed to determine the intensity of the diffracted light as follows:
where the sinc function is defined as sinc(x) = sin(x)/x for x ≠ 0, and sinc(0) = 1.
This is illustrated in the figure above, where the first pattern is the diffraction pattern of a single slit, given by the function in this equation, and the second figure shows the combined intensity of the light diffracted from the two slits, where the function represents the fine structure, and the coarser structure represents diffraction by the individual slits as described by the function.
Similar calculations for the near field can be made by applying the Fresnel diffraction equation, which implies that as the plane of observation gets closer to the plane in which the slits are located, the diffraction patterns associated with each slit decrease in size, so that the area in which interference occurs is reduced, and may vanish altogether when there is no overlap in the two diffracted patterns.
Interpretations of the experiment
Like the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, the double-slit experiment is often used to highlight the differences and similarities between the various interpretations of quantum mechanics.
Copenhagen interpretation
The Copenhagen interpretation, put forth by some of the pioneers in the field of quantum mechanics, asserts that it is undesirable to posit anything that goes beyond the mathematical formulae and the kinds of physical apparatus and reactions that enable us to gain some knowledge of what goes on at the atomic scale. One of the mathematical constructs that enables experimenters to predict very accurately certain experimental results is sometimes called a probability wave. In its mathematical form it is analogous to the description of a physical wave, but its "crests" and "troughs" indicate levels of probability for the occurrence of certain phenomena (e.g., a spark of light at a certain point on a detector screen) that can be observed in the macro world of ordinary human experience.
The probability "wave" can be said to "pass through space" because the probability values that one can compute from its mathematical representation are dependent on time. One cannot speak of the location of any particle such as a photon between the time it is emitted and the time it is detected simply because in order to say that something is located somewhere at a certain time one has to detect it. The requirement for the eventual appearance of an interference pattern is that particles be emitted, and that there be a screen with at least two distinct paths for the particle to take from the emitter to the detection screen. Experiments observe nothing whatsoever between the time of emission of the particle and its arrival at the detection screen. If a ray tracing is next made as if a light wave (as understood in classical physics) is wide enough to take both paths, then that ray tracing will accurately predict the appearance of maxima and minima on the detector screen when many particles pass through the apparatus and gradually "paint" the expected interference pattern.
Path-integral formulation
The Copenhagen interpretation is similar to the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics provided by Feynman. The path integral formulation replaces the classical notion of a single, unique trajectory for a system, with a sum over all possible trajectories. The trajectories are added together by using functional integration.
Each path is considered equally likely, and thus contributes the same amount. However, the phase of this contribution at any given point along the path is determined by the action along the path:
All these contributions are then added together, and the magnitude of the final result is squared, to get the probability distribution for the position of a particle:
As is always the case when calculating probability, the results must then be normalized by imposing:
To summarize, the probability distribution of the outcome is the normalized square of the norm of the superposition, over all paths from the point of origin to the final point, of waves propagating proportionally to the action along each path. The differences in the cumulative action along the different paths (and thus the relative phases of the contributions) produces the interference pattern observed by the double-slit experiment. Feynman stressed that his formulation is merely a mathematical description, not an attempt to describe a real process that we can measure.
Relational interpretation
According to the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed by Carlo Rovelli, observations such as those in the double-slit experiment result specifically from the interaction between the observer (measuring device) and the object being observed (physically interacted with), not any absolute property possessed by the object. In the case of an electron, if it is initially "observed" at a particular slit, then the observer–particle (photon–electron) interaction includes information about the electron's position. This partially constrains the particle's eventual location at the screen. If it is "observed" (measured with a photon) not at a particular slit but rather at the screen, then there is no "which path" information as part of the interaction, so the electron's "observed" position on the screen is determined strictly by its probability function. This makes the resulting pattern on the screen the same as if each individual electron had passed through both slits.
Many-worlds interpretation
Physicist David Deutsch argues in his book The Fabric of Reality that the double-slit experiment is evidence for the many-worlds interpretation. However, since every interpretation of quantum mechanics is empirically indistinguishable, some scientists are skeptical of this claim.
De Broglie–Bohm theory
An alternative to the standard understanding of quantum mechanics, the De Broglie–Bohm theory states that particles also have precise locations at all times, and that their velocities are defined by the wave-function. So while a single particle will travel through one particular slit in the double-slit experiment, the so-called "pilot wave" that influences it will travel through both. The two slit de Broglie-Bohm trajectories were first calculated by Chris Dewdney while working with Chris Philippidis and Basil Hiley at Birkbeck College (London). The de Broglie-Bohm theory produces the same statistical results as standard quantum mechanics, but dispenses with many of its conceptual difficulties.
See also
Complementarity (physics)
Delayed choice quantum eraser
Diffraction from slits
Dual-polarization interferometry
Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester
N-slit interferometer
Photon polarization
Quantum coherence
Schrödinger's cat
Young's interference experiment
Measurement problem
Hydrodynamic quantum analogs
Pilot wave theory
References
Further reading
External links
Interactive animations
Huygens and interference
Single particle experiments
Website with the movie and other information from the first single electron experiment by Merli, Missiroli, and Pozzi.
Movie showing single electron events build up to form an interference pattern in double-slit experiments. Several versions with and without narration (File size = 3.6 to 10.4 MB) (Movie Length = 1m 8s)
Freeview video 'Electron Waves Unveil the Microcosmos' A Royal Institution Discourse by Akira Tonomura provided by the Vega Science Trust
Hitachi website that provides background on Tonomura video and link to the video
Hydrodynamic analog
"Single-particle interference observed for macroscopic objects"
Pilot-Wave Hydrodynamics: Supplemental Video
Through the Wormhole: Yves Couder . Explains Wave/Particle Duality via Silicon Droplets
Computer simulations
Java demonstration of Young's double slit interference
A simulation that runs in Mathematica Player, in which the number of quantum particles, the frequency of the particles, and the slit separation can be independently varied
Foundational quantum physics
Physics experiments
Quantum mechanics
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"Don't ask, don't tell" (DADT) was the official United States policy on military service by gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians, instituted during the Clinton administration. The policy was issued under Department of Defense Directive 1304.26 on December 21, 1993, and was in effect from February 28, 1994, until September 20, 2011. The policy prohibited military personnel from discriminating against or harassing closeted homosexual or bisexual service members or applicants, while barring openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service. This relaxation of legal restrictions on service by gays and lesbians in the armed forces was mandated by United States federal law (), which was signed November 30, 1993. The policy prohibited people who "demonstrate a propensity or intent to engage in homosexual acts" from serving in the armed forces of the United States, because their presence "would create an unacceptable risk to the high standards of morale, good order and discipline, and unit cohesion that are the essence of military capability".
The act prohibited any homosexual male, lesbian, or bisexual from disclosing their sexual orientation or from speaking about any same-sex relationships, including marriages or other familial attributes, while serving in the United States armed forces. The act specified that service members who disclose that they are homosexual or engage in homosexual conduct should be separated (discharged) except when a service member's conduct was "for the purpose of avoiding or terminating military service" or when it "would not be in the best interest of the armed forces". Since DADT ended in 2011, persons who are openly homosexual and bisexual have been able to serve.
The "don't ask" part of the DADT policy specified that superiors should not initiate an investigation of a service member's orientation without witnessing disallowed behaviors. However, evidence of homosexual behavior deemed credible could be used to initiate an investigation. Unauthorized investigations and harassment of suspected servicemen and women led to an expansion of the policy to "don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue, don't harass".
Beginning in the early 2000s, several legal challenges to DADT were filed, and legislation to repeal DADT was enacted in December 2010, specifying that the policy would remain in place until the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff certified that repeal would not harm military readiness, followed by a 60-day waiting period. A July 6, 2011, ruling from a federal appeals court barred further enforcement of the U.S. military's ban on openly gay service members. President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen sent that certification to Congress on July 22, 2011, which set the end of DADT to September 20, 2011. Although DADT was officially repealed, the legal definition of marriage as being one man and one woman under the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) meant that, although same-sex partners could get married, their marriage was not recognized by the federal government. This barred partners from access to the same benefits afforded to heterosexual couples such as base access, health care, and United States military pay, including family separation allowance and Basic Allowance for Housing with dependents. The Department of Defense attempted to open some of the benefits that were not restricted by DOMA, but the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Windsor made these efforts unnecessary.
Background
Engaging in homosexual activity had been grounds for discharge from the American military since the Revolutionary War. Policies based on sexual orientation appeared as the United States prepared to enter World War II. When the military added psychiatric screening to its induction process, it included homosexuality as a disqualifying trait, then seen as a form of psychopathology. When the army issued revised mobilization regulations in 1942, it distinguished "homosexual" recruits from "normal" recruits for the first time. Before the buildup to the war, gay service members were court-martialed, imprisoned, and dishonorably discharged; but in wartime, commanding officers found it difficult to convene court-martial boards of commissioned officers and the administrative blue discharge became the military's standard method for handling gay and lesbian personnel. In 1944, a new policy directive decreed that homosexuals were to be committed to military hospitals, examined by psychiatrists, and discharged under Regulation 615–360, section 8.
In 1947, blue discharges were discontinued and two new classifications were created: "general" and "undesirable". Under such a system, a serviceman or woman found to be gay but who had not committed any sexual acts while in service would tend to receive an undesirable discharge. Those found guilty of engaging in sexual conduct were usually dishonorably discharged. A 1957 U.S. Navy study known as the Crittenden Report dismissed the charge that homosexuals constitute a security risk, but nonetheless did not advocate for an end to anti-gay discrimination in the navy on the basis that "The service should not move ahead of civilian society nor attempt to set substantially different standards in attitude or action with respect to homosexual offenders." It remained secret until 1976. Fannie Mae Clackum was the first service member to successfully appeal such a discharge, winning eight years of back pay from the US Court of Claims in 1960.
From the 1950s through the Vietnam War, some notable gay service members avoided discharges despite pre-screening efforts, and when personnel shortages occurred, homosexuals were allowed to serve.
The gay and lesbian rights movement in the 1970s and 1980s raised the issue by publicizing several noteworthy dismissals of gay service members. Air Force TSgt Leonard Matlovich, the first service member to purposely out himself to challenge the ban, appeared on the cover of Time in 1975. In 1982 the Department of Defense issued a policy stating that, "Homosexuality is incompatible with military service." It cited the military's need "to maintain discipline, good order, and morale" and "to prevent breaches of security". In 1988, in response to a campaign against lesbians at the Marines' Parris Island Depot, activists launched the Gay and Lesbian Military Freedom Project (MFP) to advocate for an end to the exclusion of gays and lesbians from the armed forces. In 1989, reports commissioned by the Personnel Security Research and Education Center (PERSEREC), an arm of the Pentagon, were discovered in the process of Joseph Steffan's lawsuit fighting his forced resignation from the U.S. Naval Academy. One report said that "having a same-gender or an opposite-gender orientation is unrelated to job performance in the same way as is being left- or right-handed." Other lawsuits fighting discharges highlighted the service record of service members like Tracy Thorne and Margarethe (Grethe) Cammermeyer. The MFP began lobbying Congress in 1990, and in 1991 Senator Brock Adams (D-Washington) and Rep. Barbara Boxer introduced the Military Freedom Act, legislation to end the ban completely. Adams and Rep. Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado) re-introduced it the next year. In July 1991, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, in the context of the outing of his press aide Pete Williams, dismissed the idea that gays posed a security risk as "a bit of an old chestnut" in testimony before the House Budget Committee. In response to his comment, several major newspapers endorsed ending the ban, including USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the Detroit Free Press. In June 1992, the General Accounting Office released a report that members of Congress had requested two years earlier estimating the costs associated with the ban on gays and lesbians in the military at $27 million annually.
During the 1992 U.S. presidential election campaign, the civil rights of gays and lesbians, particularly their open service in the military, attracted some press attention, and all candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination supported ending the ban on military service by gays and lesbians, but the Republicans did not make a political issue of that position. In an August cover letter to all his senior officers, General Carl Mundy Jr., Commandant of the Marine Corps, praised a position paper authored by a Marine Corps chaplain that said that "In the unique, intensely close environment of the military, homosexual conduct can threaten the lives, including the physical (e.g. AIDS) and psychological well-being of others". Mundy called it "extremely insightful" and said it offered "a sound basis for discussion of the issue". The murder of gay U.S. Navy petty officer Allen R. Schindler Jr. on October 27, 1992, brought calls from advocates of allowing open service by gays and lesbians for prompt action from the incoming Clinton administration.
Origin
The policy was introduced as a compromise measure in 1993 by President Bill Clinton who campaigned in 1992 on the promise to allow all citizens to serve in the military regardless of sexual orientation. Commander Craig Quigley, a Navy spokesman, expressed the opposition of many in the military at the time when he said, "Homosexuals are notoriously promiscuous" and that in shared shower situations, heterosexuals would have an "uncomfortable feeling of someone watching".
During the 1993 policy debate, the National Defense Research Institute prepared a study for the Office of the Secretary of Defense published as Sexual Orientation and U.S. Military Personnel Policy: Options and Assessment. It concluded that "circumstances could exist under which the ban on homosexuals could be lifted with little or no adverse consequences for recruitment and retention" if the policy were implemented with care, principally because many factors contribute to individual enlistment and re-enlistment decisions. On May 5, 1993, Gregory M. Herek, associate research psychologist at the University of California at Davis and an authority on public attitudes toward lesbians and gay men, testified before the House Armed Services Committee on behalf of several professional associations. He stated, "The research data show that there is nothing about lesbians and gay men that makes them inherently unfit for military service, and there is nothing about heterosexuals that makes them inherently unable to work and live with gay people in close quarters." Herek added, "The assumption that heterosexuals cannot overcome their prejudices toward gay people is a mistaken one."
In Congress, Democratic Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia and Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee led the contingent that favored maintaining the absolute ban on gays. Reformers were led by Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts, who favored modification (but ultimately voted for the defense authorization bill with the gay ban language), and Barry Goldwater, a former Republican Senator and a retired Major General, who argued on behalf of allowing service by open gays and lesbians but was not allowed to appear before the Committee by Nunn. In a June 1993 Washington Post opinion piece, Goldwater wrote: "You don't have to be straight to shoot straight".
Congress rushed to enact the existing gay ban policy into federal law, outflanking Clinton's planned repeal effort. Clinton called for legislation to overturn the ban, but encountered intense opposition from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, members of Congress, and portions of the public. DADT emerged as a compromise policy. Congress included text in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1994 (passed in 1993) requiring the military to abide by regulations essentially identical to the 1982 absolute ban policy. The Clinton administration on December 21, 1993, issued Defense Directive 1304.26, which directed that military applicants were not to be asked about their sexual orientation. This policy is now known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell". The phrase was coined by Charles Moskos, a military sociologist.
In accordance with the December 21, 1993, Department of Defense Directive 1332.14, it was legal policy (10 U.S.C. § 654) that homosexuality was incompatible with military service and that persons who engaged in homosexual acts or stated that they are homosexual or bisexual were to be discharged. The Uniform Code of Military Justice, passed by Congress in 1950 and signed by President Harry S Truman, established the policies and procedures for discharging service members.
The full name of the policy at the time was "Don't Ask, Don't Tell, Don't Pursue". The "Don't Ask" provision mandated that military or appointed officials not ask about or require members to reveal their sexual orientation. The "Don't Tell" stated that a member may be discharged for claiming to be a homosexual or bisexual or making a statement indicating a tendency towards or intent to engage in homosexual activities. The "Don’t Pursue" established what was minimally required for an investigation to be initiated. A "Don’t Harass" provision was added to the policy later. It ensured that the military would not allow harassment or violence against service members for any reason.
The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network was founded in 1993 to advocate an end to discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in the U.S. Armed Forces.
Court challenges
DADT was upheld by five federal Courts of Appeal. The Supreme Court, in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights, Inc. (2006), unanimously held that the federal government could constitutionally withhold funding from universities, no matter what their nondiscrimination policies might be, for refusing to give military recruiters access to school resources. An association of law schools had argued that allowing military recruiting at their institutions compromised their ability to exercise their free speech rights in opposition to discrimination based on sexual orientation as represented by DADT.
McVeigh v. Cohen
In January 1998, Senior Chief Petty Officer Timothy R. McVeigh (not to be confused with convicted Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy J. McVeigh) won a preliminary injunction from a U.S. district court that prevented his discharge from the U.S. Navy for "homosexual conduct" after 17 years of service. His lawsuit did not challenge the DADT policy but asked the court to hold the military accountable for adhering to the policy's particulars. The Navy had investigated McVeigh's sexual orientation based on his AOL email account name and user profile. District Judge Stanley Sporkin ruled in McVeigh v. Cohen that the Navy had violated its own DADT guidelines: "Suggestions of sexual orientation in a private, anonymous email account did not give the Navy a sufficient reason to investigate to determine whether to commence discharge proceedings." He called the Navy's investigation "a search and destroy mission" against McVeigh. The case also attracted attention because a navy paralegal had misrepresented himself when querying AOL for information about McVeigh's account. Frank Rich linked the two issues: "McVeigh is as clear-cut a victim of a witch hunt as could be imagined, and that witch hunt could expand exponentially if the military wants to add on-line fishing to its invasion of service members' privacy." AOL apologized to McVeigh and paid him damages. McVeigh reached a settlement with the Navy that paid his legal expenses and allowed him to retire with full benefits in July. The New York Times called Sporkin's ruling "a victory for gay rights, with implications for the millions of people who use computer on-line services".
Witt v. Department of the Air Force
In April 2006, Margaret Witt, a major in the United States Air Force who was being investigated for homosexuality, filed suit in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington seeking declaratory and injunctive relief on the grounds that DADT violates substantive due process, the Equal Protection Clause, and procedural due process. In July 2007 the Secretary of the Air Force ordered her honorable discharge. Dismissed by the district court, the case was heard on appeal, and the Ninth Circuit issued its ruling on May 21, 2008. Its decision in Witt v. Department of the Air Force reinstated Witt's substantive-due-process and procedural-due-process claims and affirmed the dismissal of her Equal Protection claim. The Ninth Circuit, analyzing the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), determined that DADT had to be subjected to heightened scrutiny, meaning that there must be an "important" governmental interest at issue, that DADT must "significantly" further the governmental interest, and that there can be no less intrusive way for the government to advance that interest.
The Obama administration declined to appeal, allowing a May 3, 2009, deadline to pass, leaving Witt as binding on the entire Ninth Circuit, and returning the case to the District Court. On September 24, 2010, District Judge Ronald B. Leighton ruled that Witt's constitutional rights had been violated by her discharge and that she must be reinstated to the Air Force.
The government filed an appeal with the Ninth Circuit on November 23, but did not attempt to have the trial court's ruling stayed pending the outcome. In a settlement announced on May 10, 2011, the Air Force agreed to drop its appeal and remove Witt's discharge from her military record. She will retire with full benefits.
Log Cabin Republicans v. United States of America
In 2010, a lawsuit filed in 2004 by the Log Cabin Republicans (LCR), the nation's largest Republican gay organization, went to trial. Challenging the constitutionality of DADT, the plaintiffs stated that the policy violates the rights of gay military members to free speech, due process and open association. The government argued that DADT was necessary to advance a legitimate governmental interest. Plaintiffs introduced statements by President Barack Obama, from prepared remarks, that DADT "doesn't contribute to our national security", "weakens our national security", and that reversal is "essential for our national security". According to plaintiffs, these statements alone satisfied their burden of proof on the due process claims.
On September 9, 2010, Judge Virginia A. Phillips ruled in Log Cabin Republicans v. United States of America that the ban on service by openly gay service members was an unconstitutional violation of the First and Fifth Amendments. On October 12, 2010, she granted an immediate worldwide injunction prohibiting the Department of Defense from enforcing the "Don't Ask Don't Tell" policy and ordered the military to suspend and discontinue any investigation or discharge, separation, or other proceedings based on it. The Department of Justice appealed her decision and requested a stay of her injunction, which Phillips denied but which the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted on October 20
and stayed pending appeal on November 1. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to overrule the stay.
District Court neither anticipated questions of
constitutional law nor formulated a rule broader than is required by the facts. The
constitutional issues regarding DADT are well-defined, and the District Court
focused specifically on the relevant inquiry of whether the statute impermissibly
infringed upon substantive due process rights with regard to a protected area of
individual liberty. Engaging in a careful and detailed review of the facts presented
to it at trial, the District Court properly concluded that the Government put forward
no persuasive evidence to demonstrate that the statute is a valid exercise of
congressional authority to legislate in the realm of protected liberty interests. See
Log Cabin, 716 F. Supp. 2d at 923. Hypothetical questions were neither presented
nor answered in reaching this decision.
On October 19, 2010, military recruiters were told they could accept openly gay applicants. On October 20, 2010, Lt. Daniel Choi, an openly gay man honorably discharged under DADT, re-enlisted in the U.S. Army.
Following the passage of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, the Justice Department asked the Ninth Circuit to suspend LCR's suit in light of the legislative repeal. LCR opposed the request, noting that gay personnel were still subject to discharge. On January 28, 2011, the Court denied the Justice Department's request. The Obama administration responded by requesting that the policy be allowed to stay in place while they completed the process of assuring that its end would not impact combat readiness. On March 28, the LCR filed a brief asking that the court deny the administration's request.
In 2011, while waiting for certification, several service members were discharged under DADT at their own insistence, until July 6 when a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals re-instated Judge Phillips' injunction barring further enforcement of the U.S. military's ban on openly gay service members. On July 11, the appeals court asked the DOJ to inform the court if it intended to proceed with its appeal. On July 14, the Justice Department filed a motion "to avoid short-circuiting the repeal process established by Congress during the final stages of the implementation of the repeal". and warning of "significant immediate harms on the government". On July 15, the Ninth Circuit restored most of the DADT policy, but continued to prohibit the government from discharging or investigating openly gay personnel. Following the implementation of DADT's repeal, a panel of three judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the Phillips ruling.
Debate
Following the July 1999 murder of Army Pfc. Barry Winchell, apparently motivated by anti-gay bias, President Clinton issued an executive order modifying the Uniform Code of Military Justice to permit evidence of a hate crime to be admitted during the sentencing phase of a trial. In December, Secretary of Defense William Cohen ordered a review of DADT to determine if the policy's anti-gay harassment component was being observed. When that review found anti-gay sentiments were widely expressed and tolerated in the military, the DOD adopted a new anti-harassment policy in July 2000, though its effectiveness was disputed. On December 7, 1999, Hillary Clinton told an audience of gay supporters that "Gays and lesbians already serve with distinction in our nation's armed forces and should not face discrimination. Fitness to serve should be based on an individual's conduct, not their sexual orientation." Later that month, retired General Carl E. Mundy Jr. defended the implementation of DADT against what he called the "politicization" of the issue by both Clintons. He cited discharge statistics for the Marines for the past five years that showed 75% were based on "voluntary admission of homosexuality" and 49% occurred during the first six months of service, when new recruits were most likely to reevaluate their decision to enlist. He also argued against any change in the policy, writing in the New York Times: "Conduct that is widely rejected by a majority of Americans can undermine the trust that is essential to creating and maintaining the sense of unity that is critical to the success of a military organization operating under the very different and difficult demands of combat." The conviction of Winchell's murderer, according to the New York Times, "galvanized opposition" to DADT, an issue that had "largely vanished from public debate". Opponents of the policy focused on punishing harassment in the military rather than the policy itself, which Senator Chuck Hagel defended on December 25: "The U.S. armed forces aren't some social experiment."
The principal candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000, Al Gore and Bill Bradley, both endorsed military service by open gays and lesbians, provoking opposition from high-ranking retired military officers, notably the recently retired commandant of the Marine Corps, General Charles C. Krulak. He and others objected to Gore's statement that he would use support for ending DADT as a "litmus test" when considering candidates for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The 2000 Democratic Party platform was silent on the issue, while the Republican Party platform that year said: "We affirm that homosexuality is incompatible with military service." Following the election of George W. Bush in 2000, observers expected him to avoid any changes to DADT, since his nominee for Secretary of State Colin Powell had participated in its creation.
In February 2004, members of the British Armed Forces, Lt Rolf Kurth and Lt Cdr Craig Jones, along with Aaron Belkin, Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military met with members of Congress and spoke at the National Defense University. They spoke about their experience of the current situation in the UK. The UK lifted the gay ban on members serving in their forces in 2000.
In July 2004, the American Psychological Association issued a statement that DADT "discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation" and that "Empirical evidence fails to show that sexual orientation is germane to any aspect of military effectiveness including unit cohesion, morale, recruitment and retention." It said that the U.S. military's track record overcoming past racial and gender discrimination demonstrated its ability to integrate groups previously excluded. The Republican Party platform that year reiterated its support for the policy—"We affirm traditional military culture, and we affirm that homosexuality is incompatible with military service."—while the Democratic Party maintained its silence.
In February 2005, the Government Accountability Office released estimates of the cost of DADT. It reported at least $95.4 million in recruiting costs and at least $95.1 million for training replacements for the 9,488 troops discharged from 1994 through 2003, while noting that the true figures might be higher. In September, as part of its campaign to demonstrate that the military allowed open homosexuals to serve when its workforce requirements were greatest, the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military (now the Palm Center) reported that army regulations allowed the active-duty deployment of Army Reservists and National Guard troops who claim to be or who are accused of being gay. A U.S. Army Forces Command spokesperson said the regulation was intended to prevent Reservists and National Guard members from pretending to be gay to escape combat. Advocates of ending DADT repeatedly publicized discharges of highly trained gay and lesbian personnel, especially those in positions with critical shortages, including fifty-nine Arabic speakers and nine Persian speakers. Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, later argued that the military's failure to ask about sexual orientation at recruitment was the cause of the discharges: [Y]ou could reduce this number to zero or near zero if the Department of Defense dropped Don't Ask, Don't Tell. ... We should not be training people who are not eligible to be in the Armed Forces."
In February 2006, a University of California Blue Ribbon Commission that included Lawrence Korb, a former assistant defense secretary during the Reagan administration, William Perry, Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration, and professors from the United States Military Academy released their assessment of the GAO's analysis of the cost of DADT released a year earlier. The commission report stated that the GAO did not take into account the value the military lost from the departures. They said that that total cost was closer to $363 million, including $14.3 million for "separation travel" following a service member's discharge, $17.8 million for training officers, $252.4 million for training enlistees, and $79.3 million in recruiting costs.
In 2006, Soulforce, a national LGBT rights organization, organized its Right to Serve Campaign, in which gay men and lesbians in several cities attempted to enlist in the Armed Forces or National Guard. Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness stated in September: "I think the people involved here do not have the best interests of the military at heart. They never have. They are promoting an agenda to normalize homosexuality in America using the military as a battering ram to promote that broader agenda." She said that "pro-homosexual activists ... are creating media events all over the country and even internationally."
In 2006, a speaking tour of gay former service members, organized by SLDN, Log Cabin Republicans, and Meehan, visited 18 colleges and universities. Patrick Guerriero, executive director of Log Cabin, thought the repeal movement was gaining "new traction" but "Ultimately", said, "we think it's going to take a Republican with strong military credentials to make a shift in the policy." Elaine Donnelly called such efforts "a big P.R. campaign" and said that "The law is there to protect good order and discipline in the military, and it's not going to change."
In December 2006, Zogby International released the results of a poll of military personnel conducted in October 2006 that found that 26% favored allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, 37% were opposed, while 37% expressed no preference or were unsure. Of respondents who had experience with gay people in their unit, 6% said their presence had a positive impact on their personal morale, 66% said no impact, and 28% said negative impact. Regarding overall unit morale, 3% said positive impact, 64% no impact, and 27% negative impact.
Retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John Shalikashvili and former Senator and Secretary of Defense William Cohen opposed the policy in January 2007: "I now believe that if gay men and lesbians served openly in the United States military, they would not undermine the efficacy of the armed forces" Shalikashvili wrote. "Our military has been stretched thin by our deployments in the Middle East, and we must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job." Shalikashvili cited the recent "Zogby poll of more than 500 service members returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, three-quarters of whom said they were comfortable interacting with gay people. The debate took a different turn in March when General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune he supported DADT because "homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and ... we should not condone immoral acts." His remarks became, according to the Tribune, "a huge news story on radio, television and the Internet during the day and showed how sensitive the Pentagon's policy has become." Senator John Warner, who backed DADT, said "I respectfully, but strongly, disagree with the chairman's view that homosexuality is immoral", and Pace expressed regret for expressing his personal views and said that DADT "does not make a judgment about the morality of individual acts." Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, then in the early stages of his campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, defended DADT:
That summer, after U.S. senator Larry Craig was arrested for lewd conduct in a men's restroom, conservative commentator Michael Medved argued that any liberalization of DADT would "compromise restroom integrity and security". He wrote: "The national shudder of discomfort and queasiness associated with any introduction of homosexual eroticism into public men's rooms should make us more determined than ever to resist the injection of those lurid attitudes into the even more explosive situation of the U.S. military."
In November 2007, 28 retired generals and admirals urged Congress to repeal the policy, citing evidence that 65,000 gay men and women were serving in the armed forces and that there were over a million gay veterans. On November 17, 2008, 104 retired generals and admirals signed a similar statement. In December, SLDN arranged for 60 Minutes to interview Darren Manzella, an Army medic who served in Iraq after coming out to his unit.
On May 4, 2008, while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen addressed the graduating cadets at West Point, a cadet asked what would happen if the next administration were supportive of legislation allowing gays to serve openly. Mullen responded, "Congress, and not the military, is responsible for DADT." Previously, during his Senate confirmation hearing in 2007, Mullen told lawmakers, "I really think it is for the American people to come forward, really through this body, to both debate that policy and make changes, if that's appropriate." He went on to say, "I'd love to have Congress make its own decisions" with respect to considering repeal.
In May 2009, when a committee of military law experts at the Palm Center, an anti-DADT research institute, concluded that the President could issue an Executive Order to suspend homosexual conduct discharges, Obama rejected that option and said he wanted Congress to change the law.
On July 5, 2009, Colin Powell told CNN that the policy was "correct for the time" but that "sixteen years have now gone by, and I think a lot has changed with respect to attitudes within our country, and therefore I think this is a policy and a law that should be reviewed." Interviewed for the same broadcast, Mullen said the policy would continue to be implemented until the law was repealed, and that his advice was to "move in a measured way. ... At a time when we're fighting two conflicts there is a great deal of pressure on our forces and their families." In September, Joint Force Quarterly published an article by an Air Force colonel that disputed the argument that unit cohesion is compromised by the presence of openly gay personnel.
In October 2009, the Commission on Military Justice, known as the Cox Commission, repeated its 2001 recommendation that Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which bans sodomy, be repealed, noting that "most acts of consensual sodomy committed by consenting military personnel are not prosecuted, creating a perception that prosecution of this sexual behavior is arbitrary."
In January 2010, the White House and congressional officials started work on repealing the ban by inserting language into the 2011 defense authorization bill. During Obama's State of the Union Address on January 27, 2010, he said that he would work with Congress and the military to enact a repeal of the gay ban law and for the first time set a timetable for repeal.
At a February 2, 2010, congressional hearing, Senator John McCain read from a letter signed by "over one thousand former general and flag officers". It said: "We firmly believe that this law, which Congress passed to protect good order, discipline and morale in the unique environment of the armed forces, deserves continued support." The signature campaign had been organized by Elaine Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness, a longtime supporter of a traditional all-male and all-heterosexual military. Servicemembers United, a veterans group opposed to DADT, issued a report critical of the letter's legitimacy. They said that among those signing the letter were officers who had no knowledge of their inclusion or who had refused to be included, and even one instance of a general's widow who signed her husband's name to the letter though he had died before the survey was published. The average age of the officers whose names were listed as signing the letter was 74, the oldest was 98, and Servicemembers United noted that "only a small fraction of these officers have even served in the military during the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' period, much less in the 21st century military."
The Center for American Progress issued a report in March 2010 that said a smooth implementation of an end to DADT required eight specified changes to the military's internal regulations. On March 25, 2010, Defense Secretary Gates announced new rules mandating that only flag officers could initiate discharge proceedings and imposing more stringent rules of evidence on discharge proceedings.
Repeal
The underlying justifications for DADT had been subjected to increasing suspicion and outright rejection by the early 21st century. Mounting evidence obtained from the integration efforts of foreign militaries, surveys of U.S. military personnel, and studies conducted by the DoD gave credence to the view that the presence of open homosexuals within the military would not be detrimental at all to the armed forces. A DoD study conducted at the behest of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in 2010 supports this most.
The DoD working group conducting the study considered the impact that lifting the ban would have on unit cohesion and effectiveness, good order and discipline, and military morale. The study included a survey that revealed significant differences between respondents who believed they had served with homosexual troops and those who did not believe they had. In analyzing such data, the DoD working group concluded that it was actually generalized perceptions of homosexual troops that led to the perceived unrest that would occur without DADT. Ultimately, the study deemed the overall risk to military effectiveness of lifting the ban to be low. Citing the ability of the armed forces to adjust to the previous integration of African-Americans and women, the DoD study asserted that the United States military could adjust as had it before in history without an impending serious effect.
In March 2005, Rep. Martin T. Meehan introduced the Military Readiness Enhancement Act in the House. It aimed "to amend title 10, United States Code, to enhance the readiness of the Armed Forces by replacing the current policy concerning homosexuality in the Armed Forces, referred to as 'Don't ask, don't tell,' with a policy of nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation". As of 2006, it had 105 Democrats and 4 Republicans as co-sponsors. He introduced the bill again in 2007 and 2009.
During the 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign, Senator Barack Obama advocated a full repeal of the laws barring gays and lesbians from serving in the military. Nineteen days after his election, Obama's advisers announced that plans to repeal the policy might be delayed until 2010, because Obama "first wants to confer with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his new political appointees at the Pentagon to reach a consensus, and then present legislation to Congress". As president he advocated a policy change to allow gay personnel to serve openly in the armed forces, stating that the U.S. government has spent millions of dollars replacing troops expelled from the military, including language experts fluent in Arabic, because of DADT. On the eve of the National Equality March in Washington, D.C., October 10, 2009, Obama stated in a speech before the Human Rights Campaign that he would end the ban, but he offered no timetable. Obama said in his 2010 State of the Union Address: "This year, I will work with Congress and our military to finally repeal the law that denies gay Americans the right to serve the country they love because of who they are." This statement was quickly followed up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs chairman Michael Mullen voicing their support for a repeal of DADT.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010
Democrats in both houses of Congress first attempted to end DADT by amending the Defense Authorization Act. On May 27, 2010, on a 234–194 vote, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the Murphy amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2011. It provided for repeal of the DADT policy and created a process for lifting the policy, including a U.S. Department of Defense study and certification by key officials that the change in policy would not harm military readiness followed by a waiting period of 60 days. The amended defense bill passed the House on May 28, 2010. On September 21, 2010, John McCain led a successful filibuster against the debate on the Defense Authorization Act, in which 56 Senators voted to end debate, four short of the 60 votes required. Some advocates for repeal, including the Palm Center, OutServe, and Knights Out, opposed any attempt to block the passage of NDAA if it failed to include DADT repeal language. The Human Rights Campaign, the Center for American Progress, Servicemembers United and SLDN refused to concede that possibility.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit, Collins v. United States, against the Department of Defense in November 2010 seeking full compensation for those discharged under the policy.
On November 30, 2010, the Joint Chiefs of Staff released the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Comprehensive Review Working Group (CRWG) report authored by Jeh C. Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, and Army General Carter F. Ham. It outlined a path to the implementation of repeal of DADT. The report indicated that there was a low risk of service disruptions due to repealing the ban, provided time was provided for proper implementation and training. It included the results of a survey of 115,000 active-duty and reserve service members. Across all service branches, 30 percent thought that integrating gays into the military would have negative consequences. In the Marine Corps and combat specialties, the percentage with that negative assessment ranged from 40 to 60 percent. The CRWG also said that 69 percent of all those surveyed believed they had already worked with a gay or lesbian and of those, 92 percent reported that the impact of that person's presence was positive or neutral. The same day, in response to the CRWG, 30 professors and scholars, most from military institutions, issued a joint statement saying that the CRWG "echoes more than 20 studies, including studies by military researchers, all of which reach the same conclusion: allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly will not harm the military ... We hope that our collective statement underscores that the debate about the evidence is now officially over". The Family Research Council's president, Tony Perkins, interpreted the CRWG data differently, writing that it "reveals that 40 percent of Marines and 25 percent of the Army could leave".
Gates encouraged Congress to act quickly to repeal the law so that the military could carefully adjust rather than face a court decision requiring it to lift the policy immediately. The United States Senate held two days of hearings on December 2 and 3, 2010, to consider the CRWG report. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Joint Chiefs chairman Michael Mullen urged immediate repeal. The heads of the Marine Corps, Army, and Navy all advised against immediate repeal and expressed varied views on its eventual repeal. Oliver North, writing in National Review the next week, said that Gates' testimony showed "a deeply misguided commitment to political correctness". He interpreted the CRWG's data as indicating a high risk that large numbers of resignations would follow the repeal of DADT. Service members, especially combat troops, he wrote, "deserve better than to be treated like lab rats in Mr. Obama's radical social experiment".
On December 9, 2010, another filibuster prevented debate on the Defense Authorization Act. In response to that vote, Senators Joe Lieberman and Susan Collins introduced a bill that included the policy-related portions of the Defense Authorization Act that they considered more likely to pass as a stand-alone bill. It passed the House on a vote of 250 to 175 on December 15, 2010. On December 18, 2010, the Senate voted to end debate on its version of the bill by a cloture vote of 63–33. The final Senate vote was held later that same day, with the measure passing by a vote of 65–31.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates released a statement following the vote indicating that the planning for implementation of a policy repeal would begin right away and would continue until Gates certified that conditions were met for orderly repeal of the policy. President Obama signed the repeal into law on December 22, 2010.
Implementation of repeal
The repeal act established a process for ending the DADT policy. The President, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were required to certify in writing that they had reviewed the Pentagon's report on the effects of DADT repeal, that the appropriate regulations had been reviewed and drafted, and that implementation of repeal regulations "is consistent with the standards of military readiness, military effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention of the Armed Forces". Once certification was given, DADT would be lifted after a 60-day waiting period.
Representative Duncan D. Hunter announced plans in January 2011 to introduce a bill designed to delay the end of DADT. His proposed legislation required all of the chiefs of the armed services to submit the certification at the time required only of the President, Defense Secretary and Joint Chiefs chairman. In April, Perkins of the Family Research Council argued that the Pentagon was misrepresenting its own survey data and that hearings by the House Armed Services Committee, now under Republican control, could persuade Obama to withhold certification. Congressional efforts to prevent the change in policy from going into effect continued into May and June 2011.
On January 29, 2011, Pentagon officials stated that the training process to prepare troops for the end of DADT would begin in February and would proceed quickly, though they suggested that it might not be completed in 2011. On the same day, the DOD announced it would not offer any additional compensation to service members who had been discharged under DADT, who received half of the separation pay other honorably discharged service members received.
In May 2011, the U.S. Army reprimanded three colonels for performing a skit in March 2011 at a function at Yongsan Garrison, South Korea, that mocked the repeal.
In May 2011, revelations that an April Navy memo relating to its DADT training guidelines contemplated allowing same-sex weddings in base chapels and allowing chaplains to officiate if they so chose resulted in a letter of protest from 63 Republican congressman, citing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as controlling the use of federal property. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said the guidelines "make it even more uncomfortable for men and women of faith to perform their duties". A Pentagon spokesperson replied that DOMA "does not limit the type of religious ceremonies a chaplain may perform in a chapel on a military installation", and a Navy spokesperson said that "A chaplain can conduct a same-sex ceremony if it is in the tenets of his faith". A few days later the Navy rescinded its earlier instructions "pending additional legal and policy review and interdepartmental coordination".
While waiting for certification, several service members were discharged at their own insistence until a July 6 ruling from a federal appeals court barred further enforcement of the U.S. military's ban on openly gay service members, which the military promptly did.
Anticipating the lifting of DADT, some active duty service members wearing civilian clothes marched in San Diego's gay pride parade on July 16. The DOD noted that participation "does not constitute a declaration of sexual orientation".
President Obama, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent the certification required by the Repeal Act to Congress on July 22, 2011, setting the end of DADT for September 20, 2011. A Pentagon spokesman said that service members discharged under DADT would be able to re-apply to rejoin the military then.
At the end of August 2011, the DOD approved the distribution of the magazine produced by OutServe, an organization of gay and lesbian service members, at Army and Air Force base exchanges beginning with the September 20 issue, coinciding with the end of DADT.
On September 20, Air force officials announced that 22 Air Force Instructions were "updated as a result of the repeal of DADT". On September 30, 2011, the Department of Defense modified regulations to reflect the repeal by deleting "homosexual conduct" as a ground for administrative separation.
Day of repeal and aftermath
On the eve of repeal, US Air Force 1st Lt. Josh Seefried, one of the founders of OutServe, an organization of LGBT troops, revealed his identity after two years of hiding behind a pseudonym. Senior Airman Randy Phillips, after conducting a social media campaign seeking encouragement coming out and already out to his military co-workers, came out to his father on the evening of September 19. When the video of their conversation he posted on YouTube went viral, it made him, in one journalist's estimation, "the poster boy for the DADT repeal". The moment the repeal took effect at midnight on September 19, US Navy Lt. Gary C. Ross married his same-sex partner of eleven and a half years, Dan Swezy, making them the first same-sex military couple to legally marry in the United States. Retired Rear Adm. Alan M. Steinman became the highest-ranking person to come out immediately following the end of DADT. HBO produced a World of Wonder documentary, The Strange History of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and premiered it on September 20. Variety called it "an unapologetic piece of liberal advocacy" and "a testament to what formidable opponents ignorance and prejudice can be". Discharge proceedings on the grounds of homosexuality, some begun years earlier, came to an end.
In the weeks that followed, a series of firsts attracted press attention to the impact of the repeal. The Marine Corps were the first branch of the armed services to recruit from the LGBTQ community. Reservist Jeremy Johnson became the first person discharged under DADT to re-enlist. Jase Daniels became the first to return to active duty, re-joining the Navy as a third class petty officer. On December 2, Air Force intelligence officer Ginger Wallace became the first open LGBT service member to have a same-sex partner participate in the "pinning-on" ceremony that marked her promotion to colonel. On December 23, after 80 days at sea, US Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta won the right to the traditional "first kiss" upon returning to port and shared it with her same-sex partner. On January 20, 2012, U.S. service members deployed to Bagram, Afghanistan, produced a video in support of the It Gets Better Project, which aims to support LGBT at-risk youth. Widespread news coverage continued even months after the repeal date, when a photograph of Marine Sgt. Brandon Morgan kissing his partner at a February 22, 2012, homecoming celebration on Marine Corps Base Hawaii went viral. When asked for a comment, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps said: "It's your typical homecoming photo."
On September 30, 2011, Under Secretary of Defense Clifford Stanley announced the DOD's policy that military chaplains are allowed to perform same-sex marriages "on or off a military installation" where local law permits them. His memo noted that "a chaplain is not required to participate in or officiate a private ceremony if doing so would be in variance with the tenets of his or her religion" and "a military chaplain's participation in a private ceremony does not constitute an endorsement of the ceremony by DoD". Some religious groups announced that their chaplains would not participate in such weddings, including an organization of evangelical Protestants, the Chaplain Alliance for Religious Liberty and Roman Catholics led by Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA.
In late October 2011, speaking at the Air Force Academy, Colonel Gary Packard, leader of the team that drafted the DOD's repeal implementation plan, said: "The best quote I've heard so far is, 'Well, some people's Facebook status changed, but that was about it. In late November, discussing the repeal of DADT and its implementation, Marine General James F. Amos said "I'm very pleased with how it has gone" and called it a "non-event". He said his earlier public opposition was appropriate based on ongoing combat operations and the negative assessment of the policy given by 56% of combat troops under his command in the Department of Defense's November 2010 survey. A Defense Department spokesperson said implementation of repeal occurred without incident and added: "We attribute this success to our comprehensive pre-repeal training program, combined with the continued close monitoring and enforcement of standards by our military leaders at all levels."
In December 2011, Congress considered two DADT-related amendments in the course of work on the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012. The Senate approved 97–3, an amendment removing the prohibition on sodomy found in Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice as recommended by the Comprehensive Review Working Group (CRWG) a year earlier. The House approved an amendment banning same-sex marriages from being performed at military bases or by military employees, including chaplains and other employees of the military when "acting in an official capacity". Neither amendment appeared in the final legislation.
In July 2012, the Department of Defense granted permission for military personnel to wear their uniforms while participating in the San Diego Pride Parade. This was the first time that U.S. military personnel were permitted to wear their service uniforms in such a parade.
Marking the first anniversary of the passage of the Repeal Act, television news networks reported no incidents in the three months since DADT ended. One aired video of a social gathering for gay service members at a base in Afghanistan. Another reported on the experience of lesbian and gay troops, including some rejection after coming out to colleagues.
The Palm Center, a think tank that studies issues of sexuality and the military, released a study in September 2012 that found no negative consequences, nor any effect on military effectiveness from DADT repeal. This study began six months following repeal and concluded at the one year mark. The study included surveys of 553 generals and admirals who had opposed repeal, experts who supported DADT, and more than 60 heterosexual, gay, lesbian and bisexual active duty service personnel.
On January 7, 2013, the ACLU reached a settlement with the federal government in Collins v. United States. It provided for the payment of full separation pay to service members discharged under DADT since November 10, 2004, who had previously been granted only half that.
2012 presidential campaign issue
Several candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination called for the restoration of DADT, including Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. Newt Gingrich called for an extensive review of DADT's repeal.
Ron Paul, having voted for the Repeal Act, maintained his support for allowing military service by open homosexuals. Herman Cain called the issue "a distraction" and opposed reinstating DADT. Mitt Romney said that the winding down of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan obviated his opposition to the repeal and said he was not proposing any change to policy.
On September 22, 2011, the audience at a Republican candidates' debate booed a U.S. soldier posted in Iraq who asked a question via video about the repeal of DADT, and none of the candidates noticed or responded to the crowd's behavior. Two days later, Obama commented on the incident while addressing a dinner of the Human Rights Campaign: "You want to be commander in chief? You can start by standing up for the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States, even when it's not politically convenient".
In June 2012, Rep. Howard McKeon, Republican chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said he considered the repeal of DADT a settled issue and if Romney became president would not advocate its reinstatement, though others in his party might.
2021 benefits restoration
In September 2021, on the 10th anniversary of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal, President Joe Biden announced that the Veterans Administration would start providing benefits for servicemembers who received other-than-honorable discharges (before DADT was enacted and while it was in effect) because of their sexual orientation.
Views of the policy
Public opinion
In 1993, Time reported that 44% of those polled supported openly gay servicemembers, and in 1994, a CNN poll indicated 53% of Americans believed gays and lesbians should be permitted to serve openly.
According to a December 2010 The Washington Post-ABC News poll 77% of Americans said gays and lesbians who publicly disclose their sexual orientation should be able to serve in the military. That number showed little change from polls over the previous two years, but represented the highest level of support in a Post-ABC poll. The support also cut across partisan and ideological lines, with majorities of Democrats (86%), Republicans (74%), independents (74%), liberals (92%), conservatives (67%), white evangelical Protestants (70%) and non-religious (84%) in favor of homosexuals serving openly.
A November 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 58% of the U.S. public favored allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military, while less than half as many (27%) were opposed. According to a November 2010 CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, 72% of adult Americans favored permitting people who are openly gay or lesbian to serve in the military, while 23% opposed it. "The main difference between the CNN poll and the Pew poll is in the number of respondents who told pollsters that they didn't have an opinion on this topic – 16 percent in the Pew poll compared to only five percent in the CNN survey", said CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "The two polls report virtually the same number who say they oppose gays serving openly in the military, which suggests that there are some people who favor that change in policy but for some reason were reluctant to admit that to the Pew interviewers. That happens occasionally on topics where moral issues and equal-treatment issues intersect."
A February 2010 Quinnipiac University Polling Institute national poll showed 57% of American voters favored gays serving openly, compared to 36% opposed, while 66% said not allowing openly gay personnel to serve is discrimination, compared to 31% who did not see it as discrimination. A CBS News/The New York Times national poll done at the same time showed 58% of Americans favored gays serving openly, compared to 28% opposed.
Chaplains and religious groups
Chaplain groups and religious organizations took various positions on DADT. Some felt that the policy needed to be withdrawn to make the military more inclusive. The Southern Baptist Convention battled the repeal of DADT, warning that their endorsements for chaplains might be withdrawn if the repeal took place. They took the position that allowing gay men and women to serve in the military without restriction would have a negative impact on the ability of chaplains who think homosexuality is a sin to speak freely regarding their religious beliefs. The Roman Catholic Church called for the retention of the policy, but had no plans to withdraw its priests from serving as military chaplains. Sixty-five retired chaplains signed a letter opposing repeal, stating that repeal would make it impossible for chaplains whose faith teaches that same-sex behavior is immoral to minister to military service members. Other religious organizations and agencies called the repeal of the policy a "non-event" or "non-issue" for chaplains, claiming that chaplains have always supported military service personnel, whether or not they agree with all their actions or beliefs.
Discharges under DADT
After the policy was introduced in 1993, the military discharged over 13,000 troops from the military under DADT. The number of discharges per fiscal year under DADT dropped sharply after the September 11 attacks and remained comparatively low through to the repeal. Discharges exceeded 600 every year until 2009.
State-based gay and lesbian military veteran laws
In November 2019, both Rhode Island and New York State signed into law and implemented restoring military benefits to gay and lesbian military veterans. An estimated approximately 100,000 individuals were affected by the "don't ask don't tell policy" (since it was repealed in September 2011).
See also
Liberal homophobia
Steve May, gay Republican Arizona legislator, Army reservist until May 2001
Sexual orientation and gender identity in the United States military
Sexual orientation and military service – for information on policies in military services worldwide
References
Citations
Bibliography
Allan Bérubé, "How Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays", in My Desire for History: Essays in Gay, Community, and Labor History, John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freeman, eds. (University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
Tim McFeeley, "Getting It Straight: A Review of the 'Gays in the Military' Debate", in John D'Emilio, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid, eds., Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights (NY: St. Martin's Press, 2000)
David Mixner, Stranger Among Friends (NY: Bantam, 1996)
Further reading
Belkin, Aaron (2013). Readiness and DADT Repeal: Has the New Policy of Open Service Undermined the Military? Armed Forces & Society, Forthcoming ... Access OnlineFirst at http://afs.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/12/06/0095327X12466248.abstract
Carter, Chad C. and Antony B. Kolenc (2005). "'Don't Ask, Don't Tell': Has the Policy Met Its Goals?", University of Dayton Law Review, Fall 2005
Eitelberg, Mark J. (2003). "Spacemen, Scholars, and Sailors: Another Look at the Military's Treatment of Gays." Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School. Retrieved from , February 5, 2022.
Eitelberg, Mark J. (2013). "Gays and the Military: A 20-Year Study at the Naval Postgraduate School." Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School. Retrieved from , February 5, 2022.
Huffman, J. Ford and Schultz, Tammy S. (editors) (2012), The End of Don't Ask Don't Tell: The Impact in Studies and Personal Essays by Service Members and Veterans, Marine Corps University
External links
Document Library, Robert Crown Law Library at Stanford Law Library
Text of Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010
Elaine Donnelly and Aaron Belkin Debate DADT at Maxwell Air Force Base, summer 2010
Don't Ask Don't Tell Review, House of Representatives, Military Personnel Subcommittee, July 23, 2008
1993 in LGBT history
1993 in American law
1993 in military history
American political catchphrases
Clinton administration controversies
Clinton Administration initiatives
Discrimination against LGBT people in the United States
LGBT rights in the United States
Secrecy
Sexual orientation and the United States military
United States federal civil rights legislation
United States federal defense and national security legislation
United States military law
LGBT-related controversies
Censorship of LGBT issues | [
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DKW (Dampf-Kraft-Wagen, , also Deutsche Kinder-Wagen . Das-Kleine-Wunder, or Des-Knaben-Wunsch, ) was a German car and motorcycle marque. DKW was one of the four companies that formed Auto Union in 1932 and is hence an ancestor of the modern day Audi company.
In 1916, Danish engineer Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen founded a factory in Zschopau, Saxony, Germany, to produce steam fittings. That year he attempted to produce a steam-driven car, called the DKW. Although unsuccessful, he made a two-stroke toy engine in 1919, called Des Knaben Wunsch – "the boy's wish". He put a slightly modified version of this engine into a motorcycle and called it Das Kleine Wunder – "the little wonder" the initials from this becoming the DKW brand: by the late 1920s, DKW was the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer.
In September 1924, DKW bought , saving them from Germany's hyperinflation economic crisis. Rudolf Slaby became chief-engineer at DKW.
In 1932, DKW merged with Audi, Horch and Wanderer to form Auto Union. After World War II, DKW moved to West Germany. The original factory became MZ. Auto Union came under Daimler-Benz ownership in 1957 and was purchased by the Volkswagen Group in 1964. The last German-built DKW car was the F102, which ceased production in 1966. Its successor, the four-stroke F103, was marketed under the Audi brand, another Auto Union marque.
DKW-badged cars continued to be built under license in Brazil and Argentina until 1967 and 1969 respectively. The DKW trademark is currently owned by Auto Union GmbH, a wholly owned subsidiary of Audi AG which also owns the rights to other historical trademarks and intellectual property of the Auto Union combine.
Automobiles made between 1928 and 1942
DKW cars were made from 1928 until 1966, apart from the interruption caused by the Second World War. DKWs always used two-stroke engines, reflecting the company's position by the end of the 1920s as the world's largest producer of motorcycles. The first DKW car, the small and rather crude Typ P, emerged on 7 May 1928 and the model continued to be built at the company's Spandau (Berlin) plant, first as a roadster and later as a stylish if basic sports car, until 1931.
More significant was a series of inexpensive cars built 300 km (185 miles) to the south in Zwickau in the plant acquired by the company's owner in 1928 when he had become the majority owner in Audi Werke AG. Models F1 to F8 (F for Front) were built between 1931 and 1942, with successor models reappearing after the end of the war in 1945. They were the first volume production cars in Europe with front wheel drive, and were powered by transversely mounted two-cylinder two-stroke engines. Displacement was 584 or 692 cc: claimed maximum power was initially 15 PS, and from 1931 a choice between 18 or . These models had a generator that doubled as a starter, mounted directly on the crankshaft, known as a Dynastart. DKWs from Zwickau notched up approximately 218,000 units between 1931 and 1942. Most cars were sold on the home market and over 85% of DKWs produced in the 1930s were the little F series cars: DKW reached second place in German sales by 1934 and stayed there, accounting for 189,369 of the cars sold between 1931 and 1938, more than 16% of the market.
Between 1929 and 1940, DKW produced a less well remembered but technically intriguing series of rear-wheel drive cars called (among other names) Schwebeklasse and Sonderklasse with two-stroke V4 engines. Engine displacement was 1,000 cc, later 1,100 cc. The engines had two extra cylinders for forced induction, so they appeared like V6 engines but without spark plugs on the front cylinder pair.
In 1939, DKW made a prototype with the first three-cylinder engine, with a displacement of 900 cc and producing . With a streamlined body, the car could run at . It was put into production after World War II, first as an Industrieverband Fahrzeugbau (IFA) F9 (later Wartburg) in Zwickau, East Germany, and shortly afterwards in DKW-form from Düsseldorf as the 3=6 or F91.
DKW engines were used by Saab as a model for the Saab two-stroke in its Saab 92 car manufacturing venture, in 1947.
Automobiles made after 1945
As Auto Union was based in Saxony in what became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), it took some time for it to regroup after the war. The company was registered in West Germany as Auto Union GmbH in 1949, first as a spare-part provider, but soon to take up production of the RT 125 motorcycle and a new delivery van, called a Schnellaster F800. Their first line of production took place in Düsseldorf. This van used the same engine as the last F8 made before the war.
Their first car was the F89 using the body from the prototype F9 made before the war and the two-cylinder two-stroke engine from the last F8. Production went on until it was replaced by the successful three-cylinder engine that came with the F91. The F91 was in production 1953–1955, and was replaced by the larger F93 in 1956. The F91 and F93 had 900 cc three-cylinder two-stroke engines, the first ones delivering , the last . The ignition system comprised three independent sets of points and coils, one for each cylinder, with the points mounted in a cluster around a single lobed cam at the front end of the crankshaft. The cooling system was of the free convection type assisted by a fan driven from a pulley mounted at the front end of the crankshaft.
The F93 was produced until 1959, and was replaced by the Auto-Union 1000. These models were produced with a 1,000 cc two-stroke engine, with a choice between or S versions until 1963. During this transition, production was moved from Düsseldorf to Ingolstadt, where Audi still has its production. From 1957, the cars could be fitted with a saxomat, an automatic clutch, the only small car then offering this feature. The last versions of the Auto-Union 1000S had disc brakes as option, an early development for this technology. A sporting 2+2 seater version was available as the Auto-Union 1000 SP from 1957 to 1964, the first years only as a coupé and from 1962 also as a convertible.
In 1956, the very rare DKW Monza was put into small-scale production on a private initiative, with a sporting two-seater body of glassfiber on a standard F93 frame. It was first called Solitude, but got its final name from the long-distance speed records it made on the Autodromo Nazionale Monza in Italy in November 1956. Running in Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA) class G, it set records including 48 hours at an average speed of , 10,000 km at and 72 hours at . The car was first produced by in Stuttgart, then by Massholder in Heidelberg and lastly by Robert Schenk in Stuttgart. The number produced is said to be around 230 and production finished by the end of 1958.
A more successful range of cars was sold from 1959, the Junior/F12 series based on a modern concept from the late 1950s. The range consists of Junior (basic model) made from 1959 to 1961, Junior de Luxe (a little enhanced) from 1961 to 1963, F11 (a little larger) and F12 (larger and bigger engine) from 1963 to 1965, and F12 Roadster from 1964 to 1965. The Junior/F12 series became quite popular, and many cars were produced. An assembly plant was licensed in Ballincollig, County Cork, Ireland between 1952 and c.1964 and roughly 4,000 vehicles were assembled, ranging from saloons, vans and motorbikes to commercial combine harvesters. This was the only DKW factory outside Germany in Europe and for many years after its closure its large DKW sign could be visible on the wall of the factory. The building was demolished in the late 2000s and was redeveloped into a German Aldi store and a McDonald's drive-thru.
All the three-cylinder two-stroke post-war cars had some sporting potential and formed the basis for many rally victories in the 1950s and early 1960s. This made DKW the most winning car brand in the European rally league for several years during the fifties.
In 1960, DKW developed a V6 engine by combining two three-cylinder two-stroke engines, with a capacity of 1,000 cc. The capacity was increased and the final V6 in 1966 had a capacity of 1,300 cc, which developed at 5,000 rpm using the standard configuration with two carburettors. A four-carburettor version produced , a six-carburettor one . It weighed only . The V6 was planned to be used in the DKW Munga and the F102. About 100 engines were built for testing purposes and 13 DKW F102 and some Mungas were fitted with the V6 engine in the 1960s.
The last DKW was the F102, coming into production in 1964 as a replacement for the old-looking AU1000. However, the F102 sold poorly, largely due to its two-stroke engine technology which was at the limit of its development. Auto Union's parent, Daimler-Benz, decided to offload the company to Volkswagen. The car was re-engineered with a four-stroke engine and relaunched as the Audi F103. This marked the end of the DKW marque for cars, and the rebirth of the Audi name.
From 1956 to 1961, Dutch importer Hart, Nibbrig & Greve assembled cars in an abandoned asphalt factory in Sassenheim, where they employed about 120 workers, two transporter, that collected SKD kits from Duesseldorf and built about 13.500 cars. When the DKW plant moved the import of SKD kits stopped, as it became too expensive.
DKW in South America
From 1956 to 1967, DKW cars were made in Brazil by the local company Vemag (Veículos e Máquinas Agrícolas S.A., "Vehicles and Agricultural Machinery Inc."). Vemag was assembling Scania-Vabis trucks, but Scania Vabis became an independent company in July 1960. The original plans were to build the Candango off-roader (Munga), a utility vehicle and a four-door sedan, called Vemaguet and Belcar respectively. The first model built was the 900 cc F91 Universal but the Belcar and Vemaguet names were applied later.
In 1958, the F94 four-door sedan and station wagon were launched, in the early 1960s renamed Belcar and Vemaguet. The company also produced a luxury coupe (the DKW Fissore) and the off-road Munga (locally called Candango). In 1960 Vemag cars received the larger one-litre, engine from the Auto Union 1000.
Vemag had a successful official racing team, with the coupe GT Malzoni, with fiberglass body. This project was the foundation of the long-lasting Brazilian sports car brand Puma. The Brazilian F94 line has been improved with several cosmetic changes and became more and more different from the German and Argentine models. Vemag had no capital to invest in new products and came under governmental pressure to merge. In 1964–1965 Volkswagen gradually took over Auto Union, a minority holder in Vemag, and in 1967 Volkswagen bought the remainder of the stock. VW quickly began phasing out DKW-Vemag production and introduced the Volkswagen 1600 sedan to the old Vemag plant, after a total of 109,343 DKW-Vemag cars had been built.
DKW vehicles were made in Argentina from 1960 to 1969 by IASF S.A. (Industria Automotriz Santa Fe Sociedad Anónima) in Sauce Viejo, Santa Fe. The most beautiful were the Cupé Fissore, which had many famous owners (Julio Sosa, César Luis Menotti, and others). Other models are the Auto Union 1000 S Sedán (21,797 made until 1969) and the Auto Union 1000 Universal S (6,396 made until 1969). and the Auto Union Combi/Pick-up.
The last version of the Auto Union Combi/Pick-up (DKW F1000 L), launched in 1969, survived a few months and was bought out by IME, which continued production until 1979.
Vans and utility vehicles
The DKW Munga was built by Auto Union in Ingolstadt. Production began in October 1956 and ended in December 1968, with 46,750 cars built.
From 1949 to 1962, DKW produced the Schnellaster with a trailing-arm rear suspension system with springs in the cross bar assembly. Spanish subsidiary IMOSA produced a modern successor introduced in 1963, the DKW F 1000 L. This van started with the three-cylinder 1,000 cc engine, but later received a Mercedes-Benz Diesel engine and was renamed a Mercedes-Benz in 1975.
Motorcycles
During the late 1920s and until WWII broke out, DKW was both the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer, as well as Europe's pioneer of front-wheel drive automobiles with their successful 1931 and later DKW Front models, before the 1932 Adler Trumpf and the 1934 Citroen Traction Avant. In 1931, Arnold Zoller started building split-singles and this concept made DKW the dominant racing motorcycle in the Lightweight and Junior classes between the wars. This included off-road events like the International Six Days Trial where the marque scored some considerable inter-war year successes alongside Bavarian Motor Works At the same time, the company also had some success with super-charged racing motorcycles which because of their light weight were particularly successful in the ISDT
The motorcycle branch produced famous models such as the RT 125 pre- and post-World War II, and after the war with production at the original factory in GDR becoming MZ it made 175, 250 and 350 (cc) models. As war reparations, the design drawings of the RT125 were given to Harley-Davidson in the US and BSA in the UK. The Harley-Davidson version was known loosely as the Hummer (Hummer is really just a few specific years, but generally people call the Harley lightweights Hummers), while BSA used them for the Bantam. IFA and later MZ models continued in production until the 1990s, when economics brought production of the two stroke to an end. Other manufacturers copied the DKW design, officially or otherwise. This can be seen in the similarity of many small two-stroke motorcycles from the 1950s, including from Yamaha, Voskhod, Maserati, and Polish WSK.
Cars
Pre-war production
DKW Typ P (1928–1931) ~ 2,000 units
DKW Typ 4=8 (1929–1940) ~ 24,000 units
DKW F1 (1931–1932) ~ 4,000 units
DKW F2 (1932–1935) ~ 17,000 units
DKW F4 (1934–1935) ~ 7,000 units
DKW F5 (1935–1937) ~ 60,000 units
DKW F7 (1937–1938) ~ 80,000 units
DKW F8 (1939–1942) ~ 50,000 units into the war.
DKW F9 prototype (1939)
Pre-war and war-years production of civilian models totalled almost 250,000 units, of which some 218,000 were front-wheel driven.
Post-war
DKW Schnellaster van (1949–1962)
DKW F10 (1950)
DKW F89 (1950–1954)
DKW 3=6 (F91/F93/F94) (1953–1959)
DKW Monza (1956–1958)
DKW Munga off-road (1956–1968)
DKW Junior (F11/F12) (1959–1965)
DKW F102 (1963–1966)
Motorcycles and scooters
See also
Eucort
List of automobile manufacturers of Germany
Notes
References
Siegfried Rauch Hrsg. von Frank Rönicke: DKW – Geschichte einer Weltmarke. Motorbuch-Verlag, Stuttgart 2007, .
Thomas Erdmann: Vom Dampfkraftwagen zur Meisterklasse – Die Geschichte der DKW Automobile 1907–1945. autovision, Hamburg 2003, .
Peter Kurze: DKW Meisterklasse – Ein Wagen für die ganze Welt. Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2005, .
Harald Linz, Halwart Schrader: Die Internationale Automobil-Enzyklopädie. United Soft Media Verlag, München 2008, .
External links
UK-based official Wartburg, Trabant and IFA owners' club
AUTO UNION Sales Brochures 1939
DKW Owners' Club
DKW Motorcycle Club
Die Meisterdinger von Nürnberg – DKW webpages
DKW & Auto Union History
The Long History of Reverse-Cylinder Engine Designs – motocrossactionmag.com
Audi
Auto Union
Vehicle manufacturing companies established in 1916
Defunct motor vehicle manufacturers of Germany
Motorcycle manufacturers of Germany
Vehicle manufacturing companies disestablished in 1966
Volkswagen Group | [
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] |
In precise timekeeping, ΔT (Delta T, delta-T, deltaT, or DT) is a measure of the cumulative effect of the departure of the Earth's rotation period from the fixed-length day of atomic time (86,400 seconds). Formally, ΔT is the time difference between Universal Time (UT, defined by the Earth's rotation) and Terrestrial Time (TT, independent of the Earth's rotation). The value of ΔT for the start of 1902 was approximately zero; for 2002 it was about 64 seconds. So the Earth's rotations over that century took about 64 seconds longer than would be required for days of atomic time. As well as this long-term drift in the length of the day there are short-term fluctuations in the length of day () which are dealt with separately.
Calculation
The Earth's rotational speed is , and a day corresponds to one period . A rotational acceleration gives a rate of change of the period of , which is usually expressed as . This has units of 1/time, and is commonly quoted as milliseconds-per-day per century (written as ms/day/cy, understood as (ms/day)/cy). Integrating gives an expression for ΔT against time.
Universal time
Universal Time is a time scale based on the Earth's rotation, which is somewhat irregular over short periods (days up to a century), thus any time based on it cannot have an accuracy better than 1 in 108. However, a larger, more consistent effect has been observed over many centuries: Earth's rate of rotation is inexorably slowing down. This observed change in the rate of rotation is attributable to two primary forces, one decreasing and one increasing the Earth's rate of rotation. Over the long term, the dominating force is tidal friction, which is slowing the rate of rotation, contributing about ms/day/cy or ms/cy, which is equal to the very small fractional change day/day. The most important force acting in the opposite direction, to speed up the rate, is believed to be a result of the melting of continental ice sheets at the end of the last glacial period. This removed their tremendous weight, allowing the land under them to begin to rebound upward in the polar regions, an effect that is still occurring today and will continue until isostatic equilibrium is reached. This "post-glacial rebound" brings mass closer to the rotational axis of the Earth, which makes the Earth spin faster, according to the law of conservation of angular momentum, similar to an ice skater pulling their arms in to spin faster. Models estimate this effect to contribute about −0.6 ms/day/cy. Combining these two effects, the net acceleration (actually a deceleration) of the rotation of the Earth, or the change in the length of the mean solar day (LOD), is +1.7 ms/day/cy or +62 s/cy2 or +46.5 ns/day2. This matches the average rate derived from astronomical records over the past 27 centuries.
Terrestrial time
Terrestrial Time is a theoretical uniform time scale, defined to provide continuity with the former Ephemeris Time (ET). ET was an independent time-variable, proposed (and its adoption agreed) in the period 1948–52 with the intent of forming a gravitationally uniform time scale as far as was feasible at that time, and depending for its definition on Simon Newcomb's Tables of the Sun (1895), interpreted in a new way to accommodate certain observed discrepancies. Newcomb's tables formed the basis of all astronomical ephemerides of the Sun from 1900 through 1983: they were originally expressed (and published) in terms of Greenwich Mean Time and the mean solar day, but later, in respect of the period 1960–1983, they were treated as expressed in terms of ET, in accordance with the adopted ET proposal of 1948–52. ET, in turn, can now be seen (in light of modern results) as close to the average mean solar time between 1750 and 1890 (centered on 1820), because that was the period during which the observations on which Newcomb's tables were based were performed. While TT is strictly uniform (being based on the SI second, every second is the same as every other second), it is in practice realised by International Atomic Time (TAI) with an accuracy of about 1 part in 1014.
Earth's rate of rotation
Earth's rate of rotation must be integrated to obtain time, which is Earth's angular position (specifically, the orientation of the meridian of Greenwich relative to the fictitious mean sun). Integrating +1.7 ms/d/cy and centering the resulting parabola on the year 1820 yields (to a first approximation) seconds for ΔT. Smoothed historical measurements of ΔT using total solar eclipses are about +17190 s in the year −500 (501 BC), +10580 s in 0 (1 BC), +5710 s in 500, +1570 s in 1000, and +200 s in 1500. After the invention of the telescope, measurements were made by observing occultations of stars by the Moon, which allowed the derivation of more closely spaced and more accurate values for ΔT. ΔT continued to decrease until it reached a plateau of +11 ± 6 s between 1680 and 1866. For about three decades immediately before 1902 it was negative, reaching −6.64 s. Then it increased to +63.83 s in January 2000 and +68.97 s in January 2018 and +69.361 s in January 2020, after even a slight decrease from 69.358 s in July 2019 to 69.338 s in September and October 2019 and a new increase in November and December 2019. This will require the addition of an ever-greater number of leap seconds to UTC as long as UTC tracks UT1 with one-second adjustments. (The SI second as now used for UTC, when adopted, was already a little shorter than the current value of the second of mean solar time.) Physically, the meridian of Greenwich in Universal Time is almost always to the east of the meridian in Terrestrial Time, both in the past and in the future. +17190 s or about h corresponds to 71.625°E. This means that in the year −500 (501 BC), Earth's faster rotation would cause a total solar eclipse to occur 71.625° to the east of the location calculated using the uniform TT.
Values prior to 1955
All values of ΔT before 1955 depend on observations of the Moon, either via eclipses or occultations. The angular momentum lost by the Earth due to friction induced by the Moon's tidal effect is transferred to the Moon, increasing its angular momentum, which means that its moment arm (approximately its distance from the Earth, i.e. precisely the semi-major axis of the Moon's orbit) is increased (for the time being about +3.8 cm/year), which via Kepler's laws of planetary motion causes the Moon to revolve around the Earth at a slower rate. The cited values of ΔT assume that the lunar acceleration (actually a deceleration, that is a negative acceleration) due to this effect is = −26″/cy2, where is the mean sidereal angular motion of the Moon. This is close to the best estimate for as of 2002 of −25.858 ± 0.003″/cy2, so ΔT need not be recalculated given the uncertainties and smoothing applied to its current values. Nowadays, UT is the observed orientation of the Earth relative to an inertial reference frame formed by extra-galactic radio sources, modified by an adopted ratio between sidereal time and solar time. Its measurement by several observatories is coordinated by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS).
Geological evidence
Tidal deceleration rates have varied over the history of the Earth-Moon system. Analysis of layering in fossil mollusc shells from 70 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous period, shows that there were 372 days a year, and thus that the day was about 23.5 hours long then. Based on geological studies of tidal rhythmites, the day was 21.9±0.4 hours long 620 million years ago and there were 13.1±0.1 synodic months/year and 400±7 solar days/year. The average recession rate of the Moon between then and now has been 2.17±0.31 cm/year, which is about half the present rate. The present high rate may be due to near resonance between natural ocean frequencies and tidal frequencies.
Notes
References
McCarthy, D.D. & Seidelmann, P.K. TIME: From Earth Rotation to Atomic Physics. Weinheim: Wiley-VCH. (2009).
Morrison, L.V. & Stephenson, F. R. "Historical values of the Earth's clock error ΔT and the calculation of eclipses" (pdf, 862 KB), Journal for the History of Astronomy 35 (2004) 327–336.
Stephenson, F.R. Historical Eclipses and Earth's Rotation. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Stephenson, F. R. & Morrison, L.V. "Long-term fluctuations in the Earth's rotation: 700 BC to AD 1990". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A 351 (1995) 165–202. JSTOR link. Includes evidence that the 'growth' in Delta-T is being modified by an oscillation with a wavelength around 1500 years; if that is true, then during the next few centuries Delta-T values will increase more slowly than is envisaged.
External links
IERS Rapid Service-Prediction Center Values for Delta T.
Delta T webpage by Robert van Gent
Delta T webpage by Felix Verbelen (archived from the original dead URL)
Eclipse Predictions and Earth's Rotation by Fred Espenak (archived from the original dead URL)
Polynomial expressions for Delta T (ΔT) Espenak and Meeus
Delta-T Charts and data software
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The Document Object Model (DOM) is a cross-platform and language-independent interface that treats an XML or HTML document as a tree structure wherein each node is an object representing a part of the document. The DOM represents a document with a logical tree. Each branch of the tree ends in a node, and each node contains objects. DOM methods allow programmatic access to the tree; with them one can change the structure, style or content of a document. Nodes can have event handlers attached to them. Once an event is triggered, the event handlers get executed.
The principal standardization of the DOM was handled by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which last developed a recommendation in 2004. WHATWG took over the development of the standard, publishing it as a living document. The W3C now publishes stable snapshots of the WHATWG standard.
History
The history of the Document Object Model is intertwined with the history of the "browser wars" of the late 1990s between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, as well as with that of JavaScript and JScript, the first scripting languages to be widely implemented in the JavaScript engines of web browsers.
JavaScript was released by Netscape Communications in 1995 within Netscape Navigator 2.0. Netscape's competitor, Microsoft, released Internet Explorer 3.0 the following year with a reimplementation of JavaScript called JScript. JavaScript and JScript let web developers create web pages with client-side interactivity. The limited facilities for detecting user-generated events and modifying the HTML document in the first generation of these languages eventually became known as "DOM Level 0" or "Legacy DOM." No independent standard was developed for DOM Level 0, but it was partly described in the specifications for HTML 4.
Legacy DOM was limited in the kinds of elements that could be accessed. Form, link and image elements could be referenced with a hierarchical name that began with the root document object. A hierarchical name could make use of either the names or the sequential index of the traversed elements. For example, a form input element could be accessed as either document.formName.inputName or document.forms[0].elements[0].
The Legacy DOM enabled client-side form validation and simple interface interactivity like creating tooltips.
In 1997, Netscape and Microsoft released version 4.0 of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer respectively, adding support for Dynamic HTML (DHTML) functionality enabling changes to a loaded HTML document. DHTML required extensions to the rudimentary document object that was available in the Legacy DOM implementations. Although the Legacy DOM implementations were largely compatible since JScript was based on JavaScript, the DHTML DOM extensions were developed in parallel by each browser maker and remained incompatible. These versions of the DOM became known as the "Intermediate DOM."
After the standardization of ECMAScript, the W3C DOM Working Group began drafting a standard DOM specification. The completed specification, known as "DOM Level 1", became a W3C Recommendation in late 1998. By 2005, large parts of W3C DOM were well-supported by common ECMAScript-enabled browsers, including Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 (from 2001), Opera, Safari and Gecko-based browsers (like Mozilla, Firefox, SeaMonkey and Camino).
Standards
The W3C DOM Working Group published its final recommendation and subsequently disbanded in 2004. Development efforts migrated to the WHATWG, which continues to maintain a living standard. In 2009, the Web Applications group reorganized DOM activities at the W3C. In 2013, due to a lack of progress and the impending release of HTML5, the DOM Level 4 specification was reassigned to the HTML Working Group to expedite its completion. Meanwhile, in 2015, the Web Applications group was disbanded and DOM stewardship passed to the Web Platform group. Beginning with the publication of DOM Level 4 in 2015, the W3C creates new recommendations based on snapshots of the WHATWG standard.
DOM Level 1 provided a complete model for an entire HTML or XML document, including the means to change any portion of the document.
DOM Level 2 was published in late 2000. It introduced the getElementById function as well as an event model and support for XML namespaces and CSS.
DOM Level 3, published in April 2004, added support for XPath and keyboard event handling, as well as an interface for serializing documents as XML.
DOM Level 4 was published in 2015. It is a snapshot of the WHATWG living standard.
Applications
Web browsers
To render a document such as a HTML page, most web browsers use an internal model similar to the DOM. The nodes of every document are organized in a tree structure, called the DOM tree, with the topmost node named as "Document object". When an HTML page is rendered in browsers, the browser downloads the HTML into local memory and automatically parses it to display the page on screen. However, the DOM does not necessarily need to be represented as a tree, and some browsers have used other internal models.
JavaScript
When a web page is loaded, the browser creates a Document Object Model of the page, which is an object oriented representation of an HTML document that acts as an interface between JavaScript and the document itself. This allows the creation of dynamic web pages, because within a page JavaScript can:
add, change, and remove any of the HTML elements and attributes
change any of the CSS styles
react to all the existing events
create new events
Implementations
Because the DOM supports navigation in any direction (e.g., parent and previous sibling) and allows for arbitrary modifications, an implementation must at least buffer the document that has been read so far (or some parsed form of it).
Layout engines
Web browsers rely on layout engines to parse HTML into a DOM. Some layout engines, such as Trident/MSHTML, are associated primarily or exclusively with a particular browser, such as Internet Explorer. Others, including Blink, WebKit, and Gecko, are shared by a number of browsers, such as Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Firefox. The different layout engines implement the DOM standards to varying degrees of compliance.
Libraries
DOM implementations:
libxml2
MSXML
Xerces is a collection of DOM implementations written in C++, Java and Perl
xml.dom for Python
XML for <SCRIPT> is a JavaScript-based DOM implementation
PHP.Gt DOM is a server-side DOM implementation based on libxml2 and brings DOM level 4 compatibility to the PHP programming language
Domino is a Server-side (Node.js) DOM implementation based on Mozilla's dom.js. Domino is used in the MediaWiki stack with Visual Editor.
SimpleHtmlDom is a simple HTML document object model in C#, which can generate HTML string programmatically.
APIs that expose DOM implementations:
JAXP (Java API for XML Processing) is an API for accessing DOM providers
Lazarus (Free Pascal IDE) contains two variants of the DOM - with UTF-8 and ANSI format
Inspection tools:
DOM Inspector is a web developer tool
See also
Shadow DOM
Virtual DOM
References
General references
External links
DOM Living Standard by the WHATWG
Original W3C DOM hub by the W3C DOM Working Group (outdated)
Web Platform Working Group (current steward of W3C DOM)
Application programming interfaces
HTML
Object models
World Wide Web Consortium standards
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The Kingdom of Dahomey () was a West African kingdom located within present-day Benin that existed from approximately 1600 until 1904. Dahomey developed on the Abomey Plateau amongst the Fon people in the early 17th century and became a regional power in the 18th century by conquering key cities on the Atlantic coast.
The Kingdom of Dahomey was one of the most well-known African nations of the 18th and 19th centuries, and European visitors extensively documented the kingdom in many different publications. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Kingdom of Dahomey was a key regional state, eventually ending tributary status to the Oyo Empire. The Kingdom of Dahomey was an important regional power that had an organized domestic economy built on conquest and slave labor, significant international trade with Europeans, a centralized administration, taxation systems, and an organized military. Notable in the kingdom were significant artwork, an all-female military unit called the Dahomey Amazons by European observers, and the elaborate religious practices of Vodun.
The growth of Dahomey coincided with the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, and it became known to European traders as a major supplier of slaves, allowing the royal elites of Dahomey to gain prestige and consolidated authority. The kingdom was constantly organised for warfare; it captured children, women, and men during wars and raids against weaker societies, and sold them into the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for European goods such as rifles, gunpowder, fabrics, cowrie shells, tobacco, pipes, and alcohol. Other remaining captives became slaves in Dahomey, where they worked on royal plantations that supplied food for the army and the royal court, and were often mass executed in large-scale human sacrifices during the festival celebrations known as the Annual Customs of Dahomey. The Annual Customs of Dahomey involved significant collection and distribution of gifts and tribute, religious Vodun ceremonies, military parades, and discussions by dignitaries about the future for the kingdom.
In the 1840s, Dahomey began to face decline with British pressure to abolish the slave trade, which included the British Royal Navy imposing a naval blockade against the kingdom and enforcing anti-slavery patrols near its coast. During this time period, Dahomey was also weakened by military defeat from Abeokuta, a Yoruba city-state which was founded as a safe haven for refugees escaping slave raids from Dahomey. After the 1850s, Dahomey began experiencing territorial tensions with France which led to the First Franco-Dahomean War in 1890, resulting in French victory. The kingdom finally fell when the last king, Béhanzin, was defeated by France in the Second Franco-Dahomean War, leading to the country being annexed into French West Africa as the colony of French Dahomey.
Name
The Kingdom of Dahomey was referred to by many different names and has been written in a variety of ways, including Danxome, Danhome, and Fon. The name Fon relates to the dominant ethnic and language group, the Fon people, of the royal families of the kingdom and is how the kingdom first became known to Europeans. The names Dahomey, Danxome, and Danhome all have a similar origin story, which historian Edna Bay says may be a false etymology.
The story goes that Dakodonu, considered the second king in modern kings lists, was granted permission by the Gedevi chiefs, the local rulers, to settle in the Abomey plateau. Dakodonu requested additional land from a prominent chief named Dan (or Da) to which the chief responded sarcastically "Should I open up my belly and build you a house in it?" For this insult, Dakodonu killed Dan and began the construction of his palace on the spot. The name of the kingdom was derived from the incident: Dan meaning "chief", xo meaning "Belly" and me meaning "Inside of".
History
The Kingdom of Dahomey was established around 1600 by the Fon people who had recently settled in the area (or were possibly a result of intermarriage between the Aja people and the local Gedevi). The foundational king for Dahomey is often considered to be Houegbadja (c. 1645–1685), who built the Royal Palaces of Abomey and began raiding and taking over towns outside of the Abomey plateau.
Kings of Dahomey
Rule of Agaja (1708–1740)
King Agaja, Houegbadja's grandson, came to the throne in 1708 and began significant expansion of the Kingdom of Dahomey. This expansion was made possible by the superior military force of King Agaja's Dahomey. In contrast to surrounding regions, Dahomey employed a professional standing army numbering around ten thousand. What the Dahomey lacked in numbers, they made up for in discipline and superior arms. In 1724, Agaja conquered Allada, the origin for the royal family according to oral tradition, and in 1727 he conquered Whydah. This increased size of the kingdom, particularly along the Atlantic coast, and increased power made Dahomey into a regional power. The result was near constant warfare with the main regional state, the Oyo Empire, from 1728 until 1740. The warfare with the Oyo empire resulted in Dahomey assuming a tributary status to the Oyo empire.
Rule of Tegbesu (1740–1774)
Tegbesu, also spelled as Tegbessou, was King of Dahomey, in present-day Benin, from 1740 until 1774. Tegbesu was not the oldest son of King Agaja (1718–1740), but was selected following his father's death after winning a succession struggle with a brother. King Agaja had significantly expanded the Kingdom of Dahomey during his reign, notably conquering Whydah in 1727. This increased the size of the kingdom and increased both domestic dissent and regional opposition. Tegbessou ruled over Dahomey at a point where it needed to increase its legitimacy over those whom it had recently conquered. As a result, Tegbesu is often credited with a number of administrative changes in the kingdom in order to establish the legitimacy of the kingdom. The slave trade increased significantly during Tegbessou's reign and began to provide the largest part of the income for the king. In addition, Tegbesu's rule is the one with the first significant kpojito or mother of the leopard with Hwanjile in that role. The kpojito became a prominently important person in Dahomey royalty. Hwanjile, in particular, is said to have changed dramatically the religious practices of Dahomey by creating two new deities and more closely tying worship to that of the king. According to one oral tradition, as part of the tribute owed by Dahomey to Oyo, Agaja had to give to Oyo one of his sons. The story claims that only Hwanjile, of all of Agaja's wives, was willing to allow her son to go to Oyo. This act of sacrifice, according to the oral tradition made Tegbesu, was favored by Agaja. Agaja reportedly told Tegbesu that he was the future king, but his brother Zinga was still the official heir.
End of the kingdom
The kingdom fought the First Franco-Dahomean War and Second Franco-Dahomean War with France. The kingdom was reduced and made a French protectorate in 1894.
In 1904 the area became part of a French colony, French Dahomey.
In 1958 French Dahomey became the self-governing colony called the Republic of Dahomey and gained full independence in 1960. It was renamed in 1975 the People's Republic of Benin and in 1991 the Republic of Benin. The Dahomey kingship exists as a ceremonial role to this day.
Politics
Early writings, predominantly written by European slave traders, often presented the kingdom as an absolute monarchy led by a despotic king. However, these depictions were often deployed as arguments by different sides in the slave trade debates, mainly in the United Kingdom, and as such were probably exaggerations. Recent historical work has emphasized the limits of monarchical power in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Historian John C. Yoder, with attention to the Great Council in the kingdom, argued that its activities do not "imply that Dahomey's government was democratic or even that her politics approximated those of nineteenth-century European monarchies. However, such evidence does support the thesis that governmental decisions were molded by conscious responses to internal political pressures as well as by executive fiat." The primary political divisions revolved around villages with chiefs and administrative posts appointed by the king and acting as his representatives to adjudicate disputes in the village.
The king
The King of Dahomey (Ahosu in the Fon language) was the sovereign power of the kingdom. All of the kings were claimed to be part of the Alladaxonou dynasty, claiming descent from the royal family in Allada. Much of the succession rules and administrative structures were created early by Houegbadja, Akaba, and Agaja. Succession through the male members of the line was the norm typically going to the oldest son, but not always. The king was selected largely through discussion and decision in the meetings of the Great Council, although how this operated was not always clear. The Great Council brought together a host of different dignitaries from throughout the kingdom yearly to meet at the Annual Customs of Dahomey. Discussions would be lengthy and included members, both men and women, from throughout the kingdom. At the end of the discussions, the king would declare the consensus for the group.
The royal court
Key positions in the King's court included the migan, the mehu, the yovogan, the kpojito (or queen mother), and later the chacha (or viceroy) of Whydah. The migan (combination of mi—our and gan—chief) was a primary consul for the king, a key judicial figure, and served as the head executioner. The mehu was similarly a key administrative officer who managed the palaces and the affairs of the royal family, economic matters, and the areas to the south of Allada (making the position key to contact with Europeans).
Foreign relations
The relations between Dahomey and other countries were complex and heavily impacted by the transatlantic slave trade.
Brazil
In 1750, The Kingdom of Dahomey sent a diplomatic mission to Brazil, while the country was still under Portuguese rule, in order to strengthen diplomatic relations, after an incident which led to the expulsion of Portuguese-Brazilian diplomatic authorities, in 1743. The interest of maintaining these relations was economic, "with the aim of building closer ties with Portuguese colonial authorities and slave buyers residing in Brazil, and making sure they continued to buy slaves supplied by Dahomey rather than rival kingdoms". Dahomey was the second country - the first being Portugal - to recognize the independence of Brazil in 1822.
Francisco Félix de Sousa, a Brazilian slave trader, became a politically influential figure in Dahomey after helping King Ghezo seize power.
France
In 1861, the kingdom of Porto Novo, one of Dahomey's tributaries, was attacked by the British Royal Navy, which was participating in anti-slaving patrols. So Porto-Novo asked for protection from France, and became a French protectorate in 1863. However, this was rejected by King Behanzin, who still declared Porto-Novo to be a tributary of Dahomey. Another issue of contention was the status of Cotonou, a port the French believed was under their control because of a treaty signed by Dahomey's representative in Whydah. Dahomey ignored all French claims there as well and continued to collect customs from the port. These territorial disputes escalated into the First Franco-Dahomean War in 1890, resulting in French victory. Dahomey was forced to sign a treaty surrendering Porto-Novo and Cotonou to the French. However, Dahomey later returned to raiding the area and disregarded French complaints, triggering the Second Franco-Dahomean War in 1892. The kingdom was defeated in 1894, it was annexed into the French colonial empire as French Dahomey, and King Behanzin was exiled to Algeria.
Portugal
The Portuguese fort at Ouidah was destroyed by the army of Dahomey in 1743 during its conquest of the city, so King Tegbesu desired to renew relations with Portugal. Dahomey sent at least five embassies to Portugal and Brazil during the years of 1750, 1795, 1805, 1811 and 1818, with the goal of negotiating the terms of the Atlantic slave trade. These missions created an official correspondence between the kings of Dahomey and the kings of Portugal, and gifts were exchanged between them. The Portuguese Crown paid for the expenses travel and accommodation expenses of Dahomey's ambassadors, who traveled between Lisbon and Salvador, Bahia. The embassies of 1805 and 1811 brought letters from King Adandozan, who had imprisoned Portuguese subjects in the Dahomean capital of Abomey and requested for Portugal to trade exclusively at Ouidah. Portugal promised to answer to his demands if he released the prisoners.
A long and detailed letter from King Adandonzan dated 9 October 1810 shows that he had knowledge of the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent exile of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil, and he expressed remorse that he was not able to help the Portuguese royal family during their war against France.. After detailing how he defeated the king of a rival African nation, Adandonzan tells the Portuguese,
United Kingdom
Dahomey became an adversary to the British Empire after the abolition of slavery during the 19th century. The British sent diplomatic missions to Dahomey, in an effort to convince King Ghezo to abolish human sacrifice and slave trading. Ghezo did not immediately concede to British demands, however he attempted to maintain friendly relations with the British by encouraging the growth of new trade in palm oil instead. In 1851, the Royal Navy imposed a naval blockade against Dahomey, forcing Ghezo to sign a treaty in 1852 that immediately abolished the export of slaves. However, the treaty was broken and slave trading efforts continued in 1857 and 1858.
Historian Martin Meredith quotes Ghezo telling the British,
During a diplomatic mission to Dahomey in 1849, Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the Royal Navy received an enslaved girl from King Ghezo as a "gift". She would later be named Sara Forbes Bonetta and she became a goddaughter to Queen Victoria.
United States
After the independence of the United States in 1776, it officially outlawed participation in the international slave trade with the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves signed by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807. Thus, the United States never established any formal diplomatic relations with the Kingdom of Dahomey. However, the last known slave ship that sailed to the United States secretly and illegally imported a group of 110 slaves from Dahomey, purchased long after the abolition of the slave trade. The story was mentioned in the newspaper The Tarboro Southerner on July 14, 1860. On July 9, 1860, a schooner called Clotilda, captained by William Foster, arrived in the bay of Mobile, Alabama carrying the last known shipment of slaves to the US from the Dahomey Kingdom. In 1858, a man known as Timothy Meaher made a wager with acquaintances that despite the law banning the slave trade, he could safely bring a load of slaves from Africa.
Describing how he came in possession of the slaves, Captain William Foster wrote in his journal in 1860, "from thence I went to see the King of Dahomey. Having agreeably transacted affairs with the Prince we went to the warehouse where they had in confinement four thousand captives in a state of nudity from which they gave me liberty to select one hundred and twenty-five as mine offering to brand them for me, from which I preemptorily [sic] forbid; commenced taking on cargo of negroes [sic], successfully securing on board one hundred and ten."
Zora Neal Hurston wrote about her interviews with Oluale Kossola, the last survivor of the Clotilda, in her book Barracoon. A notable descendant of a slave from this ship is Ahmir Khalib Thompson (American music artist known as Questlove). Mr. Thompson's story is depicted in the PBS Television show Finding Your Roots [Season 4, Episode 9].
Yoruba
The Oyo Empire engaged in frequent conflicts with the Kingdom of Dahomey and Dahomey became a tributary of the Oyo from 1732 until 1823. The city-state of Porto-Novo, under the protection of Oyo, and Dahomey had a long-standing rivalry largely over control of the slave trade along the coast. The rise of Abeokuta in the 1840s created another power rivaling Dahomey, largely by creating a safe haven for people from the slave trade.
Notable Yoruba people who were captured by Dahomey in slave raids following the collapse of the Oyo Empire include Sara Forbes Bonetta (Aina), Cudjoe Lewis (Oluale Kossola), Matilda McCrear (Abake), Redoshi, and Seriki Williams Abass (Ifaremilekun Fagbemi).
Military
The military of the Kingdom of Dahomey was divided into two units: the right and the left. The right was controlled by the migan and the left was controlled by the mehu. At least by the time of Agaja, the kingdom had developed a standing army that remained encamped wherever the king was. Soldiers in the army were recruited as young as seven or eight years old, initially serving as shield carriers for regular soldiers. After years of apprenticeship and military experience, they were allowed to join the army as regular soldiers. To further incentivize the soldiers, each soldier received bonuses paid in cowry shells for each enemy they killed or captured in battle. This combination of lifelong military experience and monetary incentives resulted in a cohesive, well-disciplined military. One European said Agaja's standing army consisted of "elite troops, brave and well-disciplined, led by a prince full of valor and prudence, supported by a staff of experienced officers". The army consisted of 15,000 personnel which was divided into right, left, center and reserve; and in each of these was further divided into companies and platoons.
In addition to being well-trained, the Dahomey army under Agaja was also very well armed. The Dahomey army favored imported European weapons as opposed to traditional weapons. For example, they used European flintlock muskets in long-range combat and imported steel swords and cutlasses in close combat. The Dahomey army also possessed twenty-five cannons. By the late 19th century, Dahomey had a large arsenal of weapons. These included the Chassepot Dreyse, Mauser, Snider Enfield, Wanzel, Verndl, Peabody action, Winchester, Spencer, Albini, Robert Jones carbine, French musketoon 1882 and the Mitrailleuse Reffye 1867. Along with firearms, Dahomey emplyed mortars.
When going into battle, the king would take a secondary position to the field commander with the reason given that if any spirit were to punish the commander for decisions it should not be the king. Dahomey units were drilled constantly. They fired on command, employed countermarch, and formed extended lines from deep columns. Tactics such as covering fire, frontal attacks and flanking movements were used in the warfare of Dahomey. Unlike other regional powers, the military of Dahomey did not have a significant cavalry (like the Oyo empire) or naval power (which prevented expansion along the coast). The Dahomey Amazons, a unit of all-female soldiers, is one of the most unusual aspects of the military of the kingdom.
Dahomey Amazons
The Dahomean state became widely known for its corps of female soldiers. Their origins are debated; they may have formed from a palace guard or from (female hunting teams).
They were organized around 1729 to fill out the army and make it look larger in battle, armed only with banners. The women reportedly behaved so courageously they became a permanent corps. In the beginning, the soldiers were criminals pressed into service rather than being executed. Eventually, however, the corps became respected enough that King Ghezo ordered every family to send him their daughters, with the fittest being chosen as soldiers. European accounts clarified that seven distinct movements were required to load a Dane gun which took an Amazon 30 seconds in comparison to the 50 seconds it took a Dahomean male soldier to load.
Economy
The economic structure of the kingdom was highly intertwined with the political and religious systems and these developed together significantly. The main currency was cowry shells.
Domestic economy
The domestic economy largely focused on agriculture and crafts for local consumption. Until the development of palm oil, very little agricultural or craft goods were traded outside of the kingdom. Markets served a key role in the kingdom and were organized around a rotating cycle of four days with a different market each day (the market type for the day was religiously sanctioned). Agriculture work was largely decentralized and done by most families. However, with the expansion of the kingdom, agricultural plantations began to be a common agricultural method in the kingdom. Craftwork was largely dominated by a formal guild system.
Herskovits recounts a complex tax system in the kingdom, in which officials who represented the king, the , gathered data from each village regarding their harvest. Then the king set a tax based upon the level of production and village population. In addition, the king's own land and production were taxed. After significant road construction undertaken by the kingdom, toll booths were also established that collected yearly taxes based on the goods people carried and their occupation. Officials also sometimes imposed fines for public nuisance before allowing people to pass.
Religion
The Kingdom of Dahomey shared many religious rituals with surrounding populations; however, it also developed unique ceremonies, beliefs, and religious stories for the kingdom. These included royal ancestor worship and the specific vodun practices of the kingdom.
Royal ancestor worship
Early kings established clear worship of royal ancestors and centralized their ceremonies in the Annual Customs of Dahomey. The spirits of the kings had an exalted position in the land of the dead and it was necessary to get their permission for many activities on earth. Ancestor worship pre-existed the kingdom of Dahomey; however, under King Agaja, a cycle of ritual was created centered on first celebrating the ancestors of the king and then celebrating a family lineage.
The Annual Customs of Dahomey ( or in Fon) involved multiple elaborate components and some aspects may have been added in the 19th century. In general, the celebration involved distribution of gifts, human sacrifice, military parades, and political councils. Its main religious aspect was to offer thanks and gain the approval for ancestors of the royal lineage. However, the custom also included military parades, public discussions, gift giving (the distribution of money to and from the king), and human sacrifice and the spilling of blood.
Human sacrifice was an important part of the practice. During the Annual Custom, 500 prisoners would be sacrificed. In addition, when a ruler died, hundreds, to thousands of prisoners would be sacrificed. As many as 4,000 were reported killed In one of these ceremonies in 1727.
Dahomey cosmology
Dahomey had a unique form of West African Vodun that linked together preexisting animist traditions with vodun practices. Oral history recounted that Hwanjile, a wife of Agaja and mother of Tegbessou, brought Vodun to the kingdom and ensured its spread. The primary deity is the combined Mawu-Lisa (Mawu having female characteristics and Lisa having male characteristics) and it is claimed that this god took over the world that was created by their mother Nana-Buluku. Mawu-Lisa governs the sky and is the highest pantheon of gods, but other gods exist in the earth and in thunder. Religious practice organized different priesthoods and shrines for each different god and each different pantheon (sky, earth or thunder). Women made up a significant amount of the priest class and the chief priest was always a descendant of Dakodonou.
Arts
The arts in Dahomey were unique and distinct from the artistic traditions elsewhere in Africa. The arts were substantially supported by the king and his family, had non-religious traditions, assembled multiple different materials, and borrowed widely from other peoples in the region. Common art forms included wood and ivory carving, metalwork (including silver, iron and brass, appliqué cloth, and clay bas-reliefs).
The king was key in supporting the arts and many of them provided significant sums for artists resulting in the unique development, for the region, of a non-religious artistic tradition in the kingdom. Artists were not of a specific class but both royalty and commoners made important artistic contributions. Kings were often depicted in large zoomorphic forms with each king resembling a particular animal in multiple representations.
Suzanne Blier identifies two unique aspects of art in Dahomey: 1. Assemblage of different components and 2. Borrowing from other states. Assemblage of art, involving the combination of multiple components (often of different materials) combined in a single piece of art, was common in all forms and was the result of the various kings promoting finished products rather than particular styles. This assembling may have been a result of the second feature, which involved the wide borrowing of styles and techniques from other cultures and states. Clothing, cloth work, architecture, and the other forms of art all resemble other artistic representation from around the region.
Much of the artwork revolved around the royalty. Each of the palaces at the Royal Palaces of Abomey contained elaborate bas-reliefs (noundidė in Fon) providing a record of the king's accomplishments. Each king had his own palace within the palace complex and within the outer walls of their personal palace was a series of clay reliefs designed specific to that king. These were not solely designed for royalty and chiefs, temples, and other important buildings had similar reliefs. The reliefs would present Dahomey kings often in military battles against the Oyo or Mahi tribes to the north of Dahomey with their opponents depicted in various negative depictions (the king of Oyo is depicted in one as a baboon eating a cob of corn). Historical themes dominated representation and characters were basically designed and often assembled on top of each other or in close proximity creating an ensemble effect. In addition to the royal depictions in the reliefs, royal members were depicted in power sculptures known as bocio, which incorporated mixed materials (including metal, wood, beads, cloth, fur, feathers, and bone) onto a base forming a standing figure. The bocio are religiously designed to include different forces together to unlock powerful forces. In addition, the cloth appliqué of Dahomey depicted royalty often in similar zoomorphic representation and dealt with matters similar to the reliefs, often the kings leading during warfare.
Dahomey had a distinctive tradition of casting small brass figures of animals or people, which were worn as jewellery or displayed in the homes of the relatively well-off. These figures, which continue to be made for the tourist trade, were relatively unusual in traditional African art in having no religious aspect, being purely decorative, as well as indicative of some wealth. Also unusual, by being so early and clearly provenanced, is a carved wooden tray (not dissimilar to much more recent examples) in Ulm, Germany, which was brought to Europe before 1659, when it was described in a printed catalogue.
In popular culture
The Kingdom of Dahomey has been depicted in a number of different works of fiction or creative nonfiction.
Literature and theatre
In the novel Robur the Conqueror (1886) by Jules Verne, the crew and passengers of the Albatross interrupt an act of human sacrifice. '
'In Dahomey (1903) was a successful Broadway musical, the first full-length Broadway musical written entirely by African Americans, in the early 20th century.
Novelist Paul Hazoumé's first novel Doguicimi (1938) was based on decades of research into the oral traditions of the Kingdom of Dahomey during the reign of King Ghezo.
The anthropologist Judith Gleason wrote a novel, Agõtĩme: Her Legend (1970), centered on one of the wives of a king of Dahomey in the late 18th century, who offends her husband who sells her to slavery in Brazil; she makes a bargain with a vodu (deity), putting her son on the throne of Dahomey and bringing her home.
Another novel tracing the background of a slave, this time in the United States, was The Dahomean, or The Man from Dahomey (1971), by the African-American novelist Frank Yerby; its hero is an aristocratic warrior.
In the third of George McDonald Fraser's Flashman novels, Flash for Freedom! (1971), Flashman dabbles in the slave trade and visits Dahomey. The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980) by Bruce Chatwin is the story of a Brazilian who, hoping to make his fortune from slave trading, sails to Dahomey in 1812, befriending its unbalanced king and coming to a bad end.
The main character of one of the two parallel stories in Will Do Magic for Small Change (2016) by Andrea Hairston is Kehinde, a Yoruba woman forced into the Dahomean army; she struggles with divided loyalty, and after the fall of Behanzin, joins a French entertainment troupe who intend to exhibit her as an Amazon at the Chicago World's Fair.
The Booker Prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) by Bernardine Evaristo features a character named Amma who writes and directs a play titled The Last Amazon of Dahomey.
Behanzin's resistance to the French attempt to end slave trading and human sacrifice has been central to a number of works. Jean Pliya's first play Kondo le requin (1967), winner of the Grand Prize for African History Literature, tells the story of Behanzin's struggle to maintain the old order. Maryse Condé's novel The Last of the African Kings (1992) similarly focuses on Behanzin's resistance and his exile to the Caribbean. The novel Thread of Gold Beads (2012) by Nike Campbell-Fatoki centers on a daughter of Behanzin; through her eyes, the end of his reign is observed.
Film
Dahomey's role in the slave trade is the central focus of the film Cobra Verde (1987), directed by Werner Herzog and adapted from the novel The Viceroy of Ouidah (1980). The main protagonist is a fictional Brazilian slave trader who travels to the kingdom, and the character is based upon the historical Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa, who was politically and economically influential in Dahomey during the reigns of King Adandozan and King Ghezo.
The Dahomey Amazons are depicted in the film The Woman King (2022), directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood.
Video games
Dahomey has been depicted in some historical war strategy video games.
The Dahomey Amazons appear in the historical strategy video game Empire: Total War (2009), developed by Creative Assembly.
In the grand strategy video games Europa Universalis IV (2013) and Victoria 3 (2022), both developed by Paradox Interactive, Dahomey appears as one of many historical nations that players can play as or interact with.
See also
Ashanti people
Blockade of Africa
References
Further reading
In-depth description of the fighting methods of these warriors.
A historical study of how royal power maintained itself in Dahomey. Bay and Alpern disagree in their interpretation of the women warriors.
Dahomean artistic and cultural history seen through the development (up to the present day) of a single ceremonial object, the asen''.
An academic study of the commercial role of Ouidah in the slave trade.
Folktales of the Fon people, including legends of old Dahomey.
Heavily-illustrated volume describing the royal palace in Abomey and its bas-reliefs, with a lot of information on the cultural and social history of Dahomey.
External links
Countries in precolonial Africa
History of Benin
Dahomey
Dahomey
French West Africa
Oyo Empire
States and territories established in 1600
States and territories disestablished in 1904
17th-century establishments in Dahomey
1600 establishments in Africa
1904 disestablishments in Africa
Sacred sites in traditional African religions | [
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] |
Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems "Do not go gentle into that good night" and "And death shall have no dominion"; the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood; and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a "roistering, drunken and doomed poet".
Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. In 1931, when he was 16, Thomas, an undistinguished pupil, left school to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post, only to leave under pressure 18 months later. Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager. In 1934, the publication of "Light breaks where no sun shines" caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara. They married in 1937 and had three children: Llewelyn, Aeronwy and Colm.
Thomas came to be appreciated as a popular poet during his lifetime, though he found earning a living as a writer was difficult. He began augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention, and he was frequently used by the BBC as an accessible voice of the literary scene.
Thomas first travelled to the United States in the 1950s. His readings there brought him a degree of fame, while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in the United States cemented his legend, however, and he went on to record to vinyl such works as A Child's Christmas in Wales. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma. He died on 9 November 1953 and his body was returned to Wales. On 25 November 1953, he was interred at St Martin's churchyard in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire.
Although Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language, he has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. He is noted for his original, rhythmic and ingenious use of words and imagery. His position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, and he remains popular with the public.
Life and career
Early time
Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea, the son of Florence Hannah (née Williams; 1882–1958), a seamstress, and David John Thomas (1876–1952), a teacher. His father had a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth and ambitions to rise above his position teaching English literature at the local grammar school. Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles (1906–1953), who was eight years his senior. The children spoke only English, though their parents were bilingual in English and Welsh, and David Thomas gave Welsh lessons at home. Thomas's father chose the name Dylan, which could be translated as "son of the sea", after Dylan ail Don, a character in The Mabinogion. His middle name, Marlais, was given in honour of his great-uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles. Dylan, pronounced ˈ [ˈdəlan] (Dull-an) in Welsh, caused his mother to worry that he might be teased as the "dull one". When he broadcast on Welsh BBC, early in his career, he was introduced using this pronunciation. Thomas favoured the Anglicised pronunciation and gave instructions that it should be Dillan .
The red-brick semi-detached house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (in the respectable area of the Uplands), in which Thomas was born and lived until he was 23, had been bought by his parents a few months before his birth. His childhood featured regular summer trips to the Llansteffan peninsula, a Welsh-speaking part of Carmarthenshire, where his maternal relatives were the sixth generation to farm there. In the land between Llangain and Llansteffan, his mother's family, the Williamses and their close relatives, worked a dozen farms with over a thousand acres between them. The memory of Fernhill, a dilapidated 15-acre farm rented by his maternal aunt, Ann Jones, and her husband, Jim, is evoked in the 1945 lyrical poem "Fern Hill", but is portrayed more accurately in his short story, The Peaches.
Thomas had bronchitis and asthma in childhood and struggled with these throughout his life. He was indulged by his mother and enjoyed being mollycoddled, a trait he carried into adulthood, and he was skilful in gaining attention and sympathy.
Thomas's formal education began at Mrs Hole's dame school, a private school on Mirador Crescent, a few streets away from his home. He described his experience there in Reminiscences of Childhood:
Never was there such a dame school as ours, so firm and kind and smelling of galoshes, with the sweet and fumbled music of the piano lessons drifting down from upstairs to the lonely schoolroom, where only the sometimes tearful wicked sat over undone sums, or to repent a little crime – the pulling of a girl's hair during geography, the sly shin kick under the table during English literature.
In October 1925, Thomas enrolled at Swansea Grammar School for boys, in Mount Pleasant, where his father taught English. He was an undistinguished pupil who shied away from school, preferring reading. In his first year one of his poems was published in the school's magazine, and before he left he became its editor. During his final school years he began writing poetry in notebooks; the first poem, dated 27 April (1930), is entitled "Osiris, come to Isis". In June 1928, Thomas won the school's mile race, held at St. Helen's Ground; he carried a newspaper photograph of his victory with him until his death. In 1931, when he was 16, Thomas left school to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post, only to leave under pressure 18 months later. Thomas continued to work as a freelance journalist for several years, during which time he remained at Cwmdonkin Drive and continued to add to his notebooks, amassing 200 poems in four books between 1930 and 1934. Of the 90 poems he published, half were written during these years.
In his free time, he joined the amateur dramatic group at the Little Theatre in Mumbles, visited the cinema in Uplands, took walks along Swansea Bay, and frequented Swansea's pubs, especially the Antelope and the Mermaid Hotels in Mumbles. In the Kardomah Café, close to the newspaper office in Castle Street, he met his creative contemporaries, including his friend the poet Vernon Watkins. The group of writers, musicians and artists became known as "The Kardomah Gang". In 1933, Thomas visited London for probably the first time.
1933–1939
Thomas was a teenager when many of the poems for which he became famous were published: "And death shall have no dominion", "Before I Knocked" and "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower". "And death shall have no dominion" appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933. When "Light breaks where no sun shines" appeared in The Listener in 1934, it caught the attention of three senior figures in literary London, T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson and Stephen Spender. They contacted Thomas and his first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published in December 1934. 18 Poems was noted for its visionary qualities which led to critic Desmond Hawkins writing that the work was "the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years". The volume was critically acclaimed and won a contest run by the Sunday Referee, netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, in part a vanity publisher that did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. A similar arrangement was used by other new authors including Philip Larkin. In September 1935, Thomas met Vernon Watkins, thus beginning a lifelong friendship. Thomas introduced Watkins, working at Lloyds Bank at the time, to his friends, now known as The Kardomah Gang. In those days, Thomas used to frequent the cinema on Mondays with Tom Warner who, like Watkins, had recently suffered a nervous breakdown. After these trips, Warner would bring Thomas back for supper with his aunt. On one occasion, when she served him a boiled egg, she had to cut its top off for him, as Thomas did not know how to do this. This was because his mother had done it for him all his life, an example of her coddling him. Years later, his wife Caitlin would still have to prepare his eggs for him.
In December 1935, Thomas contributed the poem "The Hand That Signed the Paper" to Issue 18 of the bi-monthly New Verse. In 1936, his next collection Twenty-five Poems, published by J. M. Dent, also received much critical praise. Two years later, in 1938, Thomas won the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry; it was also the year in which New Directions offered to be his publisher in the United States. In all, he wrote half his poems while living at Cwmdonkin Drive before moving to London. It was the time that Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.
In early 1936, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara (1913–94), a 22-year-old blonde-haired, blue-eyed dancer of Irish and French descent. She had run away from home, intent on making a career in dance, and aged 18 joined the chorus line at the London Palladium. Introduced by Augustus John, Caitlin's lover, they met in The Wheatsheaf pub on Rathbone Place in London's West End. Laying his head in her lap, a drunken Thomas proposed. Thomas liked to comment that he and Caitlin were in bed together ten minutes after they first met. Although Caitlin initially continued her relationship with John, she and Thomas began a correspondence, and in the second half of 1936 were courting. They married at the register office in Penzance, Cornwall, on 11 July 1937. In early 1938, they moved to Wales, renting a cottage in the village of Laugharne, Carmarthenshire. Their first child, Llewelyn Edouard, was born on 30 January 1939.
By the late 1930s, Thomas was embraced as the "poetic herald" for a group of English poets, the New Apocalyptics. Thomas refused to align himself with them and declined to sign their manifesto. He later stated that he believed they were "intellectual muckpots leaning on a theory". Despite this, many of the group, including Henry Treece, modelled their work on Thomas'.
During the politically charged atmosphere of the 1930s, Thomas's sympathies were very much with the radical left, to the point of holding close links with the communists, as well as decidedly pacifist and anti-fascist. He was a supporter of the left-wing No More War Movement and boasted about participating in demonstrations against the British Union of Fascists.
Wartime, 1939–1945
In 1939, a collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since 1934, appeared as The Map of Love. Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), were based less on lavish fantasy than those in The Map of Love and more on real-life romances featuring himself in Wales. Sales of both books were poor, resulting in Thomas living on meagre fees from writing and reviewing. At this time he borrowed heavily from friends and acquaintances. Hounded by creditors, Thomas and his family left Laugharne in July 1940 and moved to the home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield, Gloucestershire. There Thomas collaborated with Davenport on the satire The Death of the King's Canary, though due to fears of libel the work was not published until 1976.
At the outset of the Second World War, Thomas was worried about conscription, and referred to his ailment as "an unreliable lung". Coughing sometimes confined him to bed, and he had a history of bringing up blood and mucus. After initially seeking employment in a reserved occupation, he managed to be classified Grade III, which meant that he would be among the last to be called up for service. Saddened to see his friends going on active service, he continued drinking and struggled to support his family. He wrote begging letters to random literary figures asking for support, a plan he hoped would provide a long-term regular income. Thomas supplemented his income by writing scripts for the BBC, which not only gave him additional earnings but also provided evidence that he was engaged in essential war work.
In February 1941, Swansea was bombed by the Luftwaffe in a "three nights' blitz". Castle Street was one of many streets that suffered badly; rows of shops, including the Kardomah Café, were destroyed. Thomas walked through the bombed-out shell of the town centre with his friend Bert Trick. Upset at the sight, he concluded: "Our Swansea is dead". Soon after the bombing raids, he wrote a radio play, Return Journey Home, which described the café as being "razed to the snow". The play was first broadcast on 15 June 1947. The Kardomah Café reopened on Portland Street after the war.
In five film projects, between 1942 and 1945, the Ministry of Information (MOI) commissioned Thomas to script a series of documentaries about both urban planning and wartime patriotism, all in partnership with director John Eldridge: Wales: Green Mountain, Black Mountain, New Towns for Old, Fuel for Battle, Our Country and A City Reborn.
In May 1941, Thomas and Caitlin left their son with his grandmother at Blashford and moved to London. Thomas hoped to find employment in the film industry and wrote to the director of the films division of the Ministry of Information. After being rebuffed, he found work with Strand Films, providing him with his first regular income since the Daily Post. Strand produced films for the MOI; Thomas scripted at least five films in 1942, This Is Colour (a history of the British dyeing industry) and New Towns For Old (on post-war reconstruction). These Are The Men (1943) was a more ambitious piece in which Thomas's verse accompanies Leni Riefenstahl's footage of an early Nuremberg Rally. Conquest of a Germ (1944) explored the use of early antibiotics in the fight against pneumonia and tuberculosis. Our Country (1945) was a romantic tour of Britain set to Thomas's poetry.
In early 1943, Thomas began a relationship with Pamela Glendower; one of several affairs he had during his marriage. The affairs either ran out of steam or were halted after Caitlin discovered his infidelity. In March 1943, Caitlin gave birth to a daughter, Aeronwy, in London. They lived in a run-down studio in Chelsea, made up of a single large room with a curtain to separate the kitchen.
The Thomas family also made several escapes back to Wales. Between 1941 and 1943, they lived intermittently in Plas Gelli, Talsarn, in Cardiganshire. Plas Gelli sits close by the River Aeron, after whom Aeronwy is thought to have been named. Some of Thomas’ letters from Gelli can be found in his Collected Letters. The Thomases shared the mansion with his childhood friends from Swansea, Vera and Evelyn Phillips. Vera's friendship with the Thomases in nearby New Quay is portrayed in the 2008 film, The Edge of Love.
In July 1944, with the threat in London of German flying bombs, Thomas moved to the family cottage at Blaencwm near Llangain, Carmarthenshire, where he resumed writing poetry, completing "Holy Spring" and "Vision and Prayer".
In September that year, the Thomas family moved to New Quay in Cardiganshire (Ceredigion), where they rented Majoda, a wood and asbestos bungalow on the cliffs overlooking Cardigan Bay. It was there that Thomas wrote the radio piece Quite Early One Morning, a sketch for his later work, Under Milk Wood. Of the poetry written at this time, of note is "Fern Hill", believed to have been started while living in New Quay, but completed at Blaencwm in mid-1945. His nine months in New Quay, said first biographer, Constantine FitzGibbon, were "a second flowering, a period of fertility that recalls the earliest days…[with a] great outpouring of poems", as well as a good deal of other material. His second biographer, Paul Ferris, concurred: "On the grounds of output, the bungalow deserves a plaque of its own." The Dylan Thomas scholar, Walford Davies, has noted that New Quay "was crucial in supplementing the gallery of characters Thomas had to hand for writing Under Milk Wood."
Broadcasting years 1945–1949
Although Thomas had previously written for the BBC, it was a minor and intermittent source of income. In 1943, he wrote and recorded a 15-minute talk titled "Reminiscences of Childhood" for the Welsh BBC. In December 1944, he recorded Quite Early One Morning (produced by Aneirin Talfan Davies, again for the Welsh BBC) but when Davies offered it for national broadcast BBC London turned it down. On 31 August 1945, the BBC Home Service broadcast Quite Early One Morning and, in the three years beginning in October 1945, Thomas made over a hundred broadcasts for the corporation. Thomas was employed not only for his poetry readings, but for discussions and critiques.
In the second half of 1945, Thomas began reading for the BBC Radio programme, Book of Verse, broadcast weekly to the Far East. This provided Thomas with a regular income and brought him into contact with Louis MacNeice, a congenial drinking companion whose advice Thomas cherished. On 29 September 1946, the BBC began transmitting the Third Programme, a high-culture network which provided opportunities for Thomas. He appeared in the play Comus for the Third Programme, the day after the network launched, and his rich, sonorous voice led to character parts, including the lead in Aeschylus's Agamemnon and Satan in an adaptation of Paradise Lost. Thomas remained a popular guest on radio talk shows for the BBC, who regarded him as "useful should a younger generation poet be needed". He had an uneasy relationship with BBC management and a staff job was never an option, with drinking cited as the problem. Despite this, Thomas became a familiar radio voice and within Britain was "in every sense a celebrity".
By late September 1945, the Thomases had left Wales and were living with various friends in London. In December, they moved to Oxford to live in a summerhouse on the banks of the Cherwell. It belonged to the historian, A.J.P. Taylor. His wife, Margaret, would prove to be Thomas’ most committed patron.
The publication of Deaths and Entrances in February 1946 was a major turning point for Thomas. Poet and critic Walter J. Turner commented in The Spectator, "This book alone, in my opinion, ranks him as a major poet".
The following year, in April 1947, the Thomases travelled to Italy, after Thomas had been awarded a Society of Authors scholarship. They stayed first in villas near Rapallo and then Florence, before moving to a hotel in Rio Marina on the island of Elba. On their return Thomas and family moved, in September 1947, into the Manor House in South Leigh, just west of Oxford, found for him by Margaret Taylor. He continued with his work for the BBC, completed a number of film scripts and worked further on his ideas for Under Milk Wood.
In March 1949 Thomas travelled to Prague. He had been invited by the Czech government to attend the inauguration of the Czechoslovak Writers' Union. Jiřina Hauková, who had previously published translations of some of Thomas' poems, was his guide and interpreter. In her memoir, Hauková recalls that at a party in Prague, Thomas "narrated the first version of his radio play Under Milk Wood." She describes how he outlined the plot about a town that was declared insane, and then portrayed the predicament of the eccentric organist and the baker with two wives.
A month later, in May 1949, Thomas and his family moved to his final home, the Boat House at Laugharne, purchased for him at a cost of £2,500 in April 1949 by Margaret Taylor. Thomas acquired a garage a hundred yards from the house on a cliff ledge which he turned into his writing shed, and where he wrote several of his most acclaimed poems. Just before moving into there, Thomas rented "Pelican House" opposite his regular drinking den, Brown's Hotel, for his parents who lived there from 1949 until 1953. It was there that his father died and the funeral was held.
Caitlin gave birth to their third child, a boy named Colm Garan Hart, on 25 July 1949. In October, the New Zealand poet, Allen Curnow, came to visit Thomas at the Boat House, who took him to his writing shed and "fished out a draft to show me of the unfinished Under Milk Wood" that was, says Curnow, titled The Town That Was Mad.
American tours, 1950–1953
American poet John Brinnin invited Thomas to New York, where in 1950 they embarked on a lucrative three-month tour of arts centres and campuses. The tour, which began in front of an audience of a thousand at the Kaufmann Auditorium of the Poetry Centre in New York, took in about 40 venues. During the tour, Thomas was invited to many parties and functions and on several occasions became drunk – going out of his way to shock people – and was a difficult guest. Thomas drank before some of his readings, though it is argued he may have pretended to be more affected by it than he actually was. The writer Elizabeth Hardwick recalled how intoxicating a performer he was and how the tension would build before a performance: "Would he arrive only to break down on the stage? Would some dismaying scene take place at the faculty party? Would he be offensive, violent, obscene?" Caitlin said in her memoir, "Nobody ever needed encouragement less, and he was drowned in it."
On returning to Britain, Thomas began work on two further poems, "In the white giant's thigh", which he read on the Third Programme in September 1950, and the incomplete "In country heaven". In October, Thomas sent a draft of the first 39 pages of 'The Town That Was Mad' to the BBC. The task of seeing this work through to production was assigned to the BBC's Douglas Cleverdon, who had been responsible for casting Thomas in 'Paradise Lost'. Despite Cleverdon's urgings, the script slipped from Thomas's priorities and in early 1951 he took a trip to Iran to work on a film for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The film was never made, with Thomas returning to Wales in February, though his time there allowed him to provide a few minutes of material for a BBC documentary, 'Persian Oil'. Early that year, Thomas wrote two poems, which Thomas's principal biographer, Paul Ferris, describes as "unusually blunt"; the ribald "Lament" and an ode, in the form of a villanelle, to his dying father "Do not go gentle into that good night".
Despite a range of wealthy patrons, including Margaret Taylor, Princess Marguerite Caetani and Marged Howard-Stepney, Thomas was still in financial difficulty, and he wrote several begging letters to notable literary figures including the likes of T. S. Eliot. Taylor was not keen on Thomas taking another trip to the United States, and thought that if he had a permanent address in London he would be able to gain steady work there. She bought a property, 54 Delancey Street, in Camden Town, and in late 1951 Thomas and Caitlin lived in the basement flat. Thomas would describe the flat as his "London house of horror" and did not return there after his 1952 tour of America.
Thomas undertook a second tour of the United States in 1952, this time with Caitlin – after she had discovered he had been unfaithful on his earlier trip. They drank heavily, and Thomas began to suffer with gout and lung problems. The second tour was the most intensive of the four, taking in 46 engagements. The trip also resulted in Thomas recording his first poetry to vinyl, which Caedmon Records released in America later that year. One of his works recorded during this time, A Child's Christmas in Wales, became his most popular prose work in America. The original 1952 recording of A Child's Christmas in Wales was a 2008 selection for the United States National Recording Registry, stating that it is "credited with launching the audiobook industry in the United States".
In April 1953, Thomas returned alone for a third tour of America. He performed a "work in progress" version of Under Milk Wood, solo, for the first time at Harvard University on 3 May. A week later, the work was performed with a full cast at the Poetry Centre in New York. He met the deadline only after being locked in a room by Brinnin's assistant, Liz Reitell, and was still editing the script on the afternoon of the performance; its last lines were handed to the actors as they put on their makeup.
During this penultimate tour, Thomas met the composer Igor Stravinsky who had become an admirer after having been introduced to his poetry by W. H. Auden. They had discussions about collaborating on a "musical theatrical work" for which Thomas would provide the libretto on the theme of "the rediscovery of love and language in what might be left after the world after the bomb." The shock of Thomas's death later in the year moved Stravinsky to compose his In Memoriam Dylan Thomas for tenor, string quartet and four trombones. The first performance in Los Angeles in 1954 was introduced with a tribute to Thomas from Aldous Huxley.
Thomas spent the last nine or ten days of his third tour in New York mostly in the company of Reitell, with whom he had an affair. During this time, Thomas fractured his arm falling down a flight of stairs when drunk. Reitell's doctor, Milton Feltenstein, put his arm in plaster and treated him for gout and gastritis.
After returning home, Thomas worked on Under Milk Wood in Wales before sending the original manuscript to Douglas Cleverdon on 15 October 1953. It was copied and returned to Thomas, who lost it in a pub in London and required a duplicate to take to America. Thomas flew to the States on 19 October 1953 for what would be his final tour. He died in New York before the BBC could record Under Milk Wood. Richard Burton starred in the first broadcast in 1954, and was joined by Elizabeth Taylor in a subsequent film. In 1954, the play won the Prix Italia for literary or dramatic programmes.
Thomas's last collection Collected Poems, 1934–1952, published when he was 38, won the Foyle poetry prize. Reviewing the volume, critic Philip Toynbee declared that "Thomas is the greatest living poet in the English language". Thomas's father died from pneumonia just before Christmas 1952. In the first few months of 1953, his sister died from liver cancer, one of his patrons took an overdose of sleeping pills, three friends died at an early age and Caitlin had an abortion.
Death
Thomas left Laugharne on 9 October 1953 on the first leg of his trip to America. He called on his mother, Florence, to say goodbye: "He always felt that he had to get out from this country because of his chest being so bad." Thomas had suffered from chest problems for most of his life, though they began in earnest soon after he moved in May 1949 to the Boat House at Laugharne – the "bronchial heronry", as he called it. Within weeks of moving in, he visited a local doctor, who prescribed medicine for both his chest and throat.
Whilst waiting in London before his flight in October 1953, Thomas stayed with the comedian Harry Locke and worked on Under Milk Wood. Locke noted that Thomas was having trouble with his chest, "terrible" coughing fits that made him go purple in the face. He was also using an inhaler to help his breathing. There were reports, too, that Thomas was also having blackouts. His visit to the BBC producer Philip Burton, a few days before he left for New York, was interrupted by a blackout. On his last night in London, he had another in the company of his fellow poet Louis MacNeice.
Thomas arrived in New York on 20 October 1953 to undertake further performances of Under Milk Wood, organised by John Brinnin, his American agent and Director of the Poetry Centre. Brinnin did not travel to New York but remained in Boston to write. He handed responsibility to his assistant, Liz Reitell, who was keen to see Thomas for the first time since their three-week romance early in the year. She met Thomas at Idlewild Airport and was shocked at his appearance. He looked pale, delicate and shaky, not his usual robust self: "He was very ill when he got here." After being taken by Reitell to check in at the Chelsea Hotel, Thomas took the first rehearsal of Under Milk Wood. They then went to the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, before returning to the Chelsea Hotel.
The next day, Reitell invited him to her apartment, but he declined. They went sightseeing, but Thomas felt unwell and retired to his bed for the rest of the afternoon. Reitell gave him half a grain (32.4 milligrams) of phenobarbitone to help him sleep and spent the night at the hotel with him. Two days later, on 23 October, at the third rehearsal, Thomas said he was too ill to take part, but he struggled on, shivering and burning with fever, before collapsing on the stage.
The following day, 24 October, Reitell took Thomas to see her doctor, Milton Feltenstein, who administered cortisone injections and Thomas made it through the first performance that evening, but collapsed immediately afterwards. "This circus out there," he told a friend who had come back-stage, "has taken the life out of me for now." Reitell later said that Feltenstein was "rather a wild doctor who thought injections would cure anything."
At the next performance on 25 October, his fellow actors realised that Thomas was very ill: "He was desperately ill…we didn’t think that he would be able to do the last performance because he was so ill…Dylan literally couldn’t speak he was so ill…still my greatest memory of it is that he had no voice."
On the evening of 27 October, Thomas attended his 39th birthday party but felt unwell and returned to his hotel after an hour. The next day, he took part in Poetry and the Film, a recorded symposium at Cinema 16.
A turning point came on 2 November. Air pollution in New York had risen significantly and exacerbated chest illnesses such as Thomas had. By the end of the month, over 200 New Yorkers had died from the smog.
On 3 November, Thomas spent most of the day in his room, entertaining various friends. He went out in the evening to keep two drink appointments. After returning to the hotel, he went out again for a drink at 2 am. After drinking at the White Horse, Thomas returned to the Hotel Chelsea, declaring, "I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record!" The barman and the owner of the pub who served him later commented that Thomas could not have drunk more than half that amount.
Thomas had an appointment at a clam house in New Jersey with Todd on 4 November. When Todd telephoned the Chelsea that morning, Thomas said he was feeling ill and postponed the engagement. Todd thought he sounded "terrible". The poet, Harvey Breit, was another to phone that morning. He thought that Thomas sounded "bad". Thomas' voice, recalled Breit, was "low and hoarse". He had wanted to say: "You sound as though from the tomb", but instead he told Thomas that he sounded like Louis Armstrong.
Later, Thomas went drinking with Reitell at the White Horse and, feeling sick again, returned to the hotel. Feltenstein came to see him three times that day, administering the cortisone secretant ACTH by injection and, on his third visit, half a grain (32.4 milligrams) of morphine sulphate, which affected Thomas' breathing. Reitell became increasingly concerned and telephoned Feltenstein for advice. He suggested she get male assistance, so she called upon the painter Jack Heliker, who arrived before 11 pm. At midnight on 5 November, Thomas's breathing became more difficult and his face turned blue. Reitell phoned Feltenstein who arrived at the hotel at about 1 am, and called for an ambulance. It then took another hour for the ambulance to arrive at St. Vincent's, even though it was only a few blocks from the Chelsea.
Thomas was admitted to the emergency ward at St Vincent's Hospital at 1:58 am. He was comatose, and his medical notes state that "the impression upon admission was acute alcoholic encephalopathy damage to the brain by alcohol, for which the patient was treated without response". Feltenstein then took control of Thomas' care, even though he did not have admitting rights at St. Vincent's. The hospital's senior brain specialist, Dr. C.G. Gutierrez-Mahoney, was not called to examine Thomas until the afternoon of 6 November, some thirty-six hours after Thomas' admission.
Caitlin flew to America the following day and was taken to the hospital, by which time a tracheotomy had been performed. Her reported first words were, "Is the bloody man dead yet?" She was allowed to see Thomas only for 40 minutes in the morning but returned in the afternoon and, in a drunken rage, threatened to kill John Brinnin. When she became uncontrollable, she was put in a straitjacket and committed, by Feltenstein, to the River Crest private psychiatric detox clinic on Long Island.
It is now believed that Thomas had been suffering from bronchitis, pneumonia and emphysema before his admission to St Vincent's. In their 2004 paper, Death by Neglect, D. N. Thomas and Dr Simon Barton disclose that Thomas was found to have pneumonia when he was admitted to hospital in a coma. Doctors took three hours to restore his breathing, using artificial respiration and oxygen. Summarising their findings, they conclude: "The medical notes indicate that, on admission, Dylan's bronchial disease was found to be very extensive, affecting upper, mid and lower lung fields, both left and right." The forensic pathologist, Professor Bernard Knight, concurs: "death was clearly due to a severe lung infection with extensive advanced bronchopneumonia...the severity of the chest infection, with greyish consolidated areas of well-established pneumonia, suggests that it had started before admission to hospital."
Thomas died at noon on 9 November, having never recovered from his coma.
Aftermath
Rumours circulated of a brain haemorrhage, followed by competing reports of a mugging or even that Thomas had drunk himself to death. Later, speculation arose about drugs and diabetes. At the post-mortem, the pathologist found three causes of death – pneumonia, brain swelling and a fatty liver. Despite the poet's heavy drinking, his liver showed no sign of cirrhosis.
The publication of John Brinnin's 1955 biography Dylan Thomas in America cemented Thomas's legacy as the "doomed poet"; Brinnin focuses on Thomas's last few years and paints a picture of him as a drunk and a philanderer. Later biographies have criticised Brinnin's view, especially his coverage of Thomas's death. David Thomas in Fatal Neglect: Who Killed Dylan Thomas? claims that Brinnin, along with Reitell and Feltenstein, were culpable. FitzGibbon's 1965 biography ignores Thomas's heavy drinking and skims over his death, giving just two pages in his detailed book to Thomas's demise. Ferris in his 1989 biography includes Thomas's heavy drinking, but is more critical of those around him in his final days and does not draw the conclusion that he drank himself to death. Many sources have criticised Feltenstein's role and actions, especially his incorrect diagnosis of delirium tremens and the high dose of morphine he administered. Dr C. G. de Gutierrez-Mahoney, the doctor who treated Thomas while at St. Vincents, concluded that Feltenstein's failure to see that Thomas was gravely ill and have him admitted to hospital sooner "was even more culpable than his use of morphine".
Caitlin Thomas's autobiographies, Caitlin Thomas – Leftover Life to Kill (1957) and My Life with Dylan Thomas: Double Drink Story (1997), describe the effects of alcohol on the poet and on their relationship. "Ours was not only a love story, it was a drink story, because without alcohol it would never had got on its rocking feet", she wrote, and "The bar was our altar." Biographer Andrew Lycett ascribed the decline in Thomas's health to an alcoholic co-dependent relationship with his wife, who deeply resented his extramarital affairs. In contrast, Dylan biographers Andrew Sinclair and George Tremlett express the view that Thomas was not an alcoholic. Tremlett argues that many of Thomas's health issues stemmed from undiagnosed diabetes.
Thomas died intestate, with assets worth £100. His body was brought back to Wales for burial in the village churchyard at Laugharne. Thomas's funeral, which Brinnin did not attend, took place at St Martin's Church in Laugharne on 24 November. Six friends from the village carried Thomas's coffin. Caitlin, without her customary hat, walked behind the coffin, with his childhood friend Daniel Jones at her arm and her mother by her side. The procession to the church was filmed and the wake took place at Brown's Hotel. Thomas's fellow poet and long-time friend Vernon Watkins wrote The Times obituary.
Thomas's widow, Caitlin, died in 1994 and was buried alongside him. Thomas's father "DJ" died on 16 December 1952 and his mother Florence in August 1958. Thomas's elder son, Llewelyn, died in 2000, his daughter, Aeronwy in 2009 and his youngest son Colm in 2012.
Poetry
Poetic style and influences
Thomas's refusal to align with any literary group or movement has made him and his work difficult to categorise.
Although influenced by the modern symbolism and surrealism movements he refused to follow such creeds. Instead, critics view Thomas as part of the modernism and romanticism movements,
though attempts to pigeon-hole him within a particular neo-romantic school have been unsuccessful. Elder Olson, in his 1954 critical study of Thomas's poetry, wrote of "... a further characteristic which distinguished Thomas's work from that of other poets. It was unclassifiable."
Olson continued that in a postmodern age that continually attempted to demand that poetry have social reference, none could be found in Thomas's work, and that his work was so obscure that critics could not explicate it.
Thomas's verbal style played against strict verse forms, such as in the villanelle "Do not go gentle into that good night". His images appear carefully ordered in a patterned sequence, and his major theme was the unity of all life, the continuing process of life and death and new life that linked the generations. Thomas saw biology as a magical transformation producing unity out of diversity, and in his poetry sought a poetic ritual to celebrate this unity. He saw men and women locked in cycles of growth, love, procreation, new growth, death, and new life. Therefore, each image engenders its opposite. Thomas derived his closely woven, sometimes self-contradictory images from the Bible, Welsh folklore, preaching, and Sigmund Freud. Explaining the source of his imagery, Thomas wrote in a letter to Glyn Jones: "My own obscurity is quite an unfashionable one, based, as it is, on a preconceived symbolism derived (I'm afraid all this sounds wooly and pretentious) from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy".
Thomas's early poetry was noted for its verbal density, alliteration, sprung rhythm and internal rhyme, and some critics detected the influence of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. This is attributed to Hopkins, who taught himself Welsh and who used sprung verse, bringing some features of Welsh poetic metre into his work. When Henry Treece wrote to Thomas comparing his style to that of Hopkins, Thomas wrote back denying any such influence. Thomas greatly admired Thomas Hardy, who is regarded as an influence. When Thomas travelled in America, he recited some of Hardy's work in his readings.
Other poets from whom critics believe Thomas drew influence include James Joyce, Arthur Rimbaud and D. H. Lawrence. William York Tindall, in his 1962 study, A Reader's Guide to Dylan Thomas, finds comparison between Thomas's and Joyce's wordplay, while he notes the themes of rebirth and nature are common to the works of Lawrence and Thomas. Although Thomas described himself as the "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive", he stated that the phrase "Swansea's Rimbaud" was coined by poet Roy Campbell. Critics have explored the origins of Thomas's mythological pasts in his works such as "The Orchards", which Ann Elizabeth Mayer believes reflects the Welsh myths of the Mabinogion.
Thomas's poetry is notable for its musicality, most clear in "Fern Hill", "In Country Sleep", "Ballad of the Long-legged Bait" and "In the White Giant's Thigh" from Under Milk Wood.
Thomas once confided that the poems which had most influenced him were Mother Goose rhymes which his parents taught him when he was a child:
I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words. The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes and before I could read them for myself I had come to love the words of them. The words alone. What the words stood for was of a very secondary importance ... I fell in love, that is the only expression I can think of, at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a little of their behaviour very well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they appear to enjoy. I tumbled for words at once. And, when I began to read the nursery rhymes for myself, and, later, to read other verses and ballads, I knew that I had discovered the most important things, to me, that could be ever.
Thomas became an accomplished writer of prose poetry, with collections such as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940) and Quite Early One Morning (1954) showing he was capable of writing moving short stories. His first published prose work, After the Fair, appeared in The New English Weekly on 15 March 1934. Jacob Korg believes that one can classify Thomas's fiction work into two main bodies: vigorous fantasies in a poetic style and, after 1939, more straightforward narratives.
Korg surmises that Thomas approached his prose writing as an alternate poetic form, which allowed him to produce complex, involuted narratives that do not allow the reader to rest.
Welsh poet
Thomas disliked being regarded as a provincial poet and decried any notion of 'Welshness' in his poetry. When he wrote to Stephen Spender in 1952, thanking him for a review of his Collected Poems, he added "Oh, & I forgot. I'm not influenced by Welsh bardic poetry. I can't read Welsh." Despite this his work was rooted in the geography of Wales. Thomas acknowledged that he returned to Wales when he had difficulty writing, and John Ackerman argues that "His inspiration and imagination were rooted in his Welsh background". Caitlin Thomas wrote that he worked "in a fanatically narrow groove, although there was nothing narrow about the depth and understanding of his feelings. The groove of direct hereditary descent in the land of his birth, which he never in thought, and hardly in body, moved out of."
Head of Programmes Wales at the BBC, Aneirin Talfan Davies, who commissioned several of Thomas's early radio talks, believed that the poet's "whole attitude is that of the medieval bards." Kenneth O. Morgan counter-argues that it is a 'difficult enterprise' to find traces of cynghanedd (consonant harmony) or cerdd dafod (tongue-craft) in Thomas's poetry. Instead he believes his work, especially his earlier more autobiographical poems, are rooted in a changing country which echoes the Welshness of the past and the Anglicisation of the new industrial nation: "rural and urban, chapel-going and profane, Welsh and English, Unforgiving and deeply compassionate." Fellow poet and critic Glyn Jones believed that any traces of cynghanedd in Thomas's work were accidental, although he felt Thomas consciously employed one element of Welsh metrics; that of counting syllables per line instead of feet. Constantine Fitzgibbon,who was his first in-depth biographer, wrote "No major English poet has ever been as Welsh as Dylan".
Although Thomas had a deep connection with Wales, he disliked Welsh nationalism. He once wrote, "Land of my fathers, and my fathers can keep it". While often attributed to Thomas himself, this line actually comes from the character Owen Morgan-Vaughan, in the screenplay Thomas wrote for the 1948 British melodrama The Three Weird Sisters. Robert Pocock, a friend from the BBC, recalled "I only once heard Dylan express an opinion on Welsh Nationalism. He used three words. Two of them were Welsh Nationalism." Although not expressed as strongly, Glyn Jones believed that he and Thomas's friendship cooled in the later years as he had not 'rejected enough' of the elements that Thomas disliked – "Welsh nationalism and a sort of hill farm morality". Apologetically, in a letter to Keidrych Rhys, editor of the literary magazine Wales, Thomas's father wrote that he was "afraid Dylan isn't much of a Welshman". Though FitzGibbon asserts that Thomas's negativity towards Welsh nationalism was fostered by his father's hostility towards the Welsh language.
Critical reception
Thomas's work and stature as a poet have been much debated by critics and biographers since his death. Critical studies have been clouded by Thomas's personality and mythology, especially his drunken persona and death in New York. When Seamus Heaney gave an Oxford lecture on the poet he opened by addressing the assembly, "Dylan Thomas is now as much a case history as a chapter in the history of poetry", querying how 'Thomas the Poet' is one of his forgotten attributes. David Holbrook, who has written three books about Thomas, stated in his 1962 publication Llareggub Revisited, "the strangest feature of Dylan Thomas's notoriety—not that he is bogus, but that attitudes to poetry attached themselves to him which not only threaten the prestige, effectiveness and accessibility to English poetry, but also destroyed his true voice and, at last, him." The Poetry Archive notes that "Dylan Thomas's detractors accuse him of being drunk on language as well as whiskey, but whilst there's no doubt that the sound of language is central to his style, he was also a disciplined writer who re-drafted obsessively".
Many critics have argued that Thomas's work is too narrow and that he suffers from verbal extravagance. Those that have championed his work have found the criticism baffling. Robert Lowell wrote in 1947, "Nothing could be more wrongheaded than the English disputes about Dylan Thomas's greatness ... He is a dazzling obscure writer who can be enjoyed without understanding." Kenneth Rexroth said, on reading Eighteen Poems, "The reeling excitement of a poetry-intoxicated schoolboy smote the Philistine as hard a blow with one small book as Swinburne had with Poems and Ballads." Philip Larkin in a letter to Kingsley Amis in 1948, wrote that "no one can 'stick words into us like pins'... like he [Thomas] can", but followed that by stating that he "doesn't use his words to any advantage". Amis was far harsher, finding little of merit in his work, and claiming that he was 'frothing at the mouth with piss.' In 1956, the publication of the anthology New Lines featuring works by the British collective The Movement, which included Amis and Larkin amongst its number, set out a vision of modern poetry that was damning towards the poets of the 1940s. Thomas's work in particular was criticised. David Lodge, writing about The Movement in 1981 stated "Dylan Thomas was made to stand for everything they detest, verbal obscurity, metaphysical pretentiousness, and romantic rhapsodizing".
Despite criticism by sections of academia, Thomas's work has been embraced by readers more so than many of his contemporaries, and is one of the few modern poets whose name is recognised by the general public. In 2009, over 18,000 votes were cast in a BBC poll to find the UK's favourite poet; Thomas was placed 10th. Several of his poems have passed into the cultural mainstream, and his work has been used by authors, musicians and film and television writers. The BBC Radio programme, Desert Island Discs, in which guests usually choose their favourite songs, has heard 50 participants select a Dylan Thomas recording. John Goodby states that this popularity with the reading public allows Thomas's work to be classed as vulgar and common. He also cites that despite a brief period during the 1960s when Thomas was considered a cultural icon, that the poet has been marginalized in critical circles due to his exuberance, in both life and work, and his refusal to know his place. Goodby believes that Thomas has been mainly snubbed since the 1970s and has become "... an embarrassment to twentieth-century poetry criticism", his work failing to fit standard narratives and thus being ignored rather than studied.
Memorials
In Swansea's maritime quarter are the Dylan Thomas Theatre, home of the Swansea Little Theatre of which Thomas was once a member, and the former Guildhall built in 1825 and now occupied by the Dylan Thomas Centre, a literature centre, where exhibitions and lectures are held and setting for the annual Dylan Thomas Festival. Outside the centre stands a bronze statue of Thomas, by John Doubleday. Another monument to Thomas stands in Cwmdonkin Park, one of his favourite childhood haunts, close to his birthplace. The memorial is a small rock in an enclosed garden within the park cut by and inscribed by the late sculptor Ronald Cour with the closing lines from Fern Hill.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Thomas's home in Laugharne, the Boathouse, is a museum run by Carmarthenshire County Council. Thomas's writing shed is also preserved. In 2004, the Dylan Thomas Prize was created in his honour, awarded to the best published writer in English under the age of 30. In 2005, the Dylan Thomas Screenplay Award was established. The prize, administered by the Dylan Thomas Centre, is awarded at the annual Swansea Bay Film Festival. In 1982 a plaque was unveiled in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey. The plaque is also inscribed with the last two lines of Fern Hill.
In 2014, the Royal Patron of The Dylan Thomas 100 Festival was Charles, Prince of Wales, who made a recording of Fern Hill for the event.
In 2014, to celebrate the centenary of Thomas's birth, the British Council Wales undertook a year-long programme of cultural and educational works. Highlights included a touring replica of Thomas's work shed, Sir Peter Blake's exhibition of illustrations based on Under Milk Wood and a 36-hour marathon of readings, which included Michael Sheen and Sir Ian McKellen performing Thomas's work.
Towamensing Trails, Pennsylvania named one of its streets, Thomas Lane, in his honour.
List of works
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The New Centenary Edition. Ed. with Introduction by John Goodby. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014
The Notebook Poems 1930–34, edited by Ralph Maud. London: Dent, 1989
Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts, ed. John Ackerman. London: Dent 1995
Dylan Thomas: Early Prose Writings, ed. Walford Davies. London: Dent 1971
Collected Stories, ed. Walford Davies. London: Dent, 1983
Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices, ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud. London: Dent, 1995
On The Air With Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, ed. R. Maud. New York: New Directions, 1991
Correspondence
Ferris, Paul (ed) (2017), Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, 2 vols. Introduction by Paul Ferris. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Vol I: 1931–1939
Vol II: 1939–1953
Watkins, Vernon (ed) (1957), Letters to Vernon Watkins. London: Dent.
Posthumous film adaptations
1972: Under Milk Wood, starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Peter O'Toole
1987: A Child's Christmas in Wales directed by Don McBrearty
1992: Rebecca's Daughters starring Peter O'Toole and Joely Richardson
1996: Independence Day Before the attack, the President paraphrases Thomas's "do not go gentle into that good night".
2007: Dylan Thomas: A War Films Anthology (DDHE/IWM D23702 – 2006)
2009: Nadolig Plentyn yng Nghymru/A Child's Christmas in Wales, 2009 BAFTA Best Short Film, animation, soundtrack in Welsh and English, Director: Dave Unwin. Extras include filmed comments from Aeronwy Thomas. 5-016886-088457
2014: Set Fire to the Stars, with Thomas portrayed by Celyn Jones and John Brinnin by Elijah Wood
2014: Under Milk Wood BBC, starring Charlotte Church, Tom Jones, Griff Rhys-Jones and Michael Sheen2014: Interstellar The poem is featured throughout the film as a recurring theme regarding the perseverance of humanity
2016: Dominion, written and directed by Steven Bernstein, examines the final hours of Thomas (Rhys Ifans)
Opera adaptationUnter dem Milchwald by German composer Walter Steffens on his own libretto using Erich Fried's translation of Under Milk Wood into German, Hamburg State Opera 1973 and Staatstheater Kassel 1977
See also
Dylan Thomas Trail
Footnotes
Notes
References
Bibliography
Brinnin, J. (1955) Dylan Thomas in America, Avon Books: New York
Ellis, Hannah (ed) (2014). Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration, London: Bloomsbury
Ferris, P. (2000) Dylan Thomas: The Collected Letters, J.M. Dent: London.
Maud, Ralph (1991) On The Air With Dylan Thomas: The Broadcasts, New York: New Directions
(first published: 1991, Constable)
Further reading
Ackerman, J. (1998) Welsh Dylan, Seren: Bridgend
Thomas, A. (2009) My Father's Places'', Constable: London
External links
Dylan Thomas: Death by Neglect
Discover Dylan Thomas – Official Family & Estate Web Site
Dylan Thomas Digital Collection, Harry Ransom Centre, Universities of Texas/Swansea
Dylan Thomas and South Leigh
Dylan Thomas's Llansteffan childhood
Dylan Thomas and New Quay
Profile at the Poetry Foundation
Dylan Thomas: Profile and Poems at Poets.org
Profile with poems – written and audio, at the Poetry Archive
Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, Web site
BBC Wales' Dylan Thomas site. Retrieved 11 September 2010
"Poem in October" – recited by Dylan Thomas, BBC Radio, September 1945. Retrieved 5 August 2014
Audio files: Anthology Film Archives – including Dylan Thomas (drunk), Symposium at Cinema 16, 28 October 1953. Retrieved 11 September 2010
Dylan Thomas Digital Collection from the University at Buffalo Libraries
1914 births
1953 deaths
Anglo-Welsh poets
Caedmon Records artists
People educated at Bishop Gore School
People from Swansea
Prix Italia winners
Welsh novelists
Welsh short story writers
Welsh writers
20th-century Welsh writers
20th-century Welsh poets
20th-century British novelists
20th-century British short story writers
Modernist writers
Alcohol-related deaths in New York (state)
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
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Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), also known as androstenolone, is an endogenous steroid hormone precursor. It is one of the most abundant circulating steroids in humans. DHEA is produced in the adrenal glands, the gonads, and the brain. It functions as a metabolic intermediate in the biosynthesis of the androgen and estrogen sex steroids both in the gonads and in various other tissues. However, DHEA also has a variety of potential biological effects in its own right, binding to an array of nuclear and cell surface receptors, and acting as a neurosteroid and modulator of neurotrophic factor receptors.
In the United States, DHEA is sold as an over-the-counter supplement, and medication called prasterone.
Biological function
As an androgen
DHEA and other adrenal androgens such as androstenedione, although relatively weak androgens, are responsible for the androgenic effects of adrenarche, such as early pubic and axillary hair growth, adult-type body odor, increased oiliness of hair and skin, and mild acne. DHEA is potentiated locally via conversion into testosterone and dihydrotestosterone (DHT) in the skin and hair follicles. Women with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS), who have a non-functional androgen receptor (AR) and are immune to the androgenic effects of DHEA and other androgens, have absent or only sparse/scanty pubic and axillary hair and body hair in general, demonstrating the role of DHEA and other androgens in body hair development at both adrenarche and pubarche.
As an estrogen
DHEA is a weak estrogen. In addition, it is transformed into potent estrogens such as estradiol in certain tissues such as the vagina, and thereby produces estrogenic effects in such tissues.
As a neurosteroid
As a neurosteroid and neurotrophin, DHEA has important effects in the central nervous system.
Biological activity
Hormonal activity
Androgen receptor
Although it functions as an endogenous precursor to more potent androgens such as testosterone and DHT, DHEA has been found to possess some degree of androgenic activity in its own right, acting as a low affinity (Ki = 1 μM), weak partial agonist of the androgen receptor (AR). However, its intrinsic activity at the receptor is quite weak, and on account of that, due to competition for binding with full agonists like testosterone, it can actually behave more like an antagonist depending on circulating testosterone and dihydrotestosterone (DHT) levels, and hence, like an antiandrogen. However, its affinity for the receptor is very low, and for that reason, is unlikely to be of much significance under normal circumstances.
Estrogen receptors
In addition to its affinity for the androgen receptor, DHEA has also been found to bind to (and activate) the ERα and ERβ estrogen receptors with Ki values of 1.1 μM and 0.5 μM, respectively, and EC50 values of >1 μM and 200 nM, respectively. Though it was found to be a partial agonist of the ERα with a maximal efficacy of 30–70%, the concentrations required for this degree of activation make it unlikely that the activity of DHEA at this receptor is physiologically meaningful. Remarkably however, DHEA acts as a full agonist of the ERβ with a maximal response similar to or actually slightly greater than that of estradiol, and its levels in circulation and local tissues in the human body are high enough to activate the receptor to the same degree as that seen with circulating estradiol levels at somewhat higher than their maximal, non-ovulatory concentrations; indeed, when combined with estradiol with both at levels equivalent to those of their physiological concentrations, overall activation of the ERβ was doubled.
Other nuclear receptors
DHEA does not bind to or activate the progesterone, glucocorticoid, or mineralocorticoid receptors. Other nuclear receptor targets of DHEA besides the androgen and estrogen receptors include the PPARα, PXR, and CAR. However, whereas DHEA is a ligand of the PPARα and PXR in rodents, it is not in humans. In addition to direct interactions, DHEA is thought to regulate a handful of other proteins via indirect, genomic mechanisms, including the enzymes CYP2C11 and 11β-HSD1 – the latter of which is essential for the biosynthesis of the glucocorticoids such as cortisol and has been suggested to be involved in the antiglucocorticoid effects of DHEA – and the carrier protein IGFBP1.
Neurosteroid activity
Neurotransmitter receptors
DHEA has been found to directly act on several neurotransmitter receptors, including acting as a positive allosteric modulator of the NMDA receptor, as a negative allosteric modulator of the GABAA receptor, and as an agonist of the σ1 receptor.
Neurotrophin receptors
In 2011, the surprising discovery was made that DHEA, as well as its sulfate ester, DHEA-S, directly bind to and activate TrkA and p75NTR, receptors of neurotrophins like nerve growth factor (NGF) and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), with high affinity. DHEA was subsequently also found to bind to TrkB and TrkC with high affinity, though it only activated TrkC not TrkB. DHEA and DHEA-S bound to these receptors with affinities in the low nanomolar range (around 5 nM), which were nonetheless approximately two orders of magnitude lower relative to highly potent polypeptide neurotrophins like NGF (0.01–0.1 nM). In any case, DHEA and DHEA-S both circulate at requisite concentrations to activate these receptors and were thus identified as important endogenous neurotrophic factors. They have since been labeled "steroidal microneurotrophins", due to their small-molecule and steroidal nature relative to their polypeptide neurotrophin counterparts. Subsequent research has suggested that DHEA and/or DHEA-S may in fact be phylogenetically ancient "ancestral" ligands of the neurotrophin receptors from early on in the evolution of the nervous system. The findings that DHEA binds to and potently activates neurotrophin receptors may explain the positive association between decreased circulating DHEA levels with age and age-related neurodegenerative diseases.
Microtubule-associated protein 2
Similarly to pregnenolone, its synthetic derivative 3β-methoxypregnenolone (MAP-4343), and progesterone, DHEA has been found to bind to microtubule-associated protein 2 (MAP2), specifically the MAP2C subtype (Kd = 27 μM). However, it is unclear whether DHEA increases binding of MAP2 to tubulin like pregnenolone.
Other activity
G6PDH inhibitor
DHEA is an uncompetitive inhibitor of (Ki = 17 μM; IC50 = 18.7 μM), and is able to lower levels and reduce NADPH-dependent free radical production. It is thought that this action may possibly be responsible for much of the antiinflammatory, antihyperplastic, chemopreventative, antihyperlipidemic, antidiabetic, and antiobesic, as well as certain immunomodulating activities of DHEA (with some experimental evidence to support this notion available). However, it has also been said that inhibition of G6PDH activity by DHEA in vivo has not been observed and that the concentrations required for DHEA to inhibit G6PDH in vitro are very high, thus making the possible contribution of G6PDH inhibition to the effects of DHEA uncertain.
Cancer
DHEA supplements have been promoted as chemopreventative, for their claimed cancer prevention properties. There is scientific evidence to support these claims.
Miscellaneous
DHEA has been found to competitively inhibit TRPV1.
Biochemistry
Biosynthesis
DHEA is produced in the zona reticularis of the adrenal cortex under the control of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and by the gonads under the control of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH). It is also produced in the brain. DHEA is synthesized from cholesterol via the enzymes cholesterol side-chain cleavage enzyme (CYP11A1; P450scc) and 17α-hydroxylase/17,20-lyase (CYP17A1), with pregnenolone and 17α-hydroxypregnenolone as intermediates. It is derived mostly from the adrenal cortex, with only about 10% being secreted from the gonads. Approximately 50 to 70% of circulating DHEA originates from desulfation of DHEA-S in peripheral tissues. DHEA-S itself originates almost exclusively from the adrenal cortex, with 95 to 100% being secreted from the adrenal cortex in women.
Increasing endogenous production
Regular exercise is known to increase DHEA production in the body. Calorie restriction has also been shown to increase DHEA in primates. Some theorize that the increase in endogenous DHEA brought about by calorie restriction is partially responsible for the longer life expectancy known to be associated with calorie restriction.
Distribution
In the circulation, DHEA is mainly bound to albumin, with a small amount bound to sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG). The small remainder of DHEA not associated with albumin or SHBG is unbound and free in the circulation.
DHEA easily crosses the blood–brain barrier into the central nervous system.
Metabolism
DHEA is transformed into DHEA-S by sulfation at the C3β position via the sulfotransferase enzymes SULT2A1 and to a lesser extent SULT1E1. This occurs naturally in the adrenal cortex and during first-pass metabolism in the liver and intestines when exogenous DHEA is administered orally. Levels of DHEA-S in circulation are approximately 250 to 300 times those of DHEA. DHEA-S in turn can be converted back into DHEA in peripheral tissues via steroid sulfatase (STS).
The terminal half-life of DHEA is short at only 15 to 30 minutes. In contrast, the terminal half-life of DHEA-S is far longer, at 7 to 10 hours. As DHEA-S can be converted back into DHEA, it serves as a circulating reservoir for DHEA, thereby extending the duration of DHEA.
Metabolites of DHEA include DHEA-S, 7α-hydroxy-DHEA, 7β-hydroxy-DHEA, 7-keto-DHEA, 7α-hydroxyepiandrosterone, and 7β-hydroxyepiandrosterone, as well as androstenediol and androstenedione.
Pregnancy
During pregnancy, DHEA-S is metabolized into the sulfates of 16α-hydroxy-DHEA and 15α-hydroxy-DHEA in the fetal liver as intermediates in the production of the estrogens estriol and estetrol, respectively.
Levels
Prior to puberty, DHEA and DHEA-S levels elevate upon differentiation of the zona reticularis of the adrenal cortex. Peak levels of DHEA and DHEA-S are observed around age 20, which is followed by an age-dependent decline throughout life eventually back to prepubertal concentrations. Plasma levels of DHEA in adult men are 10 to 25 nM, in premenopausal women are 5 to 30 nM, and in postmenopausal women are 2 to 20 nM. Conversely, DHEA-S levels are an order of magnitude higher at 1–10 μM. Levels of DHEA and DHEA-S decline to the lower nanomolar and micromolar ranges in men and women aged 60 to 80 years.
DHEA levels are as follows:
Adult men: 180–1250 ng/dL
Adult women: 130–980 ng/dL
Pregnant women: 135–810 ng/dL
Prepubertal children (<1 year): 26–585 ng/dL
Prepubertal children (1–5 years): 9–68 ng/dL
Prepubertal children (6–12 years): 11–186 ng/dL
Adolescent boys (Tanner II–III): 25–300 ng/dL
Adolescent girls (Tanner II–III): 69–605 ng/dL
Adolescent boys (Tanner IV–V): 100–400 ng/dL
Adolescent girls (Tanner IV–V): 165–690 ng/dL
Measurement
As almost all DHEA is derived from the adrenal glands, blood measurements of DHEA-S/DHEA are useful to detect excess adrenal activity as seen in adrenal cancer or hyperplasia, including certain forms of congenital adrenal hyperplasia. Women with polycystic ovary syndrome tend to have elevated levels of DHEA-S.
Chemistry
DHEA, also known as androst-5-en-3β-ol-17-one, is a naturally occurring androstane steroid and a 17-ketosteroid. It is closely related structurally to androstenediol (androst-5-ene-3β,17β-diol), androstenedione (androst-4-ene-3,17-dione), and testosterone (androst-4-en-17β-ol-3-one). DHEA is the 5-dehydro analogue of epiandrosterone (5α-androstan-3β-ol-17-one) and is also known as 5-dehydroepiandrosterone or as δ5-epiandrosterone.
Isomers
The term "dehydroepiandrosterone" is ambiguous chemically because it does not include the specific positions within epiandrosterone at which hydrogen atoms are missing. DHEA itself is 5,6-didehydroepiandrosterone or 5-dehydroepiandrosterone. A number of naturally occurring isomers also exist and may have similar activities. Some isomers of DHEA are 1-dehydroepiandrosterone (1-androsterone) and 4-dehydroepiandrosterone. These isomers are also technically "DHEA", since they are dehydroepiandrosterones in which hydrogens are removed from the epiandrosterone skeleton.
Dehydroandrosterone (DHA) is the 3α-epimer of DHEA and is also an endogenous androgen.
History
DHEA was first isolated from human urine in 1934 by Adolf Butenandt and Kurt Tscherning.
See also
Epigenetic clock
References
Further reading
Androgens and anabolic steroids
Androstanes
Estrogens
Hormones of the hypothalamus-pituitary-gonad axis
GABAA receptor negative allosteric modulators
Neurosteroids
NMDA receptor agonists
Pheromones
Pregnane X receptor agonists
Sex hormones
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Do Not Adjust Your Set (DNAYS) is a British television series produced originally by Rediffusion, London, then, by the fledgling Thames Television for British commercial television channel ITV from 26 December 1967 to 14 May 1969. The show took its name from the message (frequently seen on the TV screen in those days) which was displayed when there was a problem with transmission.
It helped launch the careers of Denise Coffey, David Jason, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Michael Palin; the last three became members of the Monty Python comedy troupe soon afterward. Although originally conceived as a children's programme, it quickly acquired a fandom amongst adults, including future Python members John Cleese and Graham Chapman.
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, a satirical comedy/art/pop group, also performed songs in each programme and frequently appeared as extras in sketches. The programme itself comprised a series of satirical sketches, often presented in a surreal, absurd and discontinuous style – anticipating Monty Python's Flying Circus, which began five months after the last episode of DNAYS. Strange animations between sketches were crafted for the final episodes by Terry Gilliam, who soon graduated to Python with Palin, Jones and Idle – part of Gilliam's "Christmas cards" animation reappeared there in the "Joy to the World" segment.
One recurring feature of the show was Captain Fantastic, a superhero parody featuring David Jason in farcical and morbid adventures against villainess Mrs. Black (Coffey). These segments were shot entirely on location in London. The feature was so popular with the young audience that after DNAYS itself ended, Captain Fantastic briefly continued in its own capacity.
In 1968, DNAYS won an international award, the Prix Jeunesse, in Munich.
Episodes
Episodes produced by Rediffusion:
The very first episode, an introductory special meant for Boxing Day 1967, was accidentally switched with the first regular episode in all regions except for London.
Thirteen regular c. 25-minute episodes (in a 30-minute slot) broadcast between 26 December 1967 to 28 March 1968, Thursdays at 17:25.
Untitled special c. 25 minutes broadcast 29 July 1968, Monday at 19:00.
Episodes produced by Thames Television:
"Do Not Adjust Your Stocking", 40 minutes, broadcast 25 December 1968, Wednesday 16:10. For a 1986 repeat, David Jason demanded to be removed from the show, thus creating an abridged version of 25 minutes.
Series two: 13 episodes of c. 25 minutes broadcast between 19 February 1969 to 14 May 1969, Wednesdays at 17:20.
In common with another important Monty Python predecessor, At Last the 1948 Show, many episodes were wiped. Unlike that programme, a large number of DNAYS episodes remain missing (as of ).
DVD release
Nine of the 14 episodes from the first (Rediffusion) series were released on DVD in the UK and the US in August 2005. Both releases use the same NTSC Region 0 discs made from telerecordings of the original videotapes. In this DVD release, the episodes are numbered 1 to 9, although, in fact, they are episodes 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14 from series 1 (a similar fault was made on the release of At Last the 1948 Show). The sole surviving episode from series 2 and Do Not Adjust Your Stocking were not included. Contrary to claims on the packaging, Terry Gilliam's animations also do not appear on this release, although Gilliam does appear as one of the additional writers in the credits for episodes 3 and 4. The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band are seen playing their song "Death Cab for Cutie" (also performed in the Beatles' film Magical Mystery Tour) on the DVD in episode 7.
On 16 September 2019, the British Film Institute released a comprehensive DVD set of the surviving videos and animations from both series. It includes the previously missing fourth episode of the first series, which was rediscovered (but only after the earlier DVD release) when it was noticed that a copy had been sent to the jury of the Prix de Jeunesse award. The video of this surviving episode was a semi-professional videotape copy made in the Thames era, and is thus the only series 1 episode with magnetic rather than optical sound quality. The BFI release features episodes with their original numbering. They include the Christmas special and some Terry Gilliam animations (restored from his own masters) that appeared in otherwise lost episodes.
References
External links
British Film Institute Screen Online
A Review of DNAYS!
1967 British television series debuts
1969 British television series endings
1960s British television sketch shows
ITV sketch shows
ITV comedy
Monty Python
Television series by Fremantle (company)
Television shows produced by Associated-Rediffusion
Television shows produced by Thames Television
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] |
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is a Taiwanese nationalist and center-left political party in Taiwan (Republic of China). Controlling both the Republic of China presidency and the unicameral Legislative Yuan, it is the majority ruling party and the dominant party in the Pan-Green Coalition as of 2022.
Founded in 1986, the DPP is one of two major parties in Taiwan, along with the historically dominant Kuomintang. It has traditionally been associated with strong advocacy of human rights, and a distinct Taiwanese identity. The incumbent President and three-time leader of the DPP, Tsai Ing-wen, is the second member of the DPP to hold the office.
The DPP is a longtime member of Liberal International and a founding member of the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats. It represented Taiwan in the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization. The DPP and its affiliated parties are widely classified as socially liberal because of their strong support for human rights, including support for same-sex marriage and other LGBT rights. They are also proponents of a Taiwanese national identity. In addition, the DPP is more willing to increase military expenditures to defend against a potential Chinese invasion, and on foreign policy favors closer ties with the United States and Japan.
History
The DPP's roots were in the "tangwai" – or "outside-the-KMT" – movement, which formed in opposition to the Kuomintang's one-party authoritarian rule under the "party-state" system during martial law. This movement culminated in the formation of the DPP as an alternative, but still illegal, party on 28 September 1986 by eighteen organizing members at Grand Hotel Taipei, with a total of 132 people joining the party in attendance. The new party members contested the 1986 election as "nonpartisan" candidates since competing parties would remain illegal until the following year. These early members of the party, like the tangwai, drew heavily from the ranks of family members and defense lawyers of political prisoners, as well as intellectuals and artists who had spent time abroad. These individuals were strongly committed to political change toward democracy and freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association.
The tangwai were not a unified political unit and consisted of factions which carried over into the early DPP. At its founding the DPP consisted of three factions: the Kang group (a moderate faction led by Kang Ning-hsiang), New Tide faction (consisting of intellectuals and social activists led by Wu Nai-ren and Chiou I-jen), and the Progress Faction (led by Lin Cheng-chieh, a waishengren opposed to independence). Moderates would later coalesce around the Formosa faction, founded by those arrested during the Formosa Incident after their release from prison. In the early days of the party, the Formosa faction focused on winning elections by wielding the star power of its leaders, while New Tide would focus on ideological mobilization and developing grassroots support for social movements. As a result, the Formosa faction would become more moderate, often bending to public opinion, while New Tide would become more ideologically cohesive. By 1988 the Formosa Faction would dominate high-level positions within the party.
The party did not at the outset give explicit support to an independent Taiwanese national identity, partially because moderates such as Hsu Hsin-liang were concerned that such a move that could have invited a violent crackdown by the Kuomintang and alienate voters, but also because some members such as Lin Cheng-chieh supported unification. Partially due to their waning influence within the party and partially due to their ideological commitment, between 1988 and 1991 the New Tide Faction would push the independence issue, bolstered by the return of pro-independence activists from overseas who were previously barred from Taiwan. In 1991, in order to head off the New Tide, party chairman Hsu Hsin-liang of the moderate Formosa faction agreed to include language in the party charter which advocated for the drafting of a new constitution as well as declaration of a new Republic of Taiwan via referendum (which resulted in many pro-unification members leaving the party). However, the party would quickly begin to walk back on this language, and eventually in 1999 the party congress passed a resolution that Taiwan was already an independent country, under the official name "Republic of China," and that any constitutional changes should be approved by the people via referendum, while emphasizing the use of the name "Taiwan" in international settings.
Despite its lack of electoral success, the pressure that the DPP created on the ruling KMT via its demands are widely credited in the political reforms of the 1990s, most notably the direct popular election of Republic of China's president and all representatives in the National Assembly and Legislative Yuan, as well the ability to open discuss events from the past such as the February 28 Incident and its long aftermath of martial law, and space for a greater variety of political views and advocacy. Once the DPP had representation in the Legislative Yuan, the party used the legislature as a forum to challenge the ruling KMT.
Post-democratization, the DPP shifted their focus to anti-corruption issues, in particular regarding KMT connections to organized crime as well as "party assets" illegally acquired from the government during martial law. Meanwhile, factions continued to form within the DPP as a mechanism for coalition-building within the party; notably, future President Chen Shui-bian would form the Justice Alliance faction.
2000–2008: in minority government
The DPP won the presidency with the election of Chen Shui-bian in March 2000 with a plurality, due to Pan-Blue voters splitting their vote between the Kuomintang and independent candidate James Soong, ending 91 years of KMT rule in the Republic of China. Chen softened the party's stance on independence to appeal to moderate voters, appease the United States, and placate China. He also promised not to change the ROC state symbols or declare formal independence as long as the People's Republic of China did not attack Taiwan. Further, he advocated for economic exchange with China as well as the establishment of transportation links.
In 2002 the DPP became the first party other than the KMT to reach a plurality in the Legislative Yuan following the 2001 legislative election. However, a majority coalition between the KMT, People First Party, and New Party prevented it from taking control of the chamber. This coalition was at odds with the presidency from the beginning, and led to President Chen's abandonment of the centrist positions that he ran his campaign on.
In 2003, Chen announced a campaign to draft a referendum law as well as a new constitution, a move which appealed to the fundamentalist wing of the DPP. By now, the New Tide faction had begun to favor pragmatic approaches to their pro-independence goals and dominated decision-making positions within the party. By contrast, grassroots support was divided largely between moderate and fundamentalist wings. Though Chen's plans for a referendum on a new constitution were scuttled by the legislature, he did manage to include a largely symbolic referendum on the PRC military threat to coincide with the 2004 presidential election. President Chen Shui-bian would be narrowly re-elected in 2004 after an assassination attempt the day before the election, and in the later legislative election, the pan-blue coalition opposition retained control of the chamber.
President Chen's moves sparked a debate within the party between fundamentalists and moderates who were concerned that voters would abandon their party. The fundamentalists won out, and as a result the DPP would largely follow Chen's lead. The DPP suffered a significant election defeat in nationwide local and county elections in December 2005, while the pan-blue coalition captured 16 of 23 county and city government offices under the leadership of popular Taipei mayor and KMT Party Chairman Ma Ying-jeou. Moderates within the party would blame this loss on the party's fundamentalist turn.
The results led to a shake up of the party leadership. Su Tseng-chang resigned as DPP chairman soon after election results were announced. Su had pledged to step down if the DPP lost either Taipei County or failed to win 10 of the 23 mayor/magistrate positions. Vice President Annette Lu was appointed acting DPP leader. Presidential Office Secretary-General Yu Shyi-kun was elected in a three-way race against legislator Chai Trong-rong and Wong Chin-chu with 54.4% of the vote.
Premier Frank Hsieh, DPP election organizer and former mayor of Kaohsiung twice tendered a verbal resignation immediately following the election, but his resignation was not accepted by President Chen until 17 January 2006 after the DPP chairmanship election had concluded. The former DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang was appointed to replace Hsieh as premier. Hsieh and his cabinet resigned en masse on 24 January to make way for Su and his new cabinet. President Chen had offered the position of Presidential Office Secretary-General (vacated by Su) to the departing premier, but Hsieh declined and left office criticizing President Chen for his tough line on dealing with China.
In 2005, following the passage of the Anti-Secession Law, the Chen administration issued a statement asserting the position that Taiwan's future should be decided by the people on Taiwan only.
Separate identity from China
On 30 September 2007, the DPP approved a resolution asserting a separate identity from China and called for the enactment of a new constitution for a "normal nation". It struck an accommodating tone by advocating general use of "Taiwan" as the country's name without calling for abandonment of the name Republic of China.
2008–2016: back to opposition
In the national elections held in early months of 2008, the DPP won less than 25% of the seats (38.2% vote share) in the new Legislative Yuan while its presidential candidate, former Kaohsiung mayor Frank Hsieh, lost to KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou by a wide margin (41.55% vs. 58.45%). In May, the DPP elected moderate Tsai Ing-wen as their new leader over fundamentalist Koo Kwang-ming. Tsai became the first female leader of the DPP and the first female leader to lead a major party in Taiwan.
The first months since backed to the opposition were dominated by press coverage of the travails of Chen Shui-bian and his wife Wu Shu-jen. On 15 August 2008, Chen resigned from the DPP and apologized: "Today I have to say sorry to all of the DPP members and supporters. I let everyone down, caused you humiliation and failed to meet your expectations. My acts have caused irreparable damage to the party. I love the DPP deeply and am proud of being a DPP member. To express my deepest regrets to all DPP members and supporters, I announce my withdrawal from the DPP immediately. My wife Wu Shu-jen is also withdrawing from the party." DPP Chairperson followed with a public statement on behalf of the party: "In regard to Chen and his wife's decision to withdraw from the party and his desire to shoulder responsibility for his actions as well as to undergo an investigation by the party's anti-corruption committee, we respect his decision and accept it."
The DPP vowed to reflect on public misgivings towards the party. Chairperson Tsai insisted on the need for the party to remember its history, defend the Republic of China's sovereignty and national security, and maintain its confidence.
The party re-emerged as a voice in Taiwan's political debate when Ma's administration reached the end of its first year in office. The DPP marked the anniversary with massive rallies in Taipei and Kaohsiung. Tsai's address to the crowd in Taipei on 17 May proclaimed a "citizens' movement to protect Republic of China" seeking to "protect our democracy and protect Republic of China."
2016–present: in majority government
On 16 January 2016, Taiwan held a general election for its presidency and for the Legislative Yuan. The DPP gained the presidential seat, with the election of Tsai Ing-wen, who received 56.12% of the votes, while her opponent Eric Chu gained 31.2%. In addition, the DPP gained a majority of the Legislative Yuan, winning 68 seats in the 113-seat legislature, up from 40 in 2012 election, thus giving them the majority for the first time in its history.
President Tsai won reelection in the 2020 Taiwanese presidential election on 11 January 2020, and the Democratic Progressive Party retained its legislative majority, winning 61 seats.
Policies
Programs supported by the party include moderate social welfare policies involving the rights of women, senior citizens, children, young people, labor, minorities, indigenous peoples, farmers, and other disadvantaged sectors of the society. Furthermore, its platform includes a legal and political order based on human rights and democracy; balanced economic and financial administration; fair and open social welfare; educational and cultural reform; and, independent defense and peaceful foreign policy with closer ties to United States and Japan. For these reasons, it used to be considered a party of the center-left economically though its base consisted largely of the middle class. The party also has a social liberal stance that includes support for gender equality and same-sex marriage under Tsai's leadership, and also has a conservative base that includes support from the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan.
Stance on Taiwanese independence
The primary political axis in Taiwan involves the issue of Taiwan independence versus eventual unification with China. Although the differences tend to be portrayed in polarized terms, both major coalitions have developed modified, nuanced and often complex positions. Though opposed in the philosophical origins, the practical differences between such positions can sometimes be subtle.
The current official position of the party is that Taiwan is an independent and sovereign country whose territory consists of Taiwan and its surrounding smaller islands and whose sovereignty derives only from the ROC citizens living in Taiwan (similar philosophy of self-determination), based on the 1999 "Resolution on Taiwan's Future". It considers Taiwan an independent nation under the name of Republic of China, making a formal declaration of independence unnecessary. Though calls for drafting a new constitution and a declaration of a Republic of Taiwan was written into the party charter in 1991, the 1999 resolution has practically superseded the earlier charter. The DPP rejects the so-called "One China principle" defined in 1992 as the basis for official diplomatic relations with the PRC and advocates a Taiwanese national identity which is separate from mainland China.
By contrast, the KMT or pan-blue coalition agrees that the Republic of China is an independent and sovereign country that is not part of the PRC, but argues that a one China principle (with different definitions across the strait) can be used as the basis for talks with China. The KMT also opposes Taiwan independence and argues that efforts to establish a Taiwanese national identity separated from the Chinese national identity are unnecessary and needlessly provocative. Some KMT conservative officials have called efforts from DPP "anti-China" (opposing migrants from mainland China, who DPP officials did not recognize as Taiwanese, but Chinese). At the other end of the political spectrum, the acceptance by the DPP of the symbols of the Republic of China is opposed by the Taiwan Solidarity Union.
The first years of the DPP as the ruling party drew accusations from the opposition that, as a self-styled Taiwanese nationalist party, the DPP was itself inadequately sensitive to the ethnographic diversity of Taiwan's population. Where the KMT had been guilty of Chinese chauvinism, the critics charged, the DPP might offer nothing more as a remedy than Hoklo chauvinism. The DPP argues that its efforts to promote a Taiwanese national identity are merely an effort to normalize a Taiwanese identity repressed during years of authoritarian Kuomintang rule.
Support
Since the democratization of Taiwan in the 1990s, the DPP has had its strongest performance in the Hokkien-speaking counties and cities of Taiwan, compared with the predominantly Hakka and Mandarin-speaking counties, that tend to support the Kuomintang.
The deep-rooted hostility between Taiwanese aborigines and (Taiwanese) Hoklo, and the effective KMT networks within aboriginal communities contribute to aboriginal skepticism against the DPP and the aboriginals tendency to vote for the KMT. Aboriginals have criticized politicians for abusing the "indigenization" movement for political gains, such as aboriginal opposition to the DPP's "rectification" by recognizing the Truku for political reasons, where the Atayal and Seediq slammed the Truku for their name rectification. In 2008, the majority of mountain townships voted for Ma Ying-jeou. However, the DPP share of the aboriginal vote has been rising.
Structure
The DPP National Party Congress selects, for two-year terms, the 30 members of the Central Executive Committee and the 11 members of the Central Review Committee. The Central Executive Committee, in turn, chooses the 10 members of the Central Standing Committee. Since 2012, the DPP has had a "China Affairs Committee" to deal with Cross-Strait relations; the name caused some controversy within the party and in the Taiwan media, with critics suggesting that "Mainland Affairs Committee" or "Cross-Strait Affairs Committee" would show less of a hostile "One Country on Each Side" attitude.
For many years the DPP officially recognized several factions within its membership, such as the New Tide faction (), the Formosa faction (), the Justice Alliance faction () and Welfare State Alliance faction (). Each faction endorsed slightly different policies. The factions were often generationally identifiable, representing individuals who had entered the party at different times. In 2006, the party ended recognition of factions. The factions have since stated that they will comply with the resolution. However, the factions are still referred to by name in national media.
Chair
Current Chair: Tsai Ing-wen (since May 2020)
Secretary-General
Current Secretary-General: Luo Wen-jia (since January 2019)
Legislative Yuan leader (caucus leader)
Shih Ming-teh (1 February 1993 – 1 February 2002)
Ker Chien-ming (since 1 February 2002)
Election results
Presidential elections
Legislative elections
{| class="wikitable"
|+
!Election
!Total seats won
!Total votes
!Share of votes
!Changes
!Party leader
!Status
!President
|-
!1989
|
|
|
|
|Huang Hsin-chieh
|
|Lee Teng-hui
|-
!1992
|
|2,944,195
|31.0%
| 30 seats
|Hsu Hsin-liang
|
|Lee Teng-hui
|-
!1995
|
|3,132,156
|33.2%
| 3 seats
|Shih Ming-teh
|
|Lee Teng-hui
|-
!1998
|
|2,966,834
|29.6%
| 16 seats
|Lin Yi-hsiung
|
|Lee Teng-hui
|-
!2001
|
|3,447,740
|36.6%
| 21 seats
|Chen Shui-bian
|
|Chen Shui-bian
|-
!2004
|
|3,471,429
|37.9%
| 2 seats
|Chen Shui-bian
|
|Chen Shui-bian
|-
!2008
|
|3,775,352
|38.2%
| 62 seats
|Chen Shui-bian
|
|Chen Shui-bian
|-
!2012
|
|4,556,526
|34.6%
| 13 seats
|Tsai Ing-wen
|
|Ma Ying-jeou
|-
!2016
|
|5,370,953
|44.1%
| 28 seats
|Tsai Ing-wen
|
|Tsai Ing-wen
|-
!2020
|
|4,811,241
|33.98%
| 7 seats
|Cho Jung-tai
|
|Tsai Ing-wen
|}
Local elections
National Assembly elections
See also
Liberalism in Taiwan
Human rights in Taiwan
Culture of Taiwan
Taiwan independence movement
Taiwanese people
Taiwanese identity
Resolution on Taiwan's Future
Referendums in Taiwan
Foreign relations of Taiwan
February 28 Incident
Formosa Incident
Sunflower Student Movement
Notes
Words in native languages
References
External links
DPP Official website
Academic thesis on the factions within DPP
1986 establishments in Taiwan
Social liberal parties
Social democratic parties in Taiwan
Progressive parties in Taiwan
Identity politics in Taiwan
Liberal International
Centre-left parties in Asia
Nationalist parties in Asia
Political parties established in 1986
Formerly banned political parties | [
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A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies, pursued with the appearance of nonchalance. A dandy could be a self-made man who strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle despite coming from a middle-class background, especially in late 18th- and early 19th-century Britain.
Previous manifestations of the petit-maître (French for "small master") and the Muscadin have been noted by John C. Prevost, but the modern practice of dandyism first appeared in the revolutionary 1790s, both in London and in Paris. The dandy cultivated cynical reserve, yet to such extremes that novelist George Meredith, himself no dandy, once defined cynicism as "intellectual dandyism". Some took a more benign view; Thomas Carlyle wrote in Sartor Resartus that a dandy was no more than "a clothes-wearing man". Honoré de Balzac introduced the perfectly worldly and unmoved Henri de Marsay in La fille aux yeux d'or (1835), a part of La Comédie Humaine, who fulfils at first the model of a perfect dandy, until an obsessive love-pursuit unravels him in passionate and murderous jealousy.
Charles Baudelaire defined the dandy, in the later "metaphysical" phase of dandyism, as one who elevates æsthetics to a living religion, that the dandy's mere existence reproaches the responsible citizen of the middle class: "Dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism" and "These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking .... Dandyism is a form of Romanticism. Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of mind."
The linkage of clothing with political protest had become a particularly English characteristic during the 18th century. Given these connotations, dandyism can be seen as a political protest against the levelling effect of egalitarian principles, often including nostalgic adherence to feudal or pre-industrial values, such as the ideals of "the perfect gentleman" or "the autonomous aristocrat". Paradoxically, the dandy required an audience, as Susann Schmid observed in examining the "successfully marketed lives" of Oscar Wilde and Lord Byron, who exemplify the dandy's roles in the public sphere, both as writers and as personae providing sources of gossip and scandal. Nigel Rodgers in The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma? questions Wilde's status as a genuine dandy, seeing him as someone who only assumed a dandified stance in passing, not a man dedicated to the exacting ideals of dandyism.
Etymology
The origin of the word is uncertain. Eccentricity, defined as taking characteristics such as dress and appearance to extremes, began to be applied generally to human behavior in the 1770s. Similarly, the word dandy first appears in the late 18th century. In the years immediately preceding the American Revolution, the first verse and chorus of "Yankee Doodle" derided the perceived poverty and rustic manners of American colonists, suggesting that whereas a fine horse and gold-braided clothing ("mac[c]aroni") were required to set a dandy apart from those around him, the average American colonist's means were so meager that ownership of a mere pony and a few feathers for personal ornamentation would qualify one of them as a "dandy" by comparison to and/or in the minds of his even less sophisticated Eurasian compatriots. A slightly later Scottish border ballad, circa 1780, also features the word, but probably without all the contextual aspects of its more recent meaning. The original, full form of 'dandy' may have been jack-a-dandy. It was a vogue word during the Napoleonic Wars. In that contemporary slang, a "dandy" was differentiated from a "fop" in that the dandy's dress was more refined and sober than the fop's.
In the twenty-first century, the word dandy is a jocular, often sarcastic adjective meaning "fine" or "great"; when used in the form of a noun, it refers to a well-groomed and well-dressed man, but often to one who is also self-absorbed.
Beau Brummell and early British dandyism
The model dandy in British society was George Bryan "Beau" Brummell (1778–1840), in his early days, an undergraduate student at Oriel College, Oxford and later, an associate of the Prince Regent. Brummell was not from an aristocratic background; indeed, his greatness was "based on nothing at all," as J.A. Barbey d'Aurevilly observed in 1845. Never unpowdered or unperfumed, immaculately bathed and shaved, and dressed in a plain dark blue coat, he was always perfectly brushed, perfectly fitted, showing much perfectly starched linen, all freshly laundered, and composed with an elaborately knotted cravat. From the mid-1790s, Beau Brummell was the early incarnation of "the celebrity", a man chiefly famous for being famous.
By the time Pitt taxed hair powder in 1795 to help pay for the war against France and to discourage the use of flour (which had recently increased in both rarity and price, owing to bad harvests) in such a frivolous product, Brummell had already abandoned wearing a wig, and had his hair cut in the Roman fashion, "à la Brutus". Moreover, he led the transition from breeches to snugly tailored dark "pantaloons," which directly led to modern trousers, the sartorial mainstay of men's clothes in the Western world for the past two centuries. In 1799, upon coming of age, Beau Brummell inherited from his father a fortune of thirty thousand pounds, which he spent mostly on costume, gambling, and high living. In 1816 he suffered bankruptcy, the dandy's stereotyped fate; he fled his creditors to France, quietly dying in 1840, in a lunatic asylum in Caen, aged 61.
Men of more notable accomplishments than Beau Brummell also adopted the dandiacal pose: Lord Byron occasionally dressed the part, helping reintroduce the frilled, lace-cuffed and lace-collared "poet shirt". In that spirit, he had his portrait painted in Albanian costume.
Another prominent dandy of the period was Alfred Guillaume Gabriel d'Orsay, the Count d'Orsay, who had been friends with Byron and who moved in the highest social circles of London.
In 1836 Thomas Carlyle wrote: A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse, and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely and well: so that the others dress to live, he lives to dress ... And now, for all this perennial Martyrdom, and Poesy, and even Prophecy, what is it that the Dandy asks in return? Solely, we may say, that you would recognise his existence; would admit him to be a living object; or even failing this, a visual object, or thing that will reflect rays of light...
By the mid-19th century, the English dandy, within the muted palette of male fashion, exhibited minute refinements—"The quality of the fine woollen cloth, the slope of a pocket flap or coat revers, exactly the right colour for the gloves, the correct amount of shine on boots and shoes, and so on. It was an image of a well-dressed man who, while taking infinite pains about his appearance, affected indifference to it. This refined dandyism continued to be regarded as an essential strand of male Englishness."
Dandyism in France
The beginnings of dandyism in France were bound to the politics of the French revolution; the initial stage of dandyism, the gilded youth, was a political statement of dressing in an aristocratic style in order to distinguish its members from the sans-culottes.
During his heyday, Beau Brummell's dictat on both fashion and etiquette reigned supreme. His habits of dress and fashion were much imitated, especially in France, where, in a curious development, they became the rage, especially in bohemian quarters. There, dandies sometimes were celebrated in revolutionary terms: self-created men of consciously designed personality, radically breaking with past traditions. With elaborate dress and idle, decadent styles of life, French bohemian dandies sought to convey contempt for and superiority to bourgeois society. In the latter 19th century, this fancy-dress bohemianism was a major influence on the Symbolist movement in French literature.
Baudelaire was deeply interested in dandyism, and memorably wrote that a dandy aspirant must have "no profession other than elegance... no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons... The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror." Other French intellectuals also were interested in the dandies strolling the streets and boulevards of Paris. Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly wrote On Dandyism and George Brummell, an essay devoted, in great measure, to examining the career of Beau Brummell.
Later dandyism
The literary dandy is a familiar figure in the writings, and sometimes the self-presentation, of Oscar Wilde, H.H. Munro (Clovis and Reginald), P.G. Wodehouse (Bertie Wooster) and Ronald Firbank, writers linked by their subversive air.
The poets Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, the American artist James McNeill Whistler, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Max Beerbohm were dandies of the Belle Époque, as was Robert de Montesquiou — Marcel Proust's inspiration for the Baron de Charlus. In Italy, Gabriele d'Annunzio and Carlo Bugatti exemplified the artistic bohemian dandyism of the fin de siecle. Wilde wrote that, "One should either be a work of Art, or wear a work of Art."
At the end of the 19th century, American dandies were called dudes. Evander Berry Wall was nicknamed the "King of the Dudes".
George Walden, in the essay Who's a Dandy?, identifies Noël Coward, Andy Warhol, and Quentin Crisp as modern dandies. The character Psmith in the novels of P. G. Wodehouse is considered a dandy, both physically and intellectually. Agatha Christie's Poirot is said to be a dandy.
The artist Sebastian Horsley described himself as a "dandy in the underworld" in his eponymous autobiography.
In Japan, dandyism has become a fashion subculture with historical roots dating back to the Edo period.
In Spain during the early 19th century a curious phenomenon developed linked to the idea of dandyism. While in England and France individuals from the middle classes adopted aristocratic manners, the Spanish aristocracy adopted the fashions of the lower classes, called majos. They were characterized by their elaborate outfits and sense of style as opposed to the modern Frenchified "afrancesados", as for their cheeky arrogant attitude.
Some famous dandies in later times were amongst other the Duke of Osuna, Mariano Tellez-Girón, artist Salvador Dalí and poet Luís Cernuda.
Later thought
Albert Camus said in L'Homme révolté (1951) that: The dandy creates his own unity by aesthetic means. But it is an aesthetic of negation. "To live and die before a mirror": that according to Baudelaire, was the dandy's slogan. It is indeed a coherent slogan. The dandy is, by occupation, always in opposition. He can only exist by defiance... The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live it.
Jean Baudrillard said that dandyism is "an aesthetic form of nihilism".
Quaintrelle
The female counterpart is a quaintrelle, a woman who emphasizes a life of passion expressed through personal style, leisurely pastimes, charm, and cultivation of life's pleasures.
In the 12th century, cointerrels (male) and cointrelles (female) emerged, based upon coint, a word applied to things skillfully made, later indicating a person of beautiful dress and refined speech. By the 18th century, coint became quaint, indicating elegant speech and beauty. Middle English dictionaries note quaintrelle as a beautifully dressed woman (or overly dressed), but do not include the favorable personality elements of grace and charm. The notion of a quaintrelle sharing the major philosophical components of refinement with dandies is a modern development that returns quaintrelles to their historic roots.
Female dandies did overlap with male dandies for a brief period during the early 19th century when dandy had a derisive definition of "fop" or "over-the-top fellow"; the female equivalents were dandyess or dandizette. Charles Dickens, in All the Year Around (1869) comments, "The dandies and dandizettes of 1819–20 must have been a strange race. "Dandizette" was a term applied to the feminine devotees to dress, and their absurdities were fully equal to those of the dandies." In 1819, Charms of Dandyism, in three volumes, was published by Olivia Moreland, Chief of the Female Dandies; most likely one of many pseudonyms used by Thomas Ashe. Olivia Moreland may have existed, as Ashe did write several novels about living persons. Throughout the novel, dandyism is associated with "living in style". Later, as the word dandy evolved to denote refinement, it became applied solely to men. Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City (2003) notes this evolution in the latter 19th century: "...or dandizette, although the term was increasingly reserved for men."
In popular culture
Jason King
The series featured the further adventures of the title character played by Peter Wyngarde who had first appeared in Department S (1969). In that series he was a dilettante, dandy, and author of a series of adventure novels, working as part of a team of investigators. In Jason King he had left that service to concentrate on writing the adventures of Mark Caine, who closely resembled Jason King in looks, manner, style, and personality. None of the other regular characters from Department S appeared in this series, although Department S itself is occasionally referred to in dialogue.
See also
Adonis
Bishōnen
Dandy and Dedicated Follower of Fashion, songs by The Kinks that parody modern (1960s) dandyism.
Dude
Effeminacy
Flâneur
Fop
Gentleman
Hipster (contemporary subculture)
Incroyables and Merveilleuses
La Sape
Macaroni (fashion)
Metrosexual
Narcissus (mythology)
Personal branding
Preppy
Risqué
Swenkas
Zoot suit (a style of clothing)
References
Further reading
Barbey d'Aurevilly, Jules. Of Dandyism and of George Brummell. Translated by Douglas Ainslie. New York: PAJ Publications, 1988.
Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten. 'Rulefollowing in Dandyism: Style as an Overcoming of Rule and Structure' in The Modern Language Review 90, April 1995, pp. 285–295.
Carassus, Émile. Le Mythe du Dandy 1971.
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. In A Carlyle Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. Edited by G.B. Tennyson. London: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Jesse, Captain William. The Life of Beau Brummell. London: The Navarre Society Limited, 1927.
Lytton, Edward Bulwer, Lord Lytton. Pelham or the Adventures of a Gentleman. Edited by Jerome McGann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.
Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. London: Secker and Warburg, 1960.
Murray, Venetia. An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England. New York: Viking, 1998.
Nicolay, Claire. Origins and Reception of Regency Dandyism: Brummell to Baudelaire. PhD diss., Loyola U of Chicago, 1998.
Prevost, John C., Le Dandysme en France (1817–1839) (Geneva and Paris) 1957.
Nigel Rodgers The Dandy: Peacock or Enigma? (London) 2012
Stanton, Domna. The Aristocrat as Art 1980.
Wharton, Grace and Philip. Wits and Beaux of Society. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1861.
External links
La Loge d'Apollon
"Bohemianism and Counter-Culture": The Dandy
Il Dandy (in Italian)
Dandyism.net
"The Dandy"
Walter Thornbury, Dandysme.eu "London Parks: IV. Hyde Park", Belgravia: A London Magazine 1868
1790s fashion
19th-century fashion
Androgyny
History of clothing (Western fashion)
Human appearance
Middle class culture
Narcissism
Terms for men
Upper class culture
Art Nouveau
Male beauty
Lifestyles
1790s neologisms | [
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In Greek mythology, Dryope (; Ancient Greek: Δρυόπη derived from δρῦς drys, "oak"; dryope "woodpecker") is the name attributed to several distinct figures:
Dryope, daughter of Dryops and mother of Amphissus by Apollo.
Dryope, mother of Tarquitus by Faunus, the god of the woods. Tarquitus was slain by Aeneas.
Dryope, a nymph responsible for kidnapping Hylas, which she did in accord with Hera's will. Her name may have to do with the fact that Hylas was the son of Theiodamas, the king of the Dryopes.
Dryope, a Theban woman of Phoenician origin, mother of Chromis. She joined the Maenads disregarding her pregnancy, and went into labor when she was dragging a sacrificial bull by the horns.
Dryope, a Lemnian.
See also
Dryopia
Notes
References
Gaius Valerius Flaccus, Argonautica translated by Mozley, J H. Loeb Classical Library Volume 286. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1928. Online version at theio.com.
Gaius Valerius Flaccus, Argonauticon. Otto Kramer. Leipzig. Teubner. 1913. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Graves, Robert, (1955) 1960. The Greek Myths. 21.j; 26.5; 56.2; 150.b, 1.
Kerenyi, Karl. 1951. The Gods of the Greeks 141, 173.
Publius Papinius Statius, The Thebaid translated by John Henry Mozley. Loeb Classical Library Volumes. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1928. Online version at the Topos Text Project.
Publius Papinius Statius, The Thebaid. Vol I-II. John Henry Mozley. London: William Heinemann; New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. 1928. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Publius Vergilius Maro, Aeneid. Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910. Online version at the Perseus Digital Library.
Publius Vergilius Maro, Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics. J. B. Greenough. Boston. Ginn & Co. 1900. Latin text available at the Perseus Digital Library.
Smith, William; Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, London (1873). "Dry'ope"
Realencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Band V, Halbband 10, Donatio-Ephoroi (1905), s. 1746
Nymphs
Women in Greek mythology
Theban characters in Greek mythology
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Despina may refer to:
People
Despina Delios, American beauty pageant contestant
Despina Stratigakos (born 1963), Canadian-born architectural historian and academic
Despina Vandi (born 1969), Greek singer
Olivera Despina ( – after 1444), Serbian princess and Ottoman queen consort
Milica Despina of Wallachia ( – 1554), Princess consort of Wallachia
Other uses
Despoina, a figure in Greek mythology
Despina (moth), a genus of moth
Despina (moon), a moon of Neptune
Despina, a character in Mozart's opera Così fan tutte
"Despoina", a song by Nikos Karvelas
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Keno Don Hugo Rosa (), known simply as Don Rosa (born June 29, 1951), is an American comic book writer and illustrator known for his Disney comics stories about Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck, and other characters which Carl Barks created for Disney-licensed comic books, first published in America by Dell Comics. Many of his stories are built on characters and locations created by Carl Barks; among these was his first Duck story, "The Son of the Sun" (1987), which was nominated for a Harvey Award in the "Best Story of the Year" category.
Rosa created about 90 stories between 1987 and 2006. In 1995, his 12-chapter work The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck won the Eisner Award for "Best Serialized Story".
Early life
Don Rosa's grandfather, Gioachino Rosa, lived in Maniago, a town at the foot of the Alps in Northern Italy, in the province of Pordenone. He immigrated to Kentucky, the United States around 1900, established a successful tile and terrazzo company, then returned to Italy to marry and start a family. In 1915 just after the birth of his son Ugo Rosa, Gioachino returned to Kentucky with his wife, two daughters and two sons. Ugo Rosa grew up and was later married in Kentucky. His wife was born to a German American father and a mother with both Scottish and Irish ancestry.
Don Rosa was born Keno Don Hugo Rosa on June 29, 1951 in Louisville, Kentucky. He was named after both his father and grandfather. Gioachino was called "Keno" for short. Don's father was named Ugo Dante Rosa but used the name "Hugo Don" Rosa in America.
Rosa was exposed to comics at a very early age, as his only sibling, an 11-year-older sister, Deanna, was a comics hoarder and had a large number of comics, which made it possible for Rosa to discover comics literally from birth as a storytelling medium by just "reading the pictures" and later also actually read. Rosa also began drawing comics before being able to write. The characters he would typically draw were a large cast of stick figures which he usually featured in comedy/adventures of a Barksian style, since the Carl Barks' stories were the ones Rosa was most fond of. Rosa stuck to drawing simple stick figures for these stories since these were mere illustrations as a means of getting the story told. The story was the pinnacle to him, not the actual drawings. Rosa kept drawing the stick figure stories until he attended High school at St. Xavier High School (Louisville), Kentucky.
Rosa's favorite comic books while growing up were Uncle Scrooge and Little Lulu comics from Dell Comics, as well as his sister's collection of MAD magazines. When Rosa became 12 years old he also discovered and started to enjoy the Superman titles of DC Comics especially from the editor Mort Weisinger's period, drawn mostly by his favorite Superman artists Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger. Shortly after Rosa started to collect Superman comics he also began to trade in the comics he had inherited from his older sister for old Superman comics. The reason behind this action was that a comic book shop in his living area offered to trade two used old comics for one new, a sound deal for the young Rosa. By the 1970s Rosa's comic trading had ended up with him only having two Barks duck comics issues left from the collection his sister originally passed on to him. One of them being Dell Comics' Four Color Comics #386 (also known as Dell Comics' One shot's) issue titled: "Uncle Scrooge in Only a Poor Old Man", which was unknown to him to be the first issue of the new Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge Title. The second issue is his other favorite Barks Comic from his youth, Dell's Donald Duck in "The Golden Helmet". Later when Rosa became a serious collector of all comics of the post-war years, he particularly enjoyed and collected the classic E.C. Comics of the horror and science fiction genres published in the early 1950s, Will Eisner's The Spirit, Walt Kelly's Pogo, and virtually all other comics from 1945 and onward.
Rosa entered the University of Kentucky in 1969. He graduated in 1973 with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering.
Career
In 1969 while still in college, Rosa won an award as "best political cartoonist in the nation in a college paper". "I'm not really an editorial cartoonist. I'd much rather be doing comedy adventure. But I must have done something right, for at one point The Journal of Higher Education named me one of the five or six best college newspaper cartoonists in the nation."
Rosa's first published comic (besides the spot illustrations in his grade school and high school newspapers) was a comic strip featuring his own character, Lancelot Pertwillaby, titled The Pertwillaby Papers. He created the strip in 1971 for The Kentucky Kernel, a college newspaper of the University of Kentucky, which wanted the strip to focus on political satire.
Rosa later switched the strip to comedy-adventure, his favorite style of comics, and drew the story Lost in (an alternative section of) the Andes. (The title is a reference to Lost in the Andes!, a Donald Duck story by Carl Barks, first published in April, 1949.) The so-called Pertwillaby Papers included 127 published episodes by the time Rosa graduated in 1973.
Meanwhile, Rosa participated in contributing art and articles to comic collector fanzines. One contribution was An Index of Uncle Scrooge Comics. According to his introduction: "Scrooge being my favorite character in comic history and Barks my favorite pure cartoonist, I'll try not to get carried away too much."
After attaining his bachelor's degree, Rosa continued to draw comics purely as a hobby, his only income came from working in the Keno Rosa Tile and Terrazzo Company, a company founded by his paternal grandfather.
Rosa authored and illustrated the monthly Information Center column in the fanzine Rocket's Blast Comicollector from 1974 to 1979. This was a question-and-answer feature dealing with readers' queries on all forms of pop entertainment of which Rosa was a student, including comics, TV and movies. He also revived the Pertwillaby Papers in this "RBCC" fanzine as a comic book style story rather than a newspaper comic strip from 1976 to 1978.
By now having become a locally known comics collector and cartoonist, Rosa accepted an offer from the editor of the local newspaper to create a weekly comic strip. This led to his creation of the comic strip character Captain Kentucky for the Saturday edition of the local newspaper Louisville Times. Captain Kentucky was the superhero alter ego of Lancelot Pertwillaby. The pay was $25/week and not worth the 12+ hours each week's strip entailed, but Rosa did it as part of his hobby. Publication started on October 6, 1979. The comic strip ended on August 15, 1982 after the publication of 150 episodes. After three years with Captain Kentucky, Don decided that it was not worth the effort. He retired from cartooning and did not draw a single line for the next four years. Years later, as his fame grew, his non-Disney work was published by the Norwegian publisher Gazette Bok in 2001, in the two hard-cover "Don Rosa Archives" volumes, The Pertwillaby Papers and The Adventures of Captain Kentucky.
Gladstone
In 1986, Rosa discovered a Gladstone Comics comic book. This was the first American comic book that contained Disney characters since Western Publishing's discontinuation of their Whitman Comics in the 1970s. Since early childhood Don Rosa had been fascinated by Carl Barks' stories about Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck. He immediately called the editor, Byron Erickson, and told him that he was the only American who was born to write and draw one Scrooge McDuck adventure. Erickson agreed to let him send a story, and Don Rosa started drawing his first Duck story, "The Son of the Sun," the very next day.
"The Son of the Sun" was a success and Rosa's very first professional comic story was nominated for a Harvey Award "Best Story of the Year". The plot of the story was the same as his earlier story, Lost in (an alternative section of) the Andes. As Don Rosa explained it, he was just "(...) turning that old Pertwillaby Papers adventure back into the story it originally was in my head, starring Scrooge, Donald, the nephews, and Flintheart Glomgold."
Rosa created a few more comics for Gladstone until 1989. He then stopped working for them, because the policies of their licensor, Disney, did not allow for the return of original art for a story to its creators. This was unacceptable to Don Rosa, since a part of his income came from selling the originals, and the original art is the property of the freelance artists, unless otherwise agreed upon. Without that extra money, he could not make a living drawing comic books.
After making some stories for the Dutch publisher Oberon, the publishers of an American Disney children's magazine called DuckTales (based on the animated series of the same name) offered Rosa employment. They even offered him a much higher salary than the one he received at Gladstone. Rosa made just one script (Back in Time for a Dime). The publishers never asked him to make more, and due to problems with receiving the payment, he did not care.
Egmont
After working with the DuckTales magazine, Rosa found out that the Denmark-based International publisher Egmont (at that time called Gutenberghus) was publishing reprints of his stories and wanted more. Rosa joined Egmont in 1990. Two years later, at Rosa's suggestion, Byron Erickson, the former editor at Gladstone also went to work for Egmont and has been working there ever since as an editor and later as a freelancer.
In 1991 Rosa started creating The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, a 12 chapter story about his favorite character. The series was a success, and in 1995 he won an Eisner Award for best continuing series. After the end of the original series, Rosa sometimes produced additional "missing" chapters. Some of the extra chapters were turned down by Egmont, because they were not interested in any more episodes. Fortunately, the French magazine Picsou was eager to publish the stories. From 1999, Rosa started working freelance for Picsou magazine as well. All of these chapters were compiled as The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion.
On strike
During early summer 2002, Rosa suddenly laid down work. As an artist he could not live under the conditions Egmont was offering him, but he did not want to give up making Scrooge McDuck comics either. So, his only choice was to go on hiatus and try to come to an agreement with Egmont. His main issues were that he had no control over his works. Rosa had discovered too often that his stories were printed with incorrect pages of art, improper colors, poor lettering, or pixelated computer conversions of the illustrations. Another matter was that his name was used in promotion of these flawed books and collections of stories without his agreement. Rosa has never, nor has any other artist working on Disney-licensed characters, received royalties for the use or multi-national reprinting of any of his stories worldwide.
Rosa came to an agreement with Egmont in December of the same year, which gave him more control over the stories and the manner in which they were publicized.
Quitting
Rosa's eyesight had been very poor since his childhood. In 2006 and 2007 he began having new difficulties, which made drawing a very slow and tedious process for him, even more so than normally. In March 2008, Rosa suffered a severe retinal detachment and underwent emergency eye surgery that proved to be only partially successful. Further surgery in both eyes made drawing even more difficult. On June 2, 2008, during an interview at the Danish Komiks.dk fair, Rosa stated that he would not do any more comics, citing eye troubles, low pay, and the constant use of his stories in special hardback or album editions by international Disney licensees without any payment of royalties or requests for permission for the use of his name.
In 2012, Rosa wrote an essay about his retirement for Egmont's 9-volume Don Rosa Collection, which was to be published in Finland, Norway, Germany and Sweden. Rosa says that Egmont agreed to publish the essay, but Disney refused to allow them to print it under their license. Rosa arranged with Egmont to post the essay on his own website, and publish a link to the essay in the collection. The essay, posted at career-end.donrosa.de, cites the above reasons, with special emphasis on the "Disney comics system" for paying writers and artists a flat per-page rate, and then allowing publishers around the world to print the stories without payment to the creators.
Rosa is more popular with readers in Europe than in his native United States. According to him, even his next-door neighbors do not know his profession.
Personal life
In 1980, Rosa married Ann Payne. Payne is a retired social studies middle school teacher.
Character
Don Rosa describes himself as an introvert due to being socially isolated as a child. Also, he thinks of himself as a workaholic.
Rosa suffered from depression during the years before he quit. He believes that it was caused by working hard while taking little time for leisure, a result of his self-imposed work regimen due to his enthusiasm for Barks' characters.
Hobbies
Rosa is an avid collector of many things, including comic books, TV Guide, National Geographic, and movie magazines, fanzines, books, White Castle memorabilia, pinball machines and movies and more.
Rosa also grows exotic chili plants and tends nearly 30 acres of a private nature preserve with wildflower fields and numerous forest trails. That and taking semi-annual European signing tours to visit his fellow BarksDucks fans, takes up all of his time. He is also working to complete his collections of All American comic books published between 1945 and 1970.
Work
In Europe, Rosa is recognized as one of the best Disney comics creators. Carl Barks and Rosa are among the few artists who have their name written on the covers of Disney magazines when their stories are published. Rosa enjoys including subtle references to his movies and comic as well as his own previous work. He normally uses about 12 panels per page, instead of the more common eight. He needs to use the extra panels, because his plot ideas usually are too long to be published if he does not condense them.
Rosa has an especially large following in Finland, and in 1999, he created a special 32-page adventure featuring Scrooge McDuck for his Finnish fans called; Sammon Salaisuus (translates to The secret of the Sampo, but it is officially named The Quest for Kalevala in English), based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. The publication of this story created a national sensation in Finland where Donald Duck and the Kalevala are important aspects of culture. It was published in many other countries as well. The cover for the comic book was a spoof of a famous painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
The latest work that Rosa has worked on is a cover for the album Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen from Nightwish who is a fan of Rosa's comics.
Drawing style
With a bachelor of arts degree in civil engineering as his only real drawing education, Rosa has some unusual drawing methods, as he writes: "I suspect nothing I do is done the way anyone else does it."
Because of being self-taught in making comics, Rosa relies mostly on the skills he learned in engineering school, which means using technical pens and templates extensively. He applies templates and other engineering tools to draw what other artists draw freehand. He usually drew just under a page per day, but that depended on the amount of detail he puts in the picture.
Rosa's drawing style is considered much more detailed and "dirtier" than that of most Disney artists, living or dead, and often likened to that of underground artists, and he is frequently compared to Robert Crumb. When Rosa was first told of this similarity, he said that he "drew that bad" long before he discovered underground comics during college. He went on to explain these similarities to underground artists with a similar background of making comics as a hobby:
"I think that both my style and that of Robert Crumb are similar only because we both grew up making comics for our personal enjoyment, without ever taking drawing seriously, and without ever trying to attain a style that would please the average comics publisher. We drew comics for fun!"
Carl Barks
"I want to take everything Barks wrote and forge it into a workable timeline. My original dream was to become the new Carl Barks. I wanted to write, draw, and letter all my own stories. People tell me that my pencils look just like Barks, but my inks are pure Rosa, and I can't letter properly! So I'll have to settle for being Don Rosa." – Don Rosa in 1987
"Don Rosa has often been called the heir of Carl Barks, especially for the way in which he has carried on the Ducks' Family Saga. But I don't think so: in my opinion Don Rosa [...] is an author who has used Barks' characters to make stories that are completely new, 'Donrosian' rather than 'Barksian', just like Barks can't be considered the heir of Al Taliaferro only because he has worked on the Ducks after him." – Carlo Chendi, Italian Disney comics writer
Rosa's idol when it comes to comics is Carl Barks. Rosa builds almost all his stories on characters and locations that Barks invented. Many of Rosa's stories contain references to some fact pointed out in a Barks story. At the request of publishers in response to reader demands, Rosa has even created sequels of old Barks stories. For example, his Return to Plain Awful is a sequel to Lost in the Andes!, where the Ducks return to the same hidden country. To add more to his admiration and consistency to Barks and Barks' stories, Rosa makes all his ducks' stories set in the 1950s. This is because Barks writes most of the stories about Scrooge, Donald and all people of Duckburg in the 1950s (it also conveniently resolves potential continuity problems, such as Scrooge's age). As explained in text pages in the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck and its companion volume, Rosa does intense research of time periods to ensure not only that he gets the physical details right, but also to ensure that all characters could have been present.
Barks either created most of the characters used by Rosa or is credited for greatly developing their personalities. Rosa thus feels obliged to make his stories factually consistent. He has spent a lot of time in making lists of facts and anecdotes pointed out in different stories by his mentor. Especially The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck was based mostly on the earlier works of Barks. Rosa admitted however that a scene of the first chapter was inspired by a story by Tony Strobl.
As most of the characters Rosa uses were created by Barks, and because Rosa considers Scrooge rather than Donald to be the main character of the Duck universe, he does not regard himself as a pure Disney artist, nor the characters really as Disney's. "Rosa prefers to say that the characters he uses are Barks's, Barks having reshaped Donald Duck's personality and creating everything else we know of Duckburg while working as a freelancer in 1942–1967 for an independent licensed publisher (Dell/Western Comics). Barks even claimed to have also created Huey, Dewey and Louie while working as a writer on Donald Duck animated cartoons in 1937." Because of his idolization of Barks, he repeatedly discourages his fans to use an absolutist way of saying his clearly different drawing style would be better than Barks's, and he found that notion confirmed when Barks himself spoke about Rosa's style in a critical tone though it is uncertain whether those comments were Barks's or those of his temporary "business managers" who filtered his communications.
"I usually don't like my stories. I mean I try really hard, but I know I don't draw that well. I know people like it because it's got lots of extra details, but art directors know good artwork, and they know mine is not good artwork. Now, people always say, 'You're being too modest, you're being too modest', and I say, 'What?' They just have to ask me the right question. I know it's not good artwork and I don't know if it's well-drawn, but I know it's entertaining." – Don Rosa, Torino Comics Festival, April 2011
"Don Rosa has a style that is a little bit different from the Disney style. I know that there is a great deal of people that like that style, which is extremely detailed. So there is room in the business for artists like Don Rosa and for others like Van Horn. They have a different style. But if they have a good story and tell it properly, then people are going to like it." – Carl Barks, interview given at Disneyland Paris, July 7, 1994
Beside Rosa's constant effort to remain faithful to the universe Barks created, there is also a number of notable differences between the two artists. The most obvious of these is Rosa's much more detailed drawing style, often with many background gags, which has been credited as being a result of Rosa's love of the Will Elder stories of MAD comics and magazines. While Barks himself discouraged the use of extreme grimacing and gesturing in any other panel for comical or dramatic effect, Rosa's stories are rich with colourful and bizarre facial renditions and physical slapstick. Barks had over 600 Duck stories to his name while Rosa only created 85 until his eye trouble set in, but whereas Barks made many short one and two-pagers centred around a subtle, compact gag, Rosa's oeuvre consists almost exclusively of long adventure stories.
Andrea "Bramo" Bramini identifies the following four differences between Barks's and Rosa's way of storytelling:
Rosa follows a very strict continuity, while Barks paid very little attention to continuity between stories.
Rosa's characterization of Scrooge is that of a much more sentimental person for often relishing his memories of past adventures.
Barks situated his stories in the present day of when he was creating them, and had a penchant for satire. Rosa strictly writes stories taking place in an era at least half a century prior to their creation, and mostly abstains from any political or social commentary.
With his engineering degree, Rosa often goes to great lengths to give scientifically plausible explanations within his stories, whereas Barks never cared much for any detailed scientific rationalizations to his stories.
D.U.C.K.
Most of Rosa's stories have the letters D.U.C.K. hidden within either the first panel or, if Rosa has created the cover art, within the cover art itself. D.U.C.K. is an acronym for "Dedicated to Unca Carl from Keno" (Carl being Carl Barks and Keno being Rosa's given first name). Due to Disney's refusal to allow artists to sign their work, early Rosa dedications to Barks were deleted as they seemed to be a form of a signature. Later Rosa began hiding the dedication acronym from his editors in various and unlikely places within his drawings.
Rosa has drawn covers for reprints of Carl Barks stories and has included his D.U.C.K. dedication within them as well.
Mickeys
Another curiosity is his Hidden Mickeys. Rosa is only interested in creating stories featuring the Duck family, but he often hides small Mickey Mouse heads or figures in the pictures, sometimes in a humiliating or unwanted situation. An example of this is in the story The Terror of the Transvaal where a flat Mickey can be seen under an elephant's foot. This is mostly a gag done for the fun of it. Rosa has admitted to neither liking nor disliking Mickey Mouse, but being indifferent to him.
In the story Attack of the Hideous Space-Varmints, the asteroid with Uncle Scrooge's money bin on it crashes into the Moon along with two missiles, creating a large Mickey Mouse head on the surface. When Huey, Dewey and Louie tell Donald that the missiles hit the "dark" (far) side of the Moon, Donald is thankful no one is going to see it — "For a minute there, I thought we were going to have some legal problems."
In the second Rosa story featuring The Three Caballeros, Donald Duck is shocked by the sight of a capybara standing on its hind legs, with shrubs, leaves and fruit in front of its body, coincidentally making it look like Mickey Mouse. José Carioca and Panchito Pistoles, never having seen Mickey Mouse, ask Donald what is wrong, but Donald replies he is just tired. Later in the same story, the Caballeros free several animals from a poacher. One panel shows the animals fleeing; Mickey can be seen among them.
In The Quest for Kalevala this running gag can be seen on the original, Akseli Gallen-Kallela-inspired cover art. In the original work, Louhi is depicted as bare-chested, but the Disneyfied version has been drawn a top, of fabric patterned with Mickey Mouse heads.
Awards
His work has won Rosa a good deal of recognition in the industry, including nominations for the Comics' Buyer's Guide Award for Favorite Writer in 1997, 1998, and 1999. Heidi MacDonald of Comics Buyer's Guide also mentioned Rosa's 1994 story Guardians of the Lost Library as "possibly the greatest comic book story of all time".
In 1995 Rosa was awarded the Eisner Award for "Best Serialized Story" for The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. In 1997 he won an Eisner for "Best Artist/Writer – Humor Category".
Rosa's story The Black Knight GLORPS Again! was nominated for the 2007 Eisner Award in the category Best Short Story. While The Prisoner of White Agony Creek, Rosa's latest Duck story to-date, was published in 2006, he was also nominated for the 2007 Harvey Awards in five categories (more than any other creator was that year) for his Uncle Scrooge comics: "Best Writer", "Best Artist", "Best Cartoonist", "Best Cover Artist", and "Special Award for Humor in Comics." In 2013 Rosa received the Bill Finger Award which recognizes excellence in comic book writing for writers who have not received their rightful reward and/or recognition.
International "Best Cartoonist of the Year" awards include:
Germany: International Grand Prize 2005 (Frankfurt Book Fair).
Denmark: ORLA Award (DR Television Network).
Sweden:
Svenska Serieakademins (Swedish Comics Academy).
Seriefrämjandets Unghunden (Swedish Comics Association).
Norway: Sproing Award (Norsk Tegneserieforum / Norwegian Comics Forum).
Italy:
Yambo Award (Lucca Comics Festival).
Premio U Giancu Award (U Giancu & Rapallo Comics Festival).
Spain: Haxtur Award (Gijon Comics Festival).
Biographical works
In 1997 the Italian publishing house Editrice ComicArt published a lavish volume about Rosa's biography and work related to the Disney characters. It was titled Don Rosa e il Rinascimento Disneyano ("Don Rosa and the Disneyean Renaissance") and written by famous Disney and Rosa scholars, Alberto Becattini, Leonardo Gori and Francesco Stajano. This work not only discusses all of Rosa's creative life up to 1997, but it also gives a comprehensive biography, lists up to that date his Disney work and presents an extensive interview with Rosa.
In 2009, Danish director Sebastian S. Cordes shot a 75-minute documentary called The Life and Times of Don Rosa, consisting of exclusive interviews with Rosa himself on his farm near Louisville, Kentucky. According to the project's Facebook group, the English-language DVD was released in Denmark on April 16, 2011.
In 2011, Italian Disney fan forum papersera.net published Don Rosa: A Little Something Special (edited by Italian Rosa fan Paolo Castagno), a large folio format, bilingual (Italian and English) book about Rosa's life and work, containing interviews with Rosa and articles by many Italian and European Disney artists, Disney scholars, and established art critics commenting on Rosa's work and career, also including many exclusive, rare Rosa drawings and illustrations. The book was originally made as a gift by papersera.net for Rosa himself upon the occasion of Rosa's April 2011 visit to Turin, Italy.
In 2017 the book, I Still Get Chills!, featuring text by German journalist Alex Jakubowski and photographs by Lois Lammerhuber, was published by Edition Lammerhuber in honour of Rosa's 66th birthday and the 70th anniversary of the first appearance of Scrooge McDuck.
A feature documentary about Don Rosa and Scrooge McDuck by French director Morgann Gicquel titled The Scrooge Mystery was released in December 2017 and was released on DVD and Blu-ray in 2018.
Comic collections
United States
The Don Rosa Classics — The Pertwillaby Papers
The Don Rosa Classics — The Adventures of Captain Kentucky
The Don Rosa Classics — The Early (So-Called) Art of Don Rosa
The Don Rosa Library of Uncle Scrooge Adventures in Color Vols. 1–8
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion
The Barks/Rosa Collection Vols. 1–3
Walt Disney Treasury: Donald Duck Vols. 1–2
Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck: The Don Rosa Library Vols. 1–10
Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: Artist's Edition Vols. 1–2
The Complete Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Vols. 1–2
Other countries
Apart from the Don Rosa Collection in Germany and Don Rosas Samlade/Samlede Verk and Don Rosan kootut in the Nordic nations, the following collections only contain Rosa's work for Disney.
See also
List of Disney comics by Don Rosa
List of people from the Louisville metropolitan area
References
External links
Don Rosa at the Lambiek Comiclopedia
The D.U.C.K.man
Duckhunt
DuckMaster
Different information by Don Rosa
Documentary with and about Don Rosa
Don Rosa's official Facebook page
1951 births
Living people
20th-century American artists
21st-century American artists
20th-century American writers
21st-century American writers
American comics artists
American comics writers
American people of German descent
American people of Irish descent
American people of Italian descent
American people of Scottish descent
Artists from Louisville, Kentucky
Writers from Louisville, Kentucky
University of Kentucky alumni
Disney comics writers
Disney comics artists
Eisner Award winners for Best Writer/Artist
Bill Finger Award winners | [
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In philology, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of texts written in ancient or obscure languages or scripts. Decipherment in cryptography refers to decryption. The term is used sardonically in everyday language to describe attempts to read poor handwriting. In genetics, decipherment is the successful attempt to understand DNA, which is viewed metaphorically as a text containing word-like units. Throughout science the term decipherment is synonymous with the understanding of biological and chemical phenomena.
Ancient languages
In a few cases, a multilingual artifact has been necessary to facilitate decipherment, the Rosetta Stone being the classic example. Statistical techniques provide another pathway to decipherment, as does the analysis of modern languages derived from ancient languages in which undeciphered texts are written. Archaeological and historical information is helpful in verifying hypothesized decipherments.
Decipherers
See also
Deciphered scripts
Cuneiform
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Kharoshthi
Linear B
Mayan
Staveless Runes
Cypriot Syllabary
Undeciphered scripts
Rongorongo
Indus script
Cretan hieroglyphs
Byblos syllabary
Linear Elamite
Cypro-Minoan syllabary
Espanca
Numidian language
Undeciphered texts
Phaistos Disc
Rohonc Codex
Voynich Manuscript
References
Cryptography
Writing systems
Genetics terms
Philology | [
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Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (), is a left-to-right abugida, based on the ancient Brāhmī script, used in the Indian subcontinent. It was developed in ancient India from the 1st to the 4th century CE and was in regular use by the 7th century CE. The Devanagari script, composed of 47 primary characters including 14 vowels and 33 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages.
The orthography of this script reflects the pronunciation of the language. Unlike the Latin alphabet, the script has no concept of letter case. It is written from left to right, has a strong preference for symmetrical rounded shapes within squared outlines, and is recognisable by a horizontal line, known as a shirorekhā, that runs along the top of full letters. In a cursory look, the Devanagari script appears different from other Indic scripts such as Bengali-Assamese, or Gurmukhi, but a closer examination reveals they are very similar except for angles and structural emphasis.
Among the languages using it – as either their only script or one of their scripts – are Marathi, Pāḷi, Sanskrit (the ancient Nagari script for Sanskrit had two additional consonantal characters), Hindi, Boro, Nepali, Sherpa, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Braj Bhasha, Chhattisgarhi, Haryanvi, Magahi, Nagpuri, Rajasthani, Bhili, Dogri, Maithili, Kashmiri, Konkani, Sindhi, Nepal Bhasa, Mundari and Santali. The Devanagari script is closely related to the Nandinagari script commonly found in numerous ancient manuscripts of South India, and it is distantly related to a number of southeast Asian scripts.
Etymology
Devanagari is a compound of "deva" () and "nāgarī" (). Deva means "heavenly or divine" and is also one of the terms for a deity in Hinduism. Nagari comes from (nagaram), which means abode or city. Hence, Devanagari denotes from the abode of divinity or deities.
is the Sanskrit feminine of "relating or belonging to a town or city, urban". It is a phrasing with lipi ("script") as "script relating to a city", or "spoken in city".
Devanagari Script known as 'Script of the divine city' came from Devanagara or the 'city of the god'. And hence interpret it as "[script] of the city of the gods".
The use of the name emerged from the older term . According to Fischer, Nagari emerged in the northwest Indian subcontinent around 633 CE, was fully developed by the 11th-century, and was one of the major scripts used for the Sanskrit literature.
History
Devanagari is part of the Brahmic family of scripts of India, Nepal, Tibet, and Southeast Asia. It is a descendant of the 3rd century BCE Brahmi script, which evolved into the Nagari script which in turn gave birth to Devanagari and Nandinagari. Devanagari has been widely adopted across India and Nepal to write Sanskrit, Marathi, Hindi, Hindi dialects, Konkani, Boro and various Nepalese languages.
Some of the earliest epigraphical evidence attesting to the developing Sanskrit Nagari script in ancient India is from the 1st to 4th century CE inscriptions discovered in Gujarat. Variants of script called Nāgarī, recognisably close to Devanagari, are first attested from the 1st century CE Rudradaman inscriptions in Sanskrit, while the modern standardised form of Devanagari was in use by about 1000 CE. Medieval inscriptions suggest widespread diffusion of the Nagari-related scripts, with biscripts presenting local script along with the adoption of Nagari scripts. For example, the mid 8th-century Pattadakal pillar in Karnataka has text in both Siddha Matrika script, and an early Telugu-Kannada script; while, the Kangra Jawalamukhi inscription in Himachal Pradesh is written in both Sharada and Devanagari scripts.
The Nagari script was in regular use by the 7th century CE, and it was fully developed by about the end of first millennium. The use of Sanskrit in Nagari script in medieval India is attested by numerous pillar and cave temple inscriptions, including the 11th-century Udayagiri inscriptions in Madhya Pradesh, and an inscribed brick found in Uttar Pradesh, dated to be from 1217 CE, which is now held at the British Museum. The script's proto- and related versions have been discovered in ancient relics outside of India, such as in Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Indonesia; while in East Asia, Siddha Matrika script considered as the closest precursor to Nagari was in use by Buddhists. Nagari has been the primus inter pares of the Indic scripts. It has long been used traditionally by religiously educated people in South Asia to record and transmit information, existing throughout the land in parallel with a wide variety of local scripts (such as Modi, Kaithi, and Mahajani) used for administration, commerce, and other daily uses.
Sharada remained in parallel use in Kashmir. An early version of Devanagari is visible in the Kutila inscription of Bareilly dated to Vikram Samvat 1049 (i.e. 992 CE), which demonstrates the emergence of the horizontal bar to group letters belonging to a word. One of the oldest surviving Sanskrit texts from the early post-Maurya period consists of 1,413 Nagari pages of a commentary by Patanjali, with a composition date of about 150 BCE, the surviving copy transcribed about 14th century CE.
East Asia
In the 7th century, under the rule of Songtsen Gampo of the Tibetan Empire, Thonmi Sambhota was sent to Nepal to open marriage negotiations with a Nepali princess and to find a writing system suitable for the Tibetan language. Thus he invented the Tibetan script, based on the Nagari used in Kashmir. He added 6 new characters for sounds that did not exist in Sanskrit.
Other scripts closely related to Nagari such as Siddham Matrka were in use in Indonesia, Vietnam, Japan and other parts of East Asia by between 7th to 10th century.
Most of the southeast Asian scripts have roots in the Dravidian scripts, except for a few found in south-central regions of Java and isolated parts of southeast Asia that resemble Devanagari or its prototype. The Kawi script in particular is similar to the Devanagari in many respects though the morphology of the script has local changes. The earliest inscriptions in the Devanagari-like scripts are from around the 10th-century, with many more between 11th and 14th century. Some of the old-Devanagari inscriptions are found in Hindu temples of Java, such as the Prambanan temple. The Ligor and the Kalasan inscriptions of central Java, dated to the 8th-century, are also in the Nagari script of North India. According to the epigraphist and Asian Studies scholar Lawrence Briggs, these may be related to the 9th-century copper plate inscription of Devapaladeva (Bengal) which is also in early Devanagari script. The term Kawi in Kawi script is a loan word from Kavya (poetry). According to anthropologists and Asian Studies scholars John Norman Miksic and Goh Geok Yian, the 8th-century version of early Nagari or Devanagari script was adopted in Java, Bali (Indonesia), and Khmer (Cambodia) around 8th or 9th-century, as evidenced by the many inscriptions of this period.
Letters
The letter order of Devanagari, like nearly all Brahmic scripts, is based on phonetic principles that consider both the manner and place of articulation of the consonants and vowels they represent. This arrangement is usually referred to as the "garland of letters". The format of Devanagari for Sanskrit serves as the prototype for its application, with minor variations or additions, to other languages.
Vowels
The vowels and their arrangement are:
Arranged with the vowels are two consonantal diacritics, the final nasal anusvāra and the final fricative visarga (called and ). notes of the anusvāra in Sanskrit that "there is some controversy as to whether it represents a homorganic nasal stop [...], a nasalised vowel, a nasalised semivowel, or all these according to context". The visarga represents post-vocalic voiceless glottal fricative , in Sanskrit an allophone of , or less commonly , usually in word-final position. Some traditions of recitation append an echo of the vowel after the breath: . considers the visarga along with letters and for the "largely predictable" velar and palatal nasals to be examples of "phonetic overkill in the system".
Another diacritic is the candrabindu/anunāsika . describes it as a "more emphatic form" of the , "sometimes [...] used to mark a true [vowel] nasalization". In a New Indo-Aryan language such as Hindi the distinction is formal: the indicates vowel nasalisation while the indicates a homorganic nasal preceding another consonant: e.g. "laughter", "the Ganges". When an akṣara has a vowel diacritic above the top line, that leaves no room for the candra ("moon") stroke candrabindu, which is dispensed with in favour of the lone dot: "am", but "are". Some writers and typesetters dispense with the "moon" stroke altogether, using only the dot in all situations.
The avagraha (usually transliterated with an apostrophe) is a Sanskrit punctuation mark for the elision of a vowel in sandhi: ( ← + ) "this one". An original long vowel lost to coalescence is sometimes marked with a double avagraha: ( ← + ) "always, the self". In Hindi, states that its "main function is to show that a vowel is sustained in a cry or a shout": . In Madhyadeshi Languages like Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, etc. which have "quite a number of verbal forms [that] end in that inherent vowel", the avagraha is used to mark the non-elision of word-final inherent a, which otherwise is a modern orthographic convention: "sit" versus
The syllabic consonants (), , () and () are specific to Sanskrit and not included in the of other languages. The sound represented by has also been lost in the modern languages, and its pronunciation now ranges from (Hindi) to (Marathi).
is not an actual phoneme of Sanskrit, but rather a graphic convention included among the vowels in order to maintain the symmetry of short–long pairs of letters.
There are non-regular formations of ru and rū.
There are two more vowels in Marathi as well as Konkani, and , that respectively represent [], similar to the RP English pronunciation of in ‘act’, and [], similar to the RP pronunciation of in ‘cot’. These vowels are sometimes used in Hindi too, as in dôlar, "dollar". IAST transliteration is not defined. In ISO 15919, the transliteration is ê and ô, respectively.
Consonants
The table below shows the consonant letters (in combination with inherent vowel a) and their arrangement. To the right of the Devanagari letter it shows the Latin script transliteration using International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, and the phonetic value (IPA) in Hindi.
Additionally, there is (IPA: or ), the intervocalic lateral flap allophone of the voiced retroflex stop in Vedic Sanskrit, which is a phoneme in languages such as Marathi, Konkani, Garhwali, and Rajasthani.
Beyond the Sanskritic set, new shapes have rarely been formulated. offers the following, "In any case, according to some, all possible sounds had already been described and provided for in this system, as Sanskrit was the original and perfect language. Hence it was difficult to provide for or even to conceive other sounds, unknown to the phoneticians of Sanskrit". Where foreign borrowings and internal developments did inevitably accrue and arise in New Indo-Aryan languages, they have been ignored in writing, or dealt through means such as diacritics and ligatures (ignored in recitation).
The most prolific diacritic has been the subscript dot (nuqtā) . Hindi uses it for the Persian, Arabic and English sounds qa /q/, xa /x/, ġa /ɣ/, za /z/, zha /ʒ/, and fa /f/, and for the allophonic developments /ɽ/ and /ɽʱ/. (Although could also exist, it is not used in Hindi.)
Sindhi's and Saraiki's implosives are accommodated with a line attached below: , , , .
Aspirated sonorants may be represented as conjuncts/ligatures with ha: mha, nha, , vha, lha, , rha.
notes Marwari as using for (while represents ).
For a list of the 297 (33×9) possible Sanskrit consonant-(short) vowel syllables see Āryabhaṭa numeration.
Vowel diacritics
Table: Consonants with vowel diacritics. Vowels in their independent form on the left and in their corresponding dependent form (vowel sign) combined with the consonant '' on the right. '' is without any added vowel sign, where the vowel '' is inherent. ISO 15919 transliteration is on the top two rows.
A vowel combines with a consonant in their diacritic form. For example, the vowel () combines with the consonant () to form the syllabic letter (), with haland (cancel sign) removed and added vowel sign which is indicated by diacritics. The vowel () combines with the consonant () to form () with haland removed. But, the diacritic series of ... () is without any added vowel sign, as the vowel अ (a) is inherent.
Conjunct consonants
As mentioned, successive consonants lacking a vowel in between them may physically join together as a conjunct consonant or ligature. When Devanagari is used for writing languages other than Sanskrit, conjuncts are used mostly with Sanskrit words and loan words. Native words typically use the basic consonant and native speakers know to suppress the vowel when it is conventional to do so. For example, the native Hindi word karnā is written (ka-ra-nā). The government of these clusters ranges from widely to narrowly applicable rules, with special exceptions within. While standardised for the most part, there are certain variations in clustering, of which the Unicode used on this page is just one scheme. The following are a number of rules:
24 out of the 36 consonants contain a vertical right stroke ( kha, gha, ṇa etc.). As first or middle fragments/members of a cluster, they lose that stroke. e.g. + = tva, + = ṇḍha, + = stha. In Unicode, as in Hindi, these consonants without their vertical stems are called half forms. ś(a) appears as a different, simple ribbon-shaped fragment preceding va, na, ca, la, and ra, causing these second members to be shifted down and reduced in size. Thus śva, śna, śca śla, and śra.
r(a) as a first member takes the form of a curved upward dash above the final character or its ā-diacritic. e.g. rva, rvā, rspa, rspā. As a final member with ṭa, ṭha, ḍa, ḍha, ṛa, cha, it is two lines together below the character pointed downwards. Thus ṭra, ṭhra, ḍra, ḍhra, ṛra, chra. Elsewhere as a final member it is a diagonal stroke extending leftwards and down. e.g. . ta is shifted up to make the conjunct tra.
As first members, remaining characters lacking vertical strokes such as d(a) and h(a) may have their second member, reduced in size and lacking its horizontal stroke, placed underneath. k(a), ch(a), and ph(a) shorten their right hooks and join them directly to the following member.
The conjuncts for and are not clearly derived from the letters making up their components. The conjunct for is ( + ) and for it is ( + ).
Accent marks
The pitch accent of Vedic Sanskrit is written with various symbols depending on shakha. In the Rigveda, anudātta is written with a bar below the line (), svarita with a stroke above the line () while udātta is unmarked.
Punctuation
The end of a sentence or half-verse may be marked with the "" symbol (called a daṇḍa, meaning "bar", or called a , meaning "full stop/pause"). The end of a full verse may be marked with a double-daṇḍa, a "" symbol. A comma (called an , meaning "short stop/pause") is used to denote a natural pause in speech. Punctuation marks of Western origin, such as the colon, semi-colon, exclamation mark, dash, and question mark are in use in Devanagari script since at least the 1900s, matching their use in European languages.
Old forms
The following letter variants are also in use, particularly in older texts.
Numerals
Fonts
A variety of Unicode fonts are in use for Devanagari. These include Akshar, Annapurna, Arial, CDAC-Gist Surekh, CDAC-Gist Yogesh, Chandas, Gargi, Gurumaa, Jaipur, Jana, Kalimati, Kanjirowa, Lohit Devanagari, Mangal, Kokila, Raghu, Sanskrit2003, Santipur OT, Siddhanta, and Thyaka.
The form of Devanagari fonts vary with function. According to Harvard College for Sanskrit studies:
The Google Fonts project has a number of Unicode fonts for Devanagari in a variety of typefaces in serif, sans-serif, display and handwriting categories.
Transliteration
There are several methods of Romanisation or transliteration from Devanagari to the Roman script.
Hunterian system
The Hunterian system is the "national system of romanisation in India" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India.
ISO 15919
A standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard of 2001. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic graphemes to the Latin script. The Devanagari-specific portion is nearly identical to the academic standard for Sanskrit, IAST.
IAST
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is the academic standard for the romanisation of Sanskrit. IAST is the de facto standard used in printed publications, like books, magazines, and electronic texts with Unicode fonts. It is based on a standard established by the Congress of Orientalists at Athens in 1912. The ISO 15919 standard of 2001 codified the transliteration convention to include an expanded standard for sister scripts of Devanagari.
The National Library at Kolkata romanisation, intended for the romanisation of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST.
Harvard-Kyoto
Compared to IAST, Harvard-Kyoto looks much simpler. It does not contain all the diacritic marks that IAST contains. It was designed to simplify the task of putting large amount of Sanskrit textual material into machine readable form, and the inventors stated that it reduces the effort needed in transliteration of Sanskrit texts on the keyboard. This makes typing in Harvard-Kyoto much easier than IAST. Harvard-Kyoto uses capital letters that can be difficult to read in the middle of words.
ITRANS
ITRANS is a lossless transliteration scheme of Devanagari into ASCII that is widely used on Usenet. It is an extension of the Harvard-Kyoto scheme. In ITRANS, the word devanāgarī is written "devanaagarii" or "devanAgarI". ITRANS is associated with an application of the same name that enables typesetting in Indic scripts. The user inputs in Roman letters and the ITRANS pre-processor translates the Roman letters into Devanagari (or other Indic languages). The latest version of ITRANS is version 5.30 released in July 2001. It is similar to Velthuis system and was created by Avinash Chopde to help print various Indic scripts with personal computers.
Velthuis
The disadvantage of the above ASCII schemes is case-sensitivity, implying that transliterated names may not be capitalised. This difficulty is avoided with the system developed in 1996 by Frans Velthuis for TeX, loosely based on IAST, in which case is irrelevant.
ALA-LC Romanisation
ALA-LC romanisation is a transliteration scheme approved by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association, and widely used in North American libraries. Transliteration tables are based on languages, so there is a table for Hindi, one for Sanskrit and Prakrit, etc.
WX
WX is a Roman transliteration scheme for Indian languages, widely used among the natural language processing community in India. It originated at IIT Kanpur for computational processing of Indian languages. The salient features of this transliteration scheme are as follows.
Every consonant and every vowel has a single mapping into Roman. Hence it is a prefix code, advantageous from computation point of view.
Lower-case letters are used for unaspirated consonants and short vowels, while capital letters are used for aspirated consonants and long vowels. While the retroflex stops are mapped to 't, T, d, D, N', the dentals are mapped to 'w, W, x, X, n'. Hence the name 'WX', a reminder of this idiosyncratic mapping.
Encodings
ISCII
ISCII is an 8-bit encoding. The lower 128 codepoints are plain ASCII, the upper 128 codepoints are ISCII-specific.
It has been designed for representing not only Devanagari but also various other Indic scripts as well as a Latin-based script with diacritic marks used for transliteration of the Indic scripts.
ISCII has largely been superseded by Unicode, which has, however, attempted to preserve the ISCII layout for its Indic language blocks.
Unicode
The Unicode Standard defines three blocks for Devanagari: Devanagari (U+0900–U+097F), Devanagari Extended (U+A8E0–U+A8FF), and Vedic Extensions (U+1CD0–U+1CFF).
Devanagari keyboard layouts
InScript layout
InScript is the standard keyboard layout for Devanagari as standardized by the Government of India. It is inbuilt in all modern major operating systems. Microsoft Windows supports the InScript layout (using the Mangal font), which can be used to input unicode Devanagari characters. InScript is also available in some touchscreen mobile phones.
Typewriter
This layout was used on manual typewriters when computers were not available or were uncommon. For backward compatibility some typing tools like Indic IME still provide this layout.
Phonetic
[[File:Marathi Wikipedia ULS.webm|thumb|right|One can use ULS (Transliteration) or (Inscript) typing options to search or edit Marathi Wikipedia articles as shown in this video clip; One can click on the cc'' to change the subtitle languages to Marathi, English, Sanskrit, Konkani, Ahirani languages.]]
Such tools work on phonetic transliteration. The user writes in the Latin alphabet and the IME automatically converts it into Devanagari. Some popular phonetic typing tools are Akruti, Baraha IME and Google IME.
The Mac OS X operating system includes two different keyboard layouts for Devanagari: one resembles the INSCRIPT/KDE Linux, while the other is a phonetic layout called "Devanagari QWERTY".
Any one of the Unicode fonts input systems is fine for the Indic language Wikipedia and other wikiprojects, including Hindi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, and Nepali Wikipedia. While some people use InScript, the majority uses either Google phonetic transliteration or the input facility Universal Language Selector provided on Wikipedia. On Indic language wikiprojects, the phonetic facility provided initially was java-based, and was later supported by Narayam extension for phonetic input facility. Currently Indic language Wiki projects are supported by Universal Language Selector (ULS), that offers both phonetic keyboard (Aksharantaran, Marathi: , Hindi: ) and InScript keyboard (Marathi: ).
The Ubuntu Linux operating system supports several keyboard layouts for Devanagari, including Harvard-Kyoto, WX notation, Bolanagari and phonetic. The 'remington' typing method in Ubuntu IBUS is similar to the Krutidev typing method, popular in Rajasthan. The 'itrans' method is useful for those who know English (and the English keyboard) well but are not familiar with typing in Devanagari.
See also
Languages of India
Clip font
Devanagari transliteration
Devanagari Braille
ISCII
Nagari Pracharini Sabha
Nepali
Schwa deletion in Indo-Aryan languages
Shiksha – the Vedic study of sound, focusing on the letters of the Sanskrit alphabet
References
Citations
General sources
.
.
.
.
.
.
Census and catalogues of manuscripts in Devanagari
Thousands of manuscripts of ancient and medieval era Sanskrit texts in Devanagari have been discovered since the 19th century. Major catalogues and census include:
, Medical Hall Press, Princeton University Archive
, Vol 1: Upanishads, Friedrich Otto Schrader (Compiler), University of Michigan Library Archives
A preliminary list of the Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts, Vedas, Sastras, Sutras, Schools of Hindu Philosophies, Arts, Design, Music and other fields, Friedrich Otto Schrader (Compiler), (Devanagiri manuscripts are identified by Character code De.''')
Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts, Part 1: Vedic Manuscripts, Harvard University Archives (mostly Devanagari)
Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts, Part 4: Manuscripts of Hindu schools of Philosophy and Tantra, Harvard University Archives (mostly Devanagari)
Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts, Part 5: Manuscripts of Medicine, Astronomy and Mathematics, Architecture and Technical Science Literature, Julius Eggeling (Compiler), Harvard University Archives (mostly Devanagari)
, Part 6: Poetic, Epic and Purana Literature, Harvard University Archives (mostly Devanagari)
David Pingree (1970–1981), Census of the Exact Sciences in Sanskrit: Volumes 1 through 5, American Philosophical Society, Manuscripts in various Indic scripts including Devanagari
External links
Devnagari Unicode Legacy Font Converters
Digital Nagari fonts, University of Chicago
Devanagari in different fonts, Wazu, Japan (Alternate collection: Luc Devroye's comprehensive Indic Fonts, McGill University)
, Rudradaman's inscription in Sanskrit Nagari script from 1st through 4th century CE (coins and epigraphy), found in Gujarat, India, pages 30–45
Numerals and Text in Devanagari, 9th century temple in Gwalior Madhya Pradesh, India, Current Science
Articles containing video clips
Brahmic scripts
Hindi
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Dynamic HTML, or DHTML, is a term which was used by some browser vendors to describe the combination of HTML, style sheets and client-side scripts (JavaScript, VBScript, or any other supported scripts) that enabled creation of interactive and animated documents. The application of DHTML was introduced by Microsoft with the release of Internet Explorer 4 in 1997.
DHTML allows scripting languages to change variables in a web page's definition language, which in turn affects the look and function of otherwise "static" HTML page content, after the page has been fully loaded and during the viewing process. Thus the dynamic characteristic of DHTML is the way it functions while a page is viewed, not in its ability to generate a unique page with each page load.
By contrast, a dynamic web page is a broader concept, covering any web page generated differently for each user, load occurrence, or specific variable values. This includes pages created by client-side scripting, and ones created by server-side scripting (such as PHP, Python, JSP or ASP.NET) where the web server generates content before sending it to the client.
DHTML is predecessor of Ajax and DHTML pages are still request/reload-based. Under DHTML model, there may not be any interaction between the client and server after the page is loaded; all processing happens on the client side. By contrast, Ajax extends features of DHTML to allow page to initiate network requests (or 'subrequest') to the server even after page load to perform additional actions. For example, if there are multiple tabs on a page, pure DHTML approach would load the contents of all tabs and then dynamically display only the one that is active, while AJAX could load each tab only when it is really needed.
Uses
DHTML allows authors to add effects to their pages that are otherwise difficult to achieve, by changing the Document Object Model (DOM) and page style. The combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript offers ways to:
Animate text and images in their document.
Embed a ticker or other dynamic display that automatically refreshes its content with the latest news, stock quotes, or other data.
Use a form to capture user input, and then process, verify and respond to that data without having to send data back to the server.
Include rollover buttons or drop-down menus.
A less common use is to create browser-based action games. Although a number of games were created using DHTML during the late 1990s and early 2000s, differences between browsers made this difficult: many techniques had to be implemented in code to enable the games to work on multiple platforms. Recently browsers have been converging towards web standards, which has made the design of DHTML games more viable. Those games can be played on all major browsers and they can also be ported to Plasma for KDE, Widgets for macOS and Gadgets for Windows Vista, which are based on DHTML code.
The term "DHTML" has fallen out of use in recent years as it was associated with practices and conventions that tended to not work well between various web browsers.
DHTML support with extensive DOM access was introduced with Internet Explorer 4.0. Although there was a basic dynamic system with Netscape Navigator 4.0, not all HTML elements were represented in the DOM. When DHTML-style techniques became widespread, varying degrees of support among web browsers for the technologies involved made them difficult to develop and debug. Development became easier when Internet Explorer 5.0+, Mozilla Firefox 2.0+, and Opera 7.0+ adopted a shared DOM inherited from ECMAScript.
More recently, JavaScript libraries such as jQuery have abstracted away many of the day-to-day difficulties in cross-browser DOM manipulation.
Structure of a web page
Typically a web page using DHTML is set up in the following way:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>DHTML example</title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="red">
<script>
function init() {
let myObj = document.getElementById("navigation");
// ... manipulate myObj
}
window.onload = init;
</script>
<!--
Often the code is stored in an external file; this is done
by linking the file that contains the JavaScript.
This is helpful when several pages use the same script:
-->
<script src="my-javascript.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
Example: Displaying an additional block of text
The following code illustrates an often-used function. An additional part of a web page will only be displayed if the user requests it.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Using a DOM function</title>
<style>
a { background-color: #eee; }
a:hover { background: #ff0; }
#toggleMe { background: #cfc; display: none; margin: 30px 0; padding: 1em; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Using a DOM function</h1>
<h2><a id="showhide" href="#">Show paragraph</a></h2>
<p id="toggle-me">This is the paragraph that is only displayed on request.</p>
<p>The general flow of the document continues.</p>
<script>
function changeDisplayState(displayElement, textElement) {
if (displayElement.style.display === "none" || displayElement.style.display === "") {
displayElement.style.display = "block";
textElement.innerHTML = "Hide paragraph";
} else {
displayElement.style.display = "none";
textElement.innerHTML = "Show paragraph";
}
}
let displayElement = document.getElementById("toggle-me");
let textElement = document.getElementById("showhide"),
textElement.addEventListener("click", function (e) {
e.preventDefault();
changeDisplayState(displayElement, textElement);
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
Document Object Model
DHTML is not a technology in and of itself; rather, it is the product of three related and complementary technologies: HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and JavaScript. To allow scripts and components to access features of HTML and CSS, the contents of the document are represented as objects in a programming model known as the Document Object Model (DOM).
The DOM API is the foundation of DHTML, providing a structured interface that allows access and manipulation of virtually anything in the document. The HTML elements in the document are available as a hierarchical tree of individual objects, making it possible to examine and modify an element and its attributes by reading and setting properties and by calling methods. The text between elements is also available through DOM properties and methods.
The DOM also provides access to user actions such as pressing a key and clicking the mouse. It is possible to intercept and process these and other events by creating event handler functions and routines. The event handler receives control each time a given event occurs and can carry out any appropriate action, including using the DOM to change the document.
Dynamic styles
Dynamic styles are a key feature of DHTML. By using CSS, one can quickly change the appearance and formatting of elements in a document without adding or removing elements. This helps keep documents small and the scripts that manipulate the document fast.
The object model provides programmatic access to styles. This means you can change inline styles on individual elements and change style rules using simple JavaScript programming.
Inline styles are CSS style assignments that have been applied to an element using the style attribute. You can examine and set these styles by retrieving the style object for an individual element. For example, to highlight the text in a heading when the user moves the mouse pointer over it, you can use the style object to enlarge the font and change its color, as shown in the following simple example.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Dynamic Styles</title>
<style>
ul { display: none; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1 id="first-header">Welcome to Dynamic HTML</h1>
<p><a id="clickable-link" href="#">Dynamic styles are a key feature of DHTML.</a></p>
<ul id="unordered-list">
<li>Change the color, size, and typeface of text</li>
<li>Show and hide text</li>
<li>And much, much more</li>
</ul>
<p>We've only just begun!</p>
<script>
function showMe() {
document.getElementById("first-header").style.color = "#990000";
document.getElementById("unordered-list").style.display = "block";
}
document.getElementById("clickable-link").addEventListener("click", function (e) {
e.preventDefault();
showMe();
});
</script>
</body>
</html>
See also
Dynamic web page
References
External links
QuirksMode, a comprehensive site with test examples and instructions on how to write DHTML code which runs on several browsers.
Introductory DHTML Tutorial
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In molecular biology, DNA replication is the biological process of producing two identical replicas of DNA from one original DNA molecule. DNA replication occurs in all living organisms acting as the most essential part for biological inheritance. This is essential for cell division during growth and repair of damaged tissues, while it also ensures that each of the new cells receives its own copy of the DNA. The cell possesses the distinctive property of division, which makes replication of DNA essential.
DNA is made up of a double helix of two complementary strands. The double helix describes the appearance of a double-stranded DNA which is thus composed of two linear strands that run opposite to each other and twist together to form. During replication, these strands are separated. Each strand of the original DNA molecule then serves as a template for the production of its counterpart, a process referred to as semiconservative replication. As a result of semi-conservative replication, the new helix will be composed of an original DNA strand as well as a newly synthesized strand. Cellular proofreading and error-checking mechanisms ensure near perfect fidelity for DNA replication.
In a cell, DNA replication begins at specific locations, or origins of replication, in the genome which contains the genetic material of an organism. Unwinding of DNA at the origin and synthesis of new strands, accommodated by an enzyme known as helicase, results in replication forks growing bi-directionally from the origin. A number of proteins are associated with the replication fork to help in the initiation and continuation of DNA synthesis. Most prominently, DNA polymerase synthesizes the new strands by adding nucleotides that complement each (template) strand. DNA replication occurs during the S-stage of interphase.
DNA replication (DNA amplification) can also be performed in vitro (artificially, outside a cell). DNA polymerases isolated from cells and artificial DNA primers can be used to start DNA synthesis at known sequences in a template DNA molecule. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR), ligase chain reaction (LCR), and transcription-mediated amplification (TMA) are examples. In March 2021, researchers reported evidence suggesting that a preliminary form of transfer RNA, a necessary component of translation, the biological synthesis of new proteins in accordance with the genetic code, could have been a replicator molecule itself in the very early development of life, or abiogenesis.
DNA structure
DNA exists as a double-stranded structure, with both strands coiled together to form the characteristic double-helix. Each single strand of DNA is a chain of four types of nucleotides. Nucleotides in DNA contain a deoxyribose sugar, a phosphate, and a nucleobase. The four types of nucleotide correspond to the four nucleobases adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, commonly abbreviated as A, C, G and T. Adenine and guanine are purine bases, while cytosine and thymine are pyrimidines. These nucleotides form phosphodiester bonds, creating the phosphate-deoxyribose backbone of the DNA double helix with the nucleobases pointing inward (i.e., toward the opposing strand). Nucleobases are matched between strands through hydrogen bonds to form base pairs. Adenine pairs with thymine (two hydrogen bonds), and guanine pairs with cytosine (three hydrogen bonds).
DNA strands have a directionality, and the different ends of a single strand are called the "3′ (three-prime) end" and the "5′ (five-prime) end". By convention, if the base sequence of a single strand of DNA is given, the left end of the sequence is the 5′ end, while the right end of the sequence is the 3′ end. The strands of the double helix are anti-parallel with one being 5′ to 3′, and the opposite strand 3′ to 5′. These terms refer to the carbon atom in deoxyribose to which the next phosphate in the chain attaches. Directionality has consequences in DNA synthesis, because DNA polymerase can synthesize DNA in only one direction by adding nucleotides to the 3′ end of a DNA strand.
The pairing of complementary bases in DNA (through hydrogen bonding) means that the information contained within each strand is redundant. Phosphodiester (intra-strand) bonds are stronger than hydrogen (inter-strand) bonds. The actual job of the phosphodiester bonds is where in DNA polymers connect the 5' carbon atom of one nucleotide to the 3' carbon atom of another nucleotide, while the hydrogen bonds stabilize DNA double helices across the helix axis but not in the direction of the axis 1. This allows the strands to be separated from one another. The nucleotides on a single strand can therefore be used to reconstruct nucleotides on a newly synthesized partner strand.
DNA polymerase
DNA polymerases are a family of enzymes that carry out all forms of DNA replication. DNA polymerases in general cannot initiate synthesis of new strands, but can only extend an existing DNA or RNA strand paired with a template strand. To begin synthesis, a short fragment of RNA, called a primer, must be created and paired with the template DNA strand.
DNA polymerase adds a new strand of DNA by extending the 3′ end of an existing nucleotide chain, adding new nucleotides matched to the template strand one at a time via the creation of phosphodiester bonds. The energy for this process of DNA polymerization comes from hydrolysis of the high-energy phosphate (phosphoanhydride) bonds between the three phosphates attached to each unincorporated base. Free bases with their attached phosphate groups are called nucleotides; in particular, bases with three attached phosphate groups are called nucleoside triphosphates. When a nucleotide is being added to a growing DNA strand, the formation of a phosphodiester bond between the proximal phosphate of the nucleotide to the growing chain is accompanied by hydrolysis of a high-energy phosphate bond with release of the two distal phosphate groups as a pyrophosphate. Enzymatic hydrolysis of the resulting pyrophosphate into inorganic phosphate consumes a second high-energy phosphate bond and renders the reaction effectively irreversible.
In general, DNA polymerases are highly accurate, with an intrinsic error rate of less than one mistake for every 107 nucleotides added. In addition, some DNA polymerases also have proofreading ability; they can remove nucleotides from the end of a growing strand in order to correct mismatched bases. Finally, post-replication mismatch repair mechanisms monitor the DNA for errors, being capable of distinguishing mismatches in the newly synthesized DNA strand from the original strand sequence. Together, these three discrimination steps enable replication fidelity of less than one mistake for every 109 nucleotides added.
The rate of DNA replication in a living cell was first measured as the rate of phage T4 DNA elongation in phage-infected E. coli. During the period of exponential DNA increase at 37 °C, the rate was 749 nucleotides per second. The mutation rate per base pair per replication during phage T4 DNA synthesis is 1.7 per 108.
Replication process
DNA replication, like all biological polymerization processes, proceeds in three enzymatically catalyzed and coordinated steps: initiation, elongation and termination.
Initiation
For a cell to divide, it must first replicate its DNA. DNA replication is an all-or-none process; once replication begins, it proceeds to completion. Once replication is complete, it does not occur again in the same cell cycle. This is made possible by the division of initiation of the pre-replication complex.
Pre-replication complex
In late mitosis and early G1 phase, a large complex of initiator proteins assembles into the pre-replication complex at particular points in the DNA, known as "origins". In E. coli the primary initiator protein is DnaA; in yeast, this is the origin recognition complex. Sequences used by initiator proteins tend to be "AT-rich" (rich in adenine and thymine bases), because A-T base pairs have two hydrogen bonds (rather than the three formed in a C-G pair) and thus are easier to strand-separate. In eukaryotes, the origin recognition complex catalyzes the assembly of initiator proteins into the pre-replication complex. Cdc6 and Cdt1 then associate with the bound origin recognition complex at the origin in order to form a larger complex necessary to load the Mcm complex onto the DNA. The Mcm complex is the helicase that will unravel the DNA helix at the replication origins and replication forks in eukaryotes. The Mcm complex is recruited at late G1 phase and loaded by the ORC-Cdc6-Cdt1 complex onto the DNA via ATP-dependent protein remodeling. The loading of the Mcm complex onto the origin DNA marks the completion of pre-replication complex formation.
If environmental conditions are right in late G1 phase, the G1 and G1/S cyclin-Cdk complexes are activated, which stimulate expression of genes that encode components of the DNA synthetic machinery. G1/S-Cdk activation also promotes the expression and activation of S-Cdk complexes, which may play a role in activating replication origins depending on species and cell type. Control of these Cdks vary depending cell type and stage of development. This regulation is best understood in budding yeast, where the S cyclins Clb5 and Clb6 are primarily responsible for DNA replication. Clb5,6-Cdk1 complexes directly trigger the activation of replication origins and are therefore required throughout S phase to directly activate each origin.
In a similar manner, Cdc7 is also required through S phase to activate replication origins. Cdc7 is not active throughout the cell cycle, and its activation is strictly timed to avoid premature initiation of DNA replication. In late G1, Cdc7 activity rises abruptly as a result of association with the regulatory subunit Dbf4, which binds Cdc7 directly and promotes its protein kinase activity. Cdc7 has been found to be a rate-limiting regulator of origin activity. Together, the G1/S-Cdks and/or S-Cdks and Cdc7 collaborate to directly activate the replication origins, leading to initiation of DNA synthesis.
Preinitiation complex
In early S phase, S-Cdk and Cdc7 activation lead to the assembly of the preinitiation complex, a massive protein complex formed at the origin. Formation of the preinitiation complex displaces Cdc6 and Cdt1 from the origin replication complex, inactivating and disassembling the pre-replication complex. Loading the preinitiation complex onto the origin activates the Mcm helicase, causing unwinding of the DNA helix. The preinitiation complex also loads α-primase and other DNA polymerases onto the DNA.
After α-primase synthesizes the first primers, the primer-template junctions interact with the clamp loader, which loads the sliding clamp onto the DNA to begin DNA synthesis. The components of the preinitiation complex remain associated with replication forks as they move out from the origin.
Elongation
DNA polymerase has 5′–3′ activity.
All known DNA replication systems require a free 3′ hydroxyl group before synthesis can be initiated (note: the DNA template is read in 3′ to 5′ direction whereas a new strand is synthesized in the 5′ to 3′ direction—this is often confused). Four distinct mechanisms for DNA synthesis are recognized:
All cellular life forms and many DNA viruses, phages and plasmids use a primase to synthesize a short RNA primer with a free 3′ OH group which is subsequently elongated by a DNA polymerase.
The retroelements (including retroviruses) employ a transfer RNA that primes DNA replication by providing a free 3′ OH that is used for elongation by the reverse transcriptase.
In the adenoviruses and the φ29 family of bacteriophages, the 3′ OH group is provided by the side chain of an amino acid of the genome attached protein (the terminal protein) to which nucleotides are added by the DNA polymerase to form a new strand.
In the single stranded DNA viruses—a group that includes the circoviruses, the geminiviruses, the parvoviruses and others—and also the many phages and plasmids that use the rolling circle replication (RCR) mechanism, the RCR endonuclease creates a nick in the genome strand (single stranded viruses) or one of the DNA strands (plasmids). The 5′ end of the nicked strand is transferred to a tyrosine residue on the nuclease and the free 3′ OH group is then used by the DNA polymerase to synthesize the new strand.
The first is the best known of these mechanisms and is used by the cellular organisms. In this mechanism, once the two strands are separated, primase adds RNA primers to the template strands. The leading strand receives one RNA primer while the lagging strand receives several. The leading strand is continuously extended from the primer by a DNA polymerase with high processivity, while the lagging strand is extended discontinuously from each primer forming Okazaki fragments. RNase removes the primer RNA fragments, and a low processivity DNA polymerase distinct from the replicative polymerase enters to fill the gaps. When this is complete, a single nick on the leading strand and several nicks on the lagging strand can be found. Ligase works to fill these nicks in, thus completing the newly replicated DNA molecule.
The primase used in this process differs significantly between bacteria and archaea/eukaryotes. Bacteria use a primase belonging to the DnaG protein superfamily which contains a catalytic domain of the TOPRIM fold type. The TOPRIM fold contains an α/β core with four conserved strands in a Rossmann-like topology. This structure is also found in the catalytic domains of topoisomerase Ia, topoisomerase II, the OLD-family nucleases and DNA repair proteins related to the RecR protein.
The primase used by archaea and eukaryotes, in contrast, contains a highly derived version of the RNA recognition motif (RRM). This primase is structurally similar to many viral RNA-dependent RNA polymerases, reverse transcriptases, cyclic nucleotide generating cyclases and DNA polymerases of the A/B/Y families that are involved in DNA replication and repair. In eukaryotic replication, the primase forms a complex with Pol α.
Multiple DNA polymerases take on different roles in the DNA replication process. In E. coli, DNA Pol III is the polymerase enzyme primarily responsible for DNA replication. It assembles into a replication complex at the replication fork that exhibits extremely high processivity, remaining intact for the entire replication cycle. In contrast, DNA Pol I is the enzyme responsible for replacing RNA primers with DNA. DNA Pol I has a 5′ to 3′ exonuclease activity in addition to its polymerase activity, and uses its exonuclease activity to degrade the RNA primers ahead of it as it extends the DNA strand behind it, in a process called nick translation. Pol I is much less processive than Pol III because its primary function in DNA replication is to create many short DNA regions rather than a few very long regions.
In eukaryotes, the low-processivity enzyme, Pol α, helps to initiate replication because it forms a complex with primase. In eukaryotes, leading strand synthesis is thought to be conducted by Pol ε; however, this view has recently been challenged, suggesting a role for Pol δ. Primer removal is completed Pol δ while repair of DNA during replication is completed by Pol ε.
As DNA synthesis continues, the original DNA strands continue to unwind on each side of the bubble, forming a replication fork with two prongs. In bacteria, which have a single origin of replication on their circular chromosome, this process creates a "theta structure" (resembling the Greek letter theta: θ). In contrast, eukaryotes have longer linear chromosomes and initiate replication at multiple origins within these.
Replication fork
The replication fork is a structure that forms within the long helical DNA during DNA replication. It is created by helicases, which break the hydrogen bonds holding the two DNA strands together in the helix. The resulting structure has two branching "prongs", each one made up of a single strand of DNA. These two strands serve as the template for the leading and lagging strands, which will be created as DNA polymerase matches complementary nucleotides to the templates; the templates may be properly referred to as the leading strand template and the lagging strand template.
DNA is read by DNA polymerase in the 3′ to 5′ direction, meaning the new strand is synthesized in the 5' to 3' direction. Since the leading and lagging strand templates are oriented in opposite directions at the replication fork, a major issue is how to achieve synthesis of new lagging strand DNA, whose direction of synthesis is opposite to the direction of the growing replication fork.
Leading strand
The leading strand is the strand of new DNA which is synthesized in the same direction as the growing replication fork. This sort of DNA replication is continuous.
Lagging strand
The lagging strand is the strand of new DNA whose direction of synthesis is opposite to the direction of the growing replication fork. Because of its orientation, replication of the lagging strand is more complicated as compared to that of the leading strand. As a consequence, the DNA polymerase on this strand is seen to "lag behind" the other strand.
The lagging strand is synthesized in short, separated segments. On the lagging strand template, a primase "reads" the template DNA and initiates synthesis of a short complementary RNA primer. A DNA polymerase extends the primed segments, forming Okazaki fragments. The RNA primers are then removed and replaced with DNA, and the fragments of DNA are joined by DNA ligase.
Dynamics at the replication fork
In all cases the helicase is composed of six polypeptides that wrap around only one strand of the DNA being replicated. The two polymerases are bound to the helicase heximer. In eukaryotes the helicase wraps around the leading strand, and in prokaryotes it wraps around the lagging strand.
As helicase unwinds DNA at the replication fork, the DNA ahead is forced to rotate. This process results in a build-up of twists in the DNA ahead. This build-up forms a torsional resistance that would eventually halt the progress of the replication fork. Topoisomerases are enzymes that temporarily break the strands of DNA, relieving the tension caused by unwinding the two strands of the DNA helix; topoisomerases (including DNA gyrase) achieve this by adding negative supercoils to the DNA helix.
Bare single-stranded DNA tends to fold back on itself forming secondary structures; these structures can interfere with the movement of DNA polymerase. To prevent this, single-strand binding proteins bind to the DNA until a second strand is synthesized, preventing secondary structure formation.
Double-stranded DNA is coiled around histones that play an important role in regulating gene expression so the replicated DNA must be coiled around histones at the same places as the original DNA. To ensure this, histone chaperones disassemble the chromatin before it is replicated and replace the histones in the correct place. Some steps in this reassembly are somewhat speculative.
Clamp proteins form a sliding clamp around DNA, helping the DNA polymerase maintain contact with its template, thereby assisting with processivity. The inner face of the clamp enables DNA to be threaded through it. Once the polymerase reaches the end of the template or detects double-stranded DNA, the sliding clamp undergoes a conformational change that releases the DNA polymerase. Clamp-loading proteins are used to initially load the clamp, recognizing the junction between template and RNA primers.:274-5
DNA replication proteins
At the replication fork, many replication enzymes assemble on the DNA into a complex molecular machine called the replisome. The following is a list of major DNA replication enzymes that participate in the replisome:
Replication machinery
Replication machineries consist of factors involved in DNA replication and appearing on template ssDNAs. Replication machineries include primosotors are replication enzymes; DNA polymerase, DNA helicases, DNA clamps and DNA topoisomerases, and replication proteins; e.g. single-stranded DNA binding proteins (SSB). In the replication machineries these components coordinate. In most of the bacteria, all of the factors involved in DNA replication are located on replication forks and the complexes stay on the forks during DNA replication. These replication machineries are called replisomes or DNA replicase systems. These terms are generic terms for proteins located on replication forks. In eukaryotic and some bacterial cells the replisomes are not formed.
Since replication machineries do not move relatively to template DNAs such as factories, they are called a replication factory. In an alternative figure, DNA factories are similar to projectors and DNAs are like as cinematic films passing constantly into the projectors. In the replication factory model, after both DNA helicases for leading strands and lagging strands are loaded on the template DNAs, the helicases run along the DNAs into each other. The helicases remain associated for the remainder of replication process. Peter Meister et al. observed directly replication sites in budding yeast by monitoring green fluorescent protein (GFP)-tagged DNA polymerases α. They detected DNA replication of pairs of the tagged loci spaced apart symmetrically from a replication origin and found that the distance between the pairs decreased markedly by time. This finding suggests that the mechanism of DNA replication goes with DNA factories. That is, couples of replication factories are loaded on replication origins and the factories associated with each other. Also, template DNAs move into the factories, which bring extrusion of the template ssDNAs and new DNAs. Meister's finding is the first direct evidence of replication factory model. Subsequent research has shown that DNA helicases form dimers in many eukaryotic cells and bacterial replication machineries stay in single intranuclear location during DNA synthesis.
The replication factories perform disentanglement of sister chromatids. The disentanglement is essential for distributing the chromatids into daughter cells after DNA replication. Because sister chromatids after DNA replication hold each other by Cohesin rings, there is the only chance for the disentanglement in DNA replication. Fixing of replication machineries as replication factories can improve the success rate of DNA replication. If replication forks move freely in chromosomes, catenation of nuclei is aggravated and impedes mitotic segregation.
Termination
Eukaryotes initiate DNA replication at multiple points in the chromosome, so replication forks meet and terminate at many points in the chromosome. Because eukaryotes have linear chromosomes, DNA replication is unable to reach the very end of the chromosomes. Due to this problem, DNA is lost in each replication cycle from the end of the chromosome. Telomeres are regions of repetitive DNA close to the ends and help prevent loss of genes due to this shortening. Shortening of the telomeres is a normal process in somatic cells. This shortens the telomeres of the daughter DNA chromosome. As a result, cells can only divide a certain number of times before the DNA loss prevents further division. (This is known as the Hayflick limit.) Within the germ cell line, which passes DNA to the next generation, telomerase extends the repetitive sequences of the telomere region to prevent degradation. Telomerase can become mistakenly active in somatic cells, sometimes leading to cancer formation. Increased telomerase activity is one of the hallmarks of cancer.
Termination requires that the progress of the DNA replication fork must stop or be blocked. Termination at a specific locus, when it occurs, involves the interaction between two components: (1) a termination site sequence in the DNA, and (2) a protein which binds to this sequence to physically stop DNA replication. In various bacterial species, this is named the DNA replication terminus site-binding protein, or Ter protein.
Because bacteria have circular chromosomes, termination of replication occurs when the two replication forks meet each other on the opposite end of the parental chromosome. E. coli regulates this process through the use of termination sequences that, when bound by the Tus protein, enable only one direction of replication fork to pass through. As a result, the replication forks are constrained to always meet within the termination region of the chromosome.
Regulation
Eukaryotes
Within eukaryotes, DNA replication is controlled within the context of the cell cycle. As the cell grows and divides, it progresses through stages in the cell cycle; DNA replication takes place during the S phase (synthesis phase). The progress of the eukaryotic cell through the cycle is controlled by cell cycle checkpoints. Progression through checkpoints is controlled through complex interactions between various proteins, including cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases. Unlike bacteria, eukaryotic DNA replicates in the confines of the nucleus.
The G1/S checkpoint (or restriction checkpoint) regulates whether eukaryotic cells enter the process of DNA replication and subsequent division. Cells that do not proceed through this checkpoint remain in the G0 stage and do not replicate their DNA.
After passing through the G1/S checkpoint, DNA must be replicated only once in each cell cycle. When the Mcm complex moves away from the origin, the pre-replication complex is dismantled. Because a new Mcm complex cannot be loaded at an origin until the pre-replication subunits are reactivated, one origin of replication can not be used twice in the same cell cycle.
Activation of S-Cdks in early S phase promotes the destruction or inhibition of individual pre-replication complex components, preventing immediate reassembly. S and M-Cdks continue to block pre-replication complex assembly even after S phase is complete, ensuring that assembly cannot occur again until all Cdk activity is reduced in late mitosis.
In budding yeast, inhibition of assembly is caused by Cdk-dependent phosphorylation of pre-replication complex components. At the onset of S phase, phosphorylation of Cdc6 by Cdk1 causes the binding of Cdc6 to the SCF ubiquitin protein ligase, which causes proteolytic destruction of Cdc6. Cdk-dependent phosphorylation of Mcm proteins promotes their export out of the nucleus along with Cdt1 during S phase, preventing the loading of new Mcm complexes at origins during a single cell cycle. Cdk phosphorylation of the origin replication complex also inhibits pre-replication complex assembly. The individual presence of any of these three mechanisms is sufficient to inhibit pre-replication complex assembly. However, mutations of all three proteins in the same cell does trigger reinitiation at many origins of replication within one cell cycle.
In animal cells, the protein geminin is a key inhibitor of pre-replication complex assembly. Geminin binds Cdt1, preventing its binding to the origin recognition complex. In G1, levels of geminin are kept low by the APC, which ubiquitinates geminin to target it for degradation. When geminin is destroyed, Cdt1 is released, allowing it to function in pre-replication complex assembly. At the end of G1, the APC is inactivated, allowing geminin to accumulate and bind Cdt1.
Replication of chloroplast and mitochondrial genomes occurs independently of the cell cycle, through the process of D-loop replication.
Replication focus
In vertebrate cells, replication sites concentrate into positions called replication foci. Replication sites can be detected by immunostaining daughter strands and replication enzymes and monitoring GFP-tagged replication factors. By these methods it is found that replication foci of varying size and positions appear in S phase of cell division and their number per nucleus is far smaller than the number of genomic replication forks.
P. Heun et al.,(2001) tracked GFP-tagged replication foci in budding yeast cells and revealed that replication origins move constantly in G1 and S phase and the dynamics decreased significantly in S phase. Traditionally, replication sites were fixed on spatial structure of chromosomes by nuclear matrix or lamins. The Heun's results denied the traditional concepts, budding yeasts do not have lamins, and support that replication origins self-assemble and form replication foci.
By firing of replication origins, controlled spatially and temporally, the formation of replication foci is regulated. D. A. Jackson et al.(1998) revealed that neighboring origins fire simultaneously in mammalian cells. Spatial juxtaposition of replication sites brings clustering of replication forks. The clustering do rescue of stalled replication forks and favors normal progress of replication forks. Progress of replication forks is inhibited by many factors; collision with proteins or with complexes binding strongly on DNA, deficiency of dNTPs, nicks on template DNAs and so on. If replication forks stall and the remaining sequences from the stalled forks are not replicated, the daughter strands have nick obtained un-replicated sites. The un-replicated sites on one parent's strand hold the other strand together but not daughter strands. Therefore, the resulting sister chromatids cannot separate from each other and cannot divide into 2 daughter cells. When neighboring origins fire and a fork from one origin is stalled, fork from other origin access on an opposite direction of the stalled fork and duplicate the un-replicated sites. As other mechanism of the rescue there is application of dormant replication origins that excess origins do not fire in normal DNA replication.
Bacteria
Most bacteria do not go through a well-defined cell cycle but instead continuously copy their DNA; during rapid growth, this can result in the concurrent occurrence of multiple rounds of replication. In E. coli, the best-characterized bacteria, DNA replication is regulated through several mechanisms, including: the hemimethylation and sequestering of the origin sequence, the ratio of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) to adenosine diphosphate (ADP), and the levels of protein DnaA. All these control the binding of initiator proteins to the origin sequences.
Because E. coli methylates GATC DNA sequences, DNA synthesis results in hemimethylated sequences. This hemimethylated DNA is recognized by the protein SeqA, which binds and sequesters the origin sequence; in addition, DnaA (required for initiation of replication) binds less well to hemimethylated DNA. As a result, newly replicated origins are prevented from immediately initiating another round of DNA replication.
ATP builds up when the cell is in a rich medium, triggering DNA replication once the cell has reached a specific size. ATP competes with ADP to bind to DnaA, and the DnaA-ATP complex is able to initiate replication. A certain number of DnaA proteins are also required for DNA replication — each time the origin is copied, the number of binding sites for DnaA doubles, requiring the synthesis of more DnaA to enable another initiation of replication.
In fast-growing bacteria, such as E. coli, chromosome replication takes more time than dividing the cell. The bacteria solve this by initiating a new round of replication before the previous one has been terminated. The new round of replication will form the chromosome of the cell that is born two generations after the dividing cell. This mechanism creates overlapping replication cycles.
Problems with DNA replication
There are many events that contribute to replication stress, including:
Misincorporation of ribonucleotides
Unusual DNA structures
Conflicts between replication and transcription
Insufficiency of essential replication factors
Common fragile sites
Overexpression or constitutive activation of oncogenes
Chromatin inaccessibility
Polymerase chain reaction
Researchers commonly replicate DNA in vitro using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). PCR uses a pair of primers to span a target region in template DNA, and then polymerizes partner strands in each direction from these primers using a thermostable DNA polymerase. Repeating this process through multiple cycles amplifies the targeted DNA region. At the start of each cycle, the mixture of template and primers is heated, separating the newly synthesized molecule and template. Then, as the mixture cools, both of these become templates for annealing of new primers, and the polymerase extends from these. As a result, the number of copies of the target region doubles each round, increasing exponentially.
See also
Life
Cell (biology)
Cell division
Gene
Gene expression
Epigenetics
Genome
Autopoiesis
Chromosome segregation
Data storage device
Self-replication
Hachimoji DNA
Notes
References
DNA replication
Senescence
Cellular processes
Molecular biology
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Digit may refer to:
Mathematics and science
Numerical digit, as used in mathematics or computer science
Hindu-Arabic numerals, the most common modern representation of numerical digits
Digit (anatomy), one of several most distal parts of a limb—fingers, thumbs, and toes on hands and feet
Dit or digit, synonym of Ban (unit), a unit of information entropy
Digit (unit), an ancient measurement unit
Digit, Dian Fossey's favourite gorilla, who was killed by poachers in Rwanda. Fossey subsequently created the Digit Fund to raise money for anti-poaching patrols
Arts and media
Digit (magazine), an Indian information technology magazine
digits dancing, a type of gestural, interpretive, rave and urban street dance
Digit (Cyberchase), a character in the PBS Kids animated series Cyberchase
Digit, an obscure robotic Muppet character
Other uses
Phone number, "digits" in slang
See also
Digital (disambiguation) | [
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Deep Space 1 (DS1) was a NASA technology demonstration spacecraft which flew by an asteroid and a comet. It was part of the New Millennium Program, dedicated to testing advanced technologies.
Launched on 24 October 1998, the Deep Space 1 spacecraft carried out a flyby of asteroid 9969 Braille, which was its primary science target. The mission was extended twice to include an encounter with comet 19P/Borrelly and further engineering testing. Problems during its initial stages and with its star tracker led to repeated changes in mission configuration. While the flyby of the asteroid was only a partial success, the encounter with the comet retrieved valuable information. Three of twelve technologies on board had to work within a few minutes of separation from the carrier rocket for the mission to continue.
The Deep Space series was continued by the Deep Space 2 probes, which were launched in January 1999 piggybacked on the Mars Polar Lander and were intended to strike the surface of Mars (though contact was lost and the mission failed). Deep Space 1 was the first NASA spacecraft to use ion propulsion rather than the traditional chemical-powered rockets.
Technologies
The purpose of Deep Space 1 was technology development and validation for future missions; 12 technologies were tested:
Solar Electric Propulsion
Solar Concentrator Arrays
Multi-functional Structure
Miniature Integrated Camera and Imaging Spectrometer
Ion and Electron Spectrometer
Small Deep Space Transponder
Ka-Band Solid State Power Amplifier
Beacon Monitor Operations
Autonomous Remote Agent
Low Power Electronics
Power Actuation and Switching Module
Autonomous Navigation
Autonav
The Autonav system, developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, takes images of known bright asteroids. The asteroids in the inner Solar System move in relation to other bodies at a noticeable, predictable speed. Thus a spacecraft can determine its relative position by tracking such asteroids across the star background, which appears fixed over such timescales. Two or more asteroids let the spacecraft triangulate its position; two or more positions in time let the spacecraft determine its trajectory. Existing spacecraft are tracked by their interactions with the transmitters of the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN), in effect an inverse GPS. However, DSN tracking requires many skilled operators, and the DSN is overburdened by its use as a communications network. The use of Autonav reduces mission cost and DSN demands.
The Autonav system can also be used in reverse, tracking the position of bodies relative to the spacecraft. This is used to acquire targets for the scientific instruments. The spacecraft is programmed with the target's coarse location. After initial acquisition, Autonav keeps the subject in frame, even commandeering the spacecraft's attitude control. The next spacecraft to use Autonav was Deep Impact.
SCARLET concentrating solar array
Primary power for the mission was produced by a new solar array technology, the Solar Concentrator Array with Refractive Linear Element Technology (SCARLET), which uses linear Fresnel lenses made of silicone to concentrate sunlight onto solar cells. ABLE Engineering developed the concentrator technology and built the solar array for DS1, with Entech Inc, who supplied the Fresnel optics, and the NASA Glenn Research Center. The activity was sponsored by the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. The concentrating lens technology was combined with dual-junction solar cells, which had considerably better performance than the GaAs solar cells that were the state of the art at the time of the mission launch.
The SCARLET arrays generated 2.5 kilowatts at 1 AU, with less size and weight than conventional arrays.
NSTAR ion engine
Although ion engines had been developed at NASA since the late 1950s, with the exception of the SERT missions in the 1960s, the technology had not been demonstrated in flight on United States spacecraft, though hundreds of Hall-effect engines had been used on Soviet and Russian spacecraft. This lack of a performance history in space meant that despite the potential savings in propellant mass, the technology was considered too experimental to be used for high-cost missions. Furthermore, unforeseen side effects of ion propulsion might in some way interfere with typical scientific experiments, such as fields and particle measurements. Therefore, it was a primary mission of the Deep Space 1 demonstration to show long-duration use of an ion thruster on a scientific mission.
The NASA Solar Technology Application Readiness (NSTAR) electrostatic ion thruster, developed at NASA Glenn, achieves a specific impulse of 1000–3000 seconds. This is an order of magnitude higher than traditional space propulsion methods, resulting in a mass savings of approximately half. This leads to much cheaper launch vehicles. Although the engine produces just thrust at maximal power (2,100 W on DS1), the craft achieved high speeds because ion engines thrust continuously for long periods.
The next spacecraft to use NSTAR engines was Dawn, with three redundant units.
Remote Agent
Remote Agent (RAX), remote intelligent self-repair software developed at NASA's Ames Research Center and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was the first artificial-intelligence control system to control a spacecraft without human supervision. Remote Agent successfully demonstrated the ability to plan onboard activities and correctly diagnose and respond to simulated faults in spacecraft components through its built-in REPL environment. Autonomous control will enable future spacecraft to operate at greater distances from Earth and to carry out more sophisticated science-gathering activities in deep space. Components of the Remote Agent software have been used to support other NASA missions. Major components of Remote Agent were a robust planner (EUROPA), a plan-execution system (EXEC) and a model-based diagnostic system (Livingstone). EUROPA was used as a ground-based planner for the Mars Exploration Rovers. EUROPA II was used to support the Phoenix Mars lander and the Mars Science Laboratory. Livingstone2 was flown as an experiment aboard Earth Observing-1 and on an F/A-18 Hornet at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center.
Beacon Monitor
Another method for reducing DSN burdens is the Beacon Monitor experiment. During the long cruise periods of the mission, spacecraft operations are essentially suspended. Instead of data, the craft emits a carrier signal on a predetermined frequency. Without data decoding, the carrier can be detected by much simpler ground antennas and receivers. If the spacecraft detects an anomaly, it changes the carrier between four tones, based on urgency. Ground receivers then signal operators to divert DSN resources. This prevents skilled operators and expensive hardware from babysitting an unburdened mission operating nominally. A similar system was used on the New Horizons Pluto probe to keep costs down during its ten-year cruise from Jupiter to Pluto.
SDST
The Small Deep Space Transponder (SDST) is a compact and lightweight radio-communications system. Aside from using miniaturized components, the SDST is capable of communicating over the Ka band. Because this band is higher in frequency than bands currently in use by deep-space missions, the same amount of data can be sent by smaller equipment in space and on the ground. Conversely, existing DSN antennas can split time among more missions. At the time of launch, the DSN had a small number of Ka receivers installed on an experimental basis; Ka operations and missions are increasing.
The SDST was later used on other space missions such as the Mars Science Laboratory (the Mars rover Curiosity).
PEPE
Once at a target, DS1 senses the particle environment with the PEPE (Plasma Experiment for Planetary Exploration) instrument. This instrument measured the flux of ions and electrons as a function of their energy and direction. The composition of the ions was determined by using a time-of-flight mass spectrometer.
MICAS
The MICAS (Miniature Integrated Camera And Spectrometer) instrument combined visible light imaging with infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopy to determine chemical composition. All channels share a telescope, which uses a silicon carbide mirror.
Both PEPE and MICAS were similar in capabilities to larger instruments or suites of instruments on other spacecraft. They were designed to be smaller and require lower power than those used on previous missions.
Mission overview
Prior to launch, Deep Space 1 was intended to visit comet 76P/West–Kohoutek–Ikemura and asteroid 3352 McAuliffe. Because of the delayed launch, the targets were changed to asteroid 9969 Braille (at the time called 1992 KD) and comet 107P/Wilson–Harrington. It achieved an impaired flyby of Braille and, due to problems with the star tracker, was re-tasked to fly by comet 19P/Borrelly, which was successful. An August 2002 flyby of asteroid as another extended mission was considered, but ultimately was not advanced due to cost concerns. During the mission, high quality infrared spectra of Mars were also taken.
Results and achievements
The ion propulsion engine initially failed after 4.5 minutes of operation. However, it was later restored to action and performed excellently. Early in the mission, material ejected during launch vehicle separation caused the closely spaced ion extraction grids to short-circuit. The contamination was eventually cleared, as the material was eroded by electrical arcing, sublimed by outgassing, or simply allowed to drift out. This was achieved by repeatedly restarting the engine in an engine repair mode, arcing across trapped material.
It was thought that the ion engine exhaust might interfere with other spacecraft systems, such as radio communications or the science instruments. The PEPE detectors had a secondary function to monitor such effects from the engine. No interference was found although the flux of ions from the thruster prevented PEPE from observing ions below approximately 20 eV.
Another failure was the loss of the star tracker. The star tracker determines spacecraft orientation by comparing the star field to its internal charts. The mission was saved when the MICAS camera was reprogrammed to substitute for the star tracker. Although MICAS is more sensitive, its field-of-view is an order of magnitude smaller, creating a greater information processing burden. Ironically, the star tracker was an off-the-shelf component, expected to be highly reliable.
Without a working star tracker, ion thrusting was temporarily suspended. The loss of thrust time forced the cancellation of a flyby past comet 107P/Wilson–Harrington.
The Autonav system required occasional manual corrections. Most problems were in identifying objects that were too dim, or were difficult to identify because of brighter objects causing diffraction spikes and reflections in the camera, causing Autonav to misidentify targets.
The Remote Agent system was presented with three simulated failures on the spacecraft and correctly handled each event.
a failed electronics unit, which Remote Agent fixed by reactivating the unit.
a failed sensor providing false information, which Remote Agent recognized as unreliable and therefore correctly ignored.
an attitude control thruster (a small engine for controlling the spacecraft's orientation) stuck in the "off" position, which Remote Agent detected and compensated for by switching to a mode that did not rely on that thruster.
Overall this constituted a successful demonstration of fully autonomous planning, diagnosis, and recovery.
The MICAS instrument was a design success, but the ultraviolet channel failed due to an electrical fault. Later in the mission, after the star tracker failure, MICAS assumed this duty as well. This caused continual interruptions in its scientific use during the remaining mission, including the Comet Borrelly encounter.
The flyby of the asteroid 9969 Braille was only a partial success. Deep Space 1 was intended to perform the flyby at at only from the asteroid. Due to technical difficulties, including a software crash shortly before approach, the craft instead passed Braille at a distance of . This, plus Braille's lower albedo, meant that the asteroid was not bright enough for the Autonav to focus the camera in the right direction, and the picture shoot was delayed by almost an hour. The resulting pictures were disappointingly indistinct.
However, the flyby of Comet Borrelly was a great success and returned extremely detailed images of the comet's surface. Such images were of higher resolution than the only previous pictures of a comet -- Halley's Comet, taken by the Giotto spacecraft. The PEPE instrument reported that the comet's solar wind interaction was offset from the nucleus. This is believed to be due to emission of jets, which were not distributed evenly across the comet's surface.
Despite having no debris shields, the spacecraft survived the comet passage intact. Once again, the sparse comet jets did not appear to point towards the spacecraft. Deep Space 1 then entered its second extended mission phase, focused on retesting the spacecraft's hardware technologies. The focus of this mission phase was on the ion engine systems. The spacecraft eventually ran out of hydrazine fuel for its attitude control thrusters. The highly efficient ion thruster had a sufficient amount of propellant left to perform attitude control in addition to main propulsion, thus allowing the mission to continue.
During late October and early November 1999, during the spacecraft's post-Braille encounter coast phase, Deep Space 1 observed Mars with its MICAS instrument. Although this was a very distant flyby, the instrument did succeed in taking multiple infrared spectra of the planet.
Current status
Deep Space 1 succeeded in its primary and secondary objectives, returning valuable science data and images. DS1's ion engines were shut down on 18 December 2001 at approximately 20:00:00 UTC, signaling the end of the mission. On-board communications were set to remain in active mode in case the craft should be needed in the future. However, attempts to resume contact in March 2002 were unsuccessful. It remains within the Solar System, in orbit around the Sun.
Statistics
Launch mass:
Dry mass:
Fuel: of hydrazine for attitude control thrusters; of xenon for the NSTAR ion engine
Power: 2,500 watts, of which 2,100 watts powers the ion engine
Prime contractor: Spectrum Astro, later acquired by General Dynamics, and later sold to Orbital Sciences Corporation
Launch vehicle: Boeing Delta II 7326
Launch site: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Space Launch Complex 17A
Total cost:
Development cost:
Personnel:
Project manager: David Lehman
Mission manager: Philip Varghese
Chief mission engineer and deputy mission manager: Marc Rayman
Project scientist: Robert Nelson
See also
Solar panels on spacecraft
List of minor planets and comets visited by spacecraft
References
External links
Deep Space 1 website by NASAJet Propulsion Laboratory
Deep Space 1 website by NASANew Millennium Program
Deep Space 1 by Encyclopedia Astronautica
Deep Space 1 Mission Archive at the NASA Planetary Data System, Small Bodies Node
Spacecraft launched in 1998
Derelict space probes
NASA space probes
New Millennium Program
Spacecraft launched by Delta II rockets
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( , , collectively / "the people of the covenant") or is a historical term for non-Muslims living in an Islamic state with legal protection. The word literally means "protected person", referring to the state's obligation under sharia to protect the individual's life, property, as well as freedom of religion, in exchange for loyalty to the state and payment of the jizya tax, in contrast to the zakat, or obligatory alms, paid by the Muslim subjects. Dhimmi were exempt from certain duties assigned specifically to Muslims if they paid the poll tax (jizya) but were otherwise equal under the laws of property, contract, and obligation.
Historically, dhimmi status was originally applied to Jews, Christians, and Sabians (Mandaeans), who are considered to be "People of the Book" in Islamic theology. This status later also came to be applied to Zoroastrians, Sikhs, Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists.
During the rule of al-Mutawakkil, the tenth Abbasid Caliph, numerous restrictions reinforced the second-class citizen status of dhimmīs and forced their communities into ghettos. For instance, they were required to distinguish themselves from their Muslim neighbors by their dress. They were not permitted to build new churches or synagogues, but only to repair old ones.
Under Sharia, the dhimmi communities were usually governed by their own laws in place of some of the laws applicable to the Muslim community. For example, the Jewish community of Medina was allowed to have its own Halakhic courts, and the Ottoman millet system allowed its various dhimmi communities to rule themselves under separate legal courts. These courts did not cover cases that involved religious groups outside of their own communities, or capital offences. Dhimmi communities were also allowed to engage in certain practices that were usually forbidden for the Muslim community, such as the consumption of alcohol and pork.
Moderate Muslims generally reject the dhimma system as inappropriate for the age of nation-states and democracies. There is a range of opinions among 20th-century and contemporary Islamic theologians about whether the notion of dhimma is appropriate for modern times, and, if so, what form it should take in an Islamic state.
There are differences among the Islamic Madhhabs regarding which non-Muslims can pay jizya and have dhimmi status. The Hanafi and Maliki Madhabs allow non-Muslims in general to have dhimmi status. In contrast, the Shafi'i and Hanbali Madhabs only allow Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians to have dhimmi status, while maintaining all other non-Muslims must either convert to Islam or be fought.
During the period of conquest and empire building, Jews and Christians were required to pay the jizyah while pagans were required to either accept Islam or die.
The "Dhimma contract"
Based on Quranic verses and Islamic traditions, sharia law distinguishes between Muslims, followers of other Abrahamic religions, and Pagans or people belonging to other polytheistic religions. As monotheists, Jews and Christians have traditionally been considered "People of the Book", and afforded a special legal status known as dhimmi derived from a theoretical contract—"dhimma" or "residence in return for taxes". Islamic legal systems based on sharia law incorporated the religious laws and courts of Christians, Jews, and Hindus, as seen in the early caliphate, al-Andalus, Indian subcontinent, and the Ottoman Millet system.
In Yemenite Jewish sources, a treaty was drafted between Muhammad and his Jewish subjects, known as kitāb ḏimmat al-nabi, written in the 17th year of the Hijra (638 CE), which gave express liberty to the Jews living in Arabia to observe the Sabbath and to grow-out their side-locks, but required them to pay the jizya (poll-tax) annually for their protection. Muslim governments in the Indus basin readily extended the dhimmi status to the Hindus and Buddhists of India. Eventually, the largest school of Islamic jurisprudence applied this term to all Non-Muslims living in Muslim lands outside the sacred area surrounding Mecca, Arabia.
In medieval Islamic societies, the qadi (Islamic judge) usually could not interfere in the matters of non-Muslims unless the parties voluntarily chose to be judged according to Islamic law, thus the dhimmi communities living in Islamic states usually had their own laws independent from the sharia law, as with the Jews who would have their own rabbinical courts. These courts did not cover cases that involved other religious groups, or capital offences or threats to public order. By the 18th century, however, dhimmi frequently attended the Ottoman Muslim courts, where cases were taken against them by Muslims, or they took cases against Muslims or other dhimmi. Oaths sworn by dhimmi in these courts were tailored to their beliefs. Non-Muslims were allowed to engage in certain practices (such as the consumption of alcohol and pork) that were usually forbidden by Islamic law, in point of fact, any Muslim who pours away their wine or forcibly appropriates it is liable to pay compensation. Some Islamic theologians held that Zoroastrian "self-marriages", considered incestuous under sharia, should also be tolerated. Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya (1292–1350) opined that most scholars of the Hanbali school held that non-Muslims were entitled to such practices, as long as they were not presented to sharia courts and the religious minorities in question held them to be permissible. This ruling was based on the precedent that there were no records of the Islamic prophet Muhammad forbidding such self-marriages among Zoroastrians, despite coming into contact with Zoroastrians and knowing about this practice. Religious minorities were also free to do as they wished in their own homes, provided they did not publicly engage in illicit sexual activity in ways that could threaten public morals.
There are parallels for this in Roman and Jewish law. According to law professor H. Patrick Glenn of McGill University, "[t]oday it is said that the dhimmi are 'excluded from the specifically Muslim privileges, but on the other hand they are excluded from the specifically Muslim duties' while (and here there are clear parallels with western public and private law treatment of aliens—Fremdenrecht, la condition de estrangers), '[f]or the rest, the Muslim and the dhimmi are equal in practically the whole of the law of property and of contracts and obligations'." Quoting the Qur'anic statement, "Let Christians judge according to what We have revealed in the Gospel", Muhammad Hamidullah writes that Islam decentralized and "communalized" law and justice. However, the classical dhimma contract is no longer enforced. Western influence over the Muslim world has been instrumental in eliminating the restrictions and protections of the dhimma contract.
The Dhimma contract and Sharia law
The dhimma contract is an integral part of traditional Islamic sharia law. From the 9th century AD, the power to interpret and refine law in traditional Islamic societies was in the hands of the scholars (ulama). This separation of powers served to limit the range of actions available to the ruler, who could not easily decree or reinterpret law independently and expect the continued support of the community. Through succeeding centuries and empires, the balance between the ulema and the rulers shifted and reformed, but the balance of power was never decisively changed. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution introduced an era of European world hegemony that included the domination of most of the Muslim lands. At the end of the Second World War, the European powers found themselves too weakened to maintain their empires. The wide variety in forms of government, systems of law, attitudes toward modernity and interpretations of sharia are a result of the ensuing drives for independence and modernity in the Muslim world.
Muslim states, sects, schools of thought and individuals differ as to exactly what sharia law entails. In addition, Muslim states today utilize a spectrum of legal systems. Most states have a mixed system that implements certain aspects of sharia while acknowledging the supremacy of a constitution. A few, such as Turkey, have declared themselves secular. Local and customary laws may take precedence in certain matters, as well. Islamic law is therefore polynormative, and despite several cases of regression in recent years, the trend is towards liberalization. Questions of human rights and the status of minorities cannot be generalized with regards to the Muslim world. They must instead be examined on a case-by-case basis, within specific political and cultural contexts, using perspectives drawn from the historical framework.
The end of the Dhimma contract
The status of the dhimmi "was for long accepted with resignation by the Christians and with gratitude by the Jews" but the rising power of Christendom and the radical ideas of the French Revolution caused a wave of discontent among Christian dhimmis. The continuing and growing pressure from the European powers combined with pressure from Muslim reformers gradually relaxed the inequalities between Muslims and non-Muslims.
On 18 February 1856, the Ottoman Reform Edict of 1856 (Hatt-i Humayan) was issued, building upon the 1839 edict. It came about partly as a result of pressure from and the efforts of the ambassadors of France, Austria and the United Kingdom, whose respective countries were needed as allies in the Crimean War. It again proclaimed the principle of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, and produced many specific reforms to this end. For example, the jizya tax was abolished and non-Muslims were allowed to join the army.
Views of modern Islamic scholars on the status of non-Muslims in an Islamic society
The Iranian Shi'a Muslim Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini indicates in his book Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist that non-Muslims should be required to pay the poll tax, in return for which they would profit from the protection and services of the state; they would, however, be excluded from all participation in the political process. Bernard Lewis remarks about Khomeini that one of his main grievances against the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was that his legislation allowed the theoretical possibility of non-Muslims exercising political or judicial authority over Muslims.
The Egyptian theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, has stated in his Al Jazeera program Sharia and Life, which has an estimated audience of 35 to 60 million viewers: "When we say dhimmis (ahl al-dhimma) it means that [...] they are under the covenant of God and His Messenger and the Muslim community and their responsibility (ḍamān), and it is everyone's duty to protect them, and this is what is intended by the word. At present many of our brethren are offended by the word dhimmis, and I have stated in what I wrote in my books that I don't see anything to prevent contemporary Islamic ijtihad from discarding this word dhimmis and calling them non-Muslim citizens."
Another Egyptian Islamist, Mohammad Salim al-Awa argued the concept of dhimmi must be re-interpreted in the context of Egyptian nationalism. Al-Awa and other Muslim scholars based this on the idea that while the previous dhimma condition result from the Islamic conquest, the modern Egyptian state results from a joint Muslim-Christian campaign to end the British occupation of Egypt. In modern-day Egypt, he argues, the constitution replaces the dhimma contract.
Muhammad Husayn Tabataba'i, a 20th-century Shia scholar writes that dhimmis should be treated "in a good and decent manner". He addresses the argument that good treatment of dhimmis was abrogated by Quranic verse 9:29 by stating that, in the literal sense, this verse is not in conflict with good treatment of dhimmis.
Javed Ahmad Ghamidi, a Pakistani theologian, writes in Mizan that certain directives of the Quran were specific only to Muhammad against peoples of his times, besides other directives, the campaign involved asking the polytheists of Arabia for submission to Islam as a condition for exoneration and the others for jizya and submission to the political authority of the Muslims for exemption from capital punishment and for military protection as the dhimmis of the Muslims. Therefore, after Muhammad and his companions, there is no concept in Islam obliging Muslims to wage war for propagation or implementation of Islam.
The Iranian Shia jurist Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi states in Selection of the Tafsir Nemooneh that the main philosophy of jizya is that it is only a financial aid to those Muslims who are in the charge of safeguarding the security of the state and dhimmis' lives and properties on their behalf.
Prominent Islamic thinkers like Fahmi Huwaidi and Tarek El-Bishry have based their justification for full citizenship of non-Muslims in an Islamic states on the precedent set by Muhammad in the Constitution of Medina. They argue that in this charter the People of Book, have the status of citizens (muwatinun) rather than dhimmis, sharing equal rights and duties with Muslims.
Legal scholar L. Ali Khan also points to the Constitution of Medina as a way forward for Islamic states in his 2006 paper titled The Medina Constitution. He suggests this ancient document, which governed the status of religions and races in the first Islamic state, in which Jewish tribes are "placed on an equal footing with [...] Muslims" and granted "the freedom of religion," can serve as a basis for the protection of minority rights, equality, and religious freedom in the modern Islamic state.
Tariq Ramadan, Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Oxford, advocates the inclusion of academic disciplines and Islamic society, along with traditional Islamic scholars, in an effort to reform Islamic law and address modern conditions. He speaks of remaining faithful to the higher objectives of sharia law. He posits universal rights of dignity, welfare, freedom, equality and justice in a religiously and culturally pluralistic Islamic (or other) society, and proposes a dialogue regarding the modern term "citizenship," although it has no clear precedent in classical fiqh. He further includes the terms "non-citizen", "foreigner", "resident" and "immigrant" in this dialogue, and challenges not only Islam, but modern civilization as a whole, to come to terms with these concepts in a meaningful way with regards to problems of racism, discrimination and oppression.
Dhimmi communities
Jews and Christians living under early Muslim rule were considered dhimmis, a status that was later also extended to other non-Muslims like Hindus and Buddhists. They were allowed to "freely practice their religion, and to enjoy a large measure of communal autonomy" and guaranteed their personal safety and security of property, in return for paying tribute and acknowledging Muslim rule. Islamic law and custom prohibited the enslavement of free dhimmis within lands under Islamic rule. Taxation from the perspective of dhimmis who came under the Muslim rule, was "a concrete continuation of the taxes paid to earlier regimes" (but much lower under the Muslim rule). They were also exempted from the zakat tax paid by Muslims. The dhimmi communities living in Islamic states had their own laws independent from the Sharia law, such as the Jews who had their own Halakhic courts. The dhimmi communities had their own leaders, courts, personal and religious laws, and "generally speaking, Muslim tolerance of unbelievers was far better than anything available in Christendom, until the rise of secularism in the 17th century". "Muslims guaranteed freedom of worship and livelihood, provided that they remained loyal to the Muslim state and paid a poll tax". "Muslim governments appointed Christian and Jewish professionals to their bureaucracies", and thus, Christians and Jews "contributed to the making of the Islamic civilization".
However, dhimmis faced social and symbolic restrictions, and a pattern of stricter, then more lax, enforcement developed over time. Marshall Hodgson, a historian of Islam, writes that during the era of the High Caliphate (7th–13th Centuries), zealous Shariah-minded Muslims gladly elaborated their code of symbolic restrictions on the dhimmis.
From an Islamic legal perspective, the pledge of protection granted dhimmis the freedom to practice their religion and spared them forced conversions. The dhimmis also served a variety of useful purposes, mostly economic, which was another point of concern to jurists. Religious minorities were free to do whatever they wished in their own homes, but could not "publicly engage in illicit sex in ways that threaten public morals". In some cases, religious practices that Muslims found repugnant were allowed. One example was the Zoroastrian practice of incestuous "self-marriage" where a man could marry his mother, sister or daughter. According to the famous Islamic legal scholar Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyya (1292–1350), non-Muslims had the right to engage in such religious practices even if it offended Muslims, under the conditions that such cases not be presented to Islamic Sharia courts and that these religious minorities believed that the practice in question is permissible according to their religion. This ruling was based on the precedent that Muhammad did not forbid such self-marriages among Zoroastrians despite coming in contact with them and having knowledge of their practices.
The Arabs generally established garrisons outside towns in the conquered territories, and had little interaction with the local dhimmi populations for purposes other than the collection of taxes. The conquered Christian, Jewish, Mazdean and Buddhist communities were otherwise left to lead their lives as before.
Christians
According to historians Lewis and Stillman, local Christians in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt were non-Chalcedonians and many may have felt better off under early Muslim rule than under that of the Byzantine Orthodox of Constantinople. In 1095, Pope Urban II urged western European Christians to come to the aid of the Christians of Palestine. The subsequent Crusades brought Roman Catholic Christians into contact with Orthodox Christians whose beliefs they discovered to differ from their own perhaps more than they had realized, and whose position under the rule of the Muslim Fatimid Caliphate was less uncomfortable than had been supposed. Consequently, the Eastern Christians provided perhaps less support to the Crusaders than had been expected. When the Arab East came under Ottoman rule in the 16th century, Christian populations and fortunes rebounded significantly. The Ottomans had long experience dealing with Christian and Jewish minorities, and were more tolerant towards religious minorities than the former Muslim rulers, the Mamluks of Egypt.
However, Christians living under Islamic rule have suffered certain legal disadvantages and at times persecution. In the Ottoman Empire, in accordance with the dhimmi system implemented in Muslim countries, they, like all other Christians and also Jews, were accorded certain freedoms. The dhimmi system in the Ottoman Empire was largely based upon the Pact of Umar. The client status established the rights of the non-Muslims to property, livelihood and freedom of worship but they were in essence treated as second-class citizens in the empire and referred to in Turkish as gavours, a pejorative word meaning "infidel" or "unbeliever". The clause of the Pact of Umar which prohibited non-Muslims from building new places of worship was historically imposed on some communities of the Ottoman Empire and ignored in other cases, at discretion of the local authorities. Although there were no laws mandating religious ghettos, this led to non-Muslim communities being clustered around existing houses of worship.
In addition to other legal limitations, Christians were not considered equals to Muslims and several prohibitions were placed on them. Their testimony against Muslims by Christians and Jews was inadmissible in courts of law wherein a Muslim could be punished; this meant that their testimony could only be considered in commercial cases. They were forbidden to carry weapons or ride atop horses and camels. Their houses could not overlook those of Muslims; and their religious practices were severely circumscribed (e.g., the ringing of church bells was strictly forbidden).
Jews
Because the early Islamic conquests initially preserved much of the existing administrative machinery and culture, in many territories they amounted to little more than a change of rulers for the subject populations, which "brought peace to peoples demoralized and disaffected by the casualties and heavy taxation that resulted from the years of Byzantine-Persian warfare".
María Rosa Menocal, argues that the Jewish dhimmis living under the caliphate, while allowed fewer rights than Muslims, were still better off than in the Christian parts of Europe. Jews from other parts of Europe made their way to al-Andalus, where in parallel to Christian sects regarded as heretical by Catholic Europe, they were not just tolerated, but where opportunities to practice faith and trade were open without restriction save for the prohibitions on proselytization.
Bernard Lewis states:
Professor of Jewish medieval history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Hayim Hillel Ben-Sasson, notes:
According to the French historian Claude Cahen, Islam has "shown more toleration than Europe towards the Jews who remained in Muslim lands."
Comparing the treatment of Jews in the medieval Islamic world and medieval Christian Europe, Mark R. Cohen notes that, in contrast to Jews in Christian Europe, the "Jews in Islam were well integrated into the economic life of the larger society", and that they were allowed to practice their religion more freely than they could do in Christian Europe.
According to the scholar Mordechai Zaken, tribal chieftains (also known as aghas) in tribal Muslim societies such as the Kurdish society in Kurdistan would tax their Jewish subjects. The Jews were in fact civilians protected by their chieftains in and around their communities; in return they paid part of their harvest as dues, and contributed their skills and services to their patron chieftain.
Hindus and Buddhists
By the 10th century, the Turks of Central Asia had invaded the Indic plains, and brought Islam to Northwestern parts of India. At the end of the 12th century, the Muslims advanced quickly into the Ganges Plain. In one decade, a Muslim army led by Turkic slaves consolidated resistance around Lahore and brought northern India, as far as Bengal, under Muslim rule. From these Turkic slaves would come sultans, including the founder of the sultanate of Delhi. By the 15th century, major parts of Northern India was ruled by Muslim rulers, mostly descended from invaders. In the 16th century, India came under the influence of the Mughals. Babur, the first ruler of the Mughal empire, established a foothold in the north which paved the way for further expansion by his successors. Although the Mughal emperor Akbar has been described as a universalist, most Mughal emperors were oppressive of native Hindu, Buddhist and later Sikh populations. Aurangzeb specifically was inclined towards a highly fundamentalist approach.
Restrictions
There were a number of restrictions on dhimmis. In a modern sense the dhimmis would be described as second-class citizens.
Although dhimmis were allowed to perform their religious rituals, they were obliged to do so in a manner not conspicuous to Muslims. Loud prayers were forbidden, as were the ringing of church bells and the blowing of the shofar. They were also not allowed to build or repair churches and synagogues without Muslim consent. Moreover, dhimmis were not allowed to seek converts among Muslims. In the Mamluk Egypt, where non-Mamluk Muslims were not allowed to ride horses and camels, dhimmis were prohibited even from riding donkeys inside cities. Sometimes, Muslim rulers issued regulations requiring dhimmis to attach distinctive signs to their houses.
Most of the restrictions were social and symbolic in nature, and a pattern of stricter, then more lax, enforcement developed over time. The major financial disabilities of the dhimmi were the jizya poll tax and the fact dhimmis and Muslims could not inherit from each other. That would create an incentive to convert if someone from the family had already converted. Ira M. Lapidus states that the "payment of the poll tax seems to have been regular, but other obligations were inconsistently enforced and did not prevent many non-Muslims from being important political, business, and scholarly figures. In the late ninth and early tenth centuries, Jewish bankers and financiers were important at the 'Abbasid court." The jurists and scholars of Islamic sharia law called for humane treatment of the dhimmis.
A Muslim man may marry a Jewish or Christian dhimmī woman, who may keep her own religion, but a Muslim woman cannot marry a dhimmī man unless he converts to Islam. Dhimmīs are prohibited from converting Muslims under severe penalties, while Muslims are encouraged to convert dhimmīs.
Jizya tax
Payment of the jizya obligated Muslim authorities to protect dhimmis in civil and military matters. Sura 9 (At-Tawba), verse 29 stipulates that jizya be exacted from non-Muslims as a condition required for jihad to cease. Islamic jurists required adult, free, healthy males among the dhimma community to pay the jizya, while exempting women, children, the elderly, slaves, those affected by mental or physical handicaps, and travelers who did not settle in Muslim lands. According to Abu Yusuf dhimmi should be imprisoned until they pay the jizya in full. Other jurists specified that dhimmis who don't pay jizya should have their heads shaved and made to wear a dress distinctive from those dhimmis who paid the jizya and Muslims.
Lewis states there are varying opinions among scholars as to how much of a burden jizya was. According to Norman Stillman: "jizya and kharaj were a "crushing burden for the non-Muslim peasantry who eked out a bare living in a subsistence economy." Both agree that ultimately, the additional taxation on non-Muslims was a critical factor that drove many dhimmis to leave their religion and accept Islam. However, in some regions the jizya on populations was significantly lower than the zakat, meaning dhimmi populations maintained an economic advantage. According to Cohen, taxation, from the perspective of dhimmis who came under Muslim rule, was "a concrete continuation of the taxes paid to earlier regimes". Lewis observes that the change from Byzantine to Arab rule was welcomed by many among the dhimmis who found the new yoke far lighter than the old, both in taxation and in other matters, and that some, even among the Christians of Syria and Egypt, preferred the rule of Islam to that of Byzantines. Montgomery Watt states, "the Christians were probably better off as dhimmis under Muslim-Arab rulers than they had been under the Byzantine Greeks." In some places, for example Egypt, the jizya was a tax incentive for Christians to convert to Islam.
Some scholars have tried compute the relative taxation on Muslims vs non-Muslims in the early Abbasid period. According to one estimate, Muslims had an average tax rate of 17-20 dirhams per person, which rose to 30 dirhams per person when in kind levies are included. Non-Muslims paid either 12, 24 or 48 dirhams per person, depending on their taxation category, though most probably paid 12.
The importance of dhimmis as a source of revenue for the Rashidun Caliphate is illustrated in a letter ascribed to Umar I and cited by Abu Yusuf: "if we take dhimmis and share them out, what will be left for the Muslims who come after us? By God, Muslims would not find a man to talk to and profit from his labors."
The early Islamic scholars took a relatively humane and practical attitude towards the collection of jizya, compared to the 11th century commentators writing when Islam was under threat both at home and abroad.
The jurist Abu Yusuf, the chief judge of the caliph Harun al-Rashid, rules as follows regarding the manner of collecting the jizya
In the border provinces, dhimmis were sometimes recruited for military operations. In such cases, they were exempted from jizya for the year of service.
Administration of law
Religious pluralism existed in medieval Islamic law and ethics. The religious laws and courts of other religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism, were usually accommodated within the Islamic legal framework, as exemplified in the Caliphate, Al-Andalus, Ottoman Empire and Indian subcontinent. In medieval Islamic societies, the qadi (Islamic judge) usually could not interfere in the matters of non-Muslims unless the parties voluntarily chose to be judged according to Islamic law. The dhimmi communities living in Islamic states usually had their own laws independent from the Sharia law, such as the Jews who had their own Halakha courts.
Dhimmis were allowed to operate their own courts following their own legal systems. However, dhimmis frequently attended the Muslim courts in order to record property and business transactions within their own communities. Cases were taken out against Muslims, against other dhimmis and even against members of the dhimmi's own family. Dhimmis often took cases relating to marriage, divorce or inheritance to the Muslim courts so these cases would be decided under sharia law. Oaths sworn by dhimmis in the Muslim courts were sometimes the same as the oaths taken by Muslims, sometimes tailored to the dhimmis' beliefs.
Muslim men could generally marry dhimmi women who are considered People of the Book, however Islamic jurists rejected the possibility any non-Muslim man might marry a Muslim woman. Bernard Lewis notes that "similar position existed under the laws of Byzantine Empire, according to which a Christian could marry a Jewish woman, but a Jew could not marry a Christian woman under pain of death".
Relevant texts
Quranic verses as a basis for Islamic policies toward dhimmis
Lewis states
The phrase "Let there be no compulsion in religion: ...", from has sometimes been interpreted in the Islamic legal and theological traditions to mean followers of other religions should not be forced to adopt Islam
The phrase "Unto you your religion, and unto me my religion.", from has been used as a "proof-text for pluralism and coexistence".
has served to justify the tolerated position accorded to the followers of Christianity, Judaism, and Sabianism (Mandaeism) under Muslim rule.
Hadith
A hadith by Muhammad, "Whoever killed a Mu'ahid (a person who is granted the pledge of protection by the Muslims) shall not smell the fragrance of Paradise though its fragrance can be smelt at a distance of forty years (of traveling).", is considered to be a foundation for the protection of the People of the Book in Muslim ruled countries. Anwar Shah Kashmiri writes in his commentary on Sahih al-Bukhari Fayd al-Bari on this hadith: "You know the gravity of sin for killing a Muslim, for its odiousness has reached the point of disbelief, and it necessitates that [the killer abides in Hell] forever. As for killing a non-Muslim citizen [mu'ahid], it is similarly no small matter, for the one who does it will not smell the fragrance of Paradise."
A similar hadith in regard to the status of the dhimmis: "Whoever wrongs one with whom a compact (treaty) has been made [i.e., a dhimmi] and lays on him a burden beyond his strength, I will be his accuser."
Constitution of Medina
The Constitution of Medina, a formal agreement between Muhammad and all the significant tribes and families of Medina (including Muslims, Jews and pagans), declared that non-Muslims in the Ummah had the following rights:
The security (dhimma) of God is equal for all groups,
Non-Muslim members have equal political and cultural rights as Muslims. They will have autonomy and freedom of religion.
Non-Muslims will take up arms against the enemy of the Ummah and share the cost of war. There is to be no treachery between the two.
Non-Muslims will not be obliged to take part in religious wars of the Muslims.
Khaybar agreement
A precedent for the dhimma contract was established with the agreement between Muhammad and the Jews after the Battle of Khaybar, an oasis near Medina. Khaybar was the first territory attacked and conquered by Muslims. When the Jews of Khaybar surrendered to Muhammad after a siege, Muhammad allowed them to remain in Khaybar in return for handing over to the Muslims one half their annual produce.
Pact of Umar
The Pact of Umar, traditionally believed to be between caliph Umar and the conquered Jerusalem Christians in the seventh century, was another source of regulations pertaining to dhimmis. However, Western orientalists doubt the authenticity of the pact, arguing it is usually the victors and not the vanquished who impose rather than propose, the terms of peace, and that it is highly unlikely that the people who spoke no Arabic and knew nothing of Islam could draft such a document. Academic historians believe the Pact of Umar in the form it is known today was a product of later jurists who attributed it to Umar in order to lend greater authority to their own opinions. The similarities between the Pact of Umar and the Theodosian and Justinian Codes of the Eastern Roman Empire suggest that perhaps much of the Pact of Umar was borrowed from these earlier codes by later Islamic jurists. At least some of the clauses of the pact mirror the measures first introduced by the Umayyad caliph Umar II or by the early Abbasid caliphs.
Cultural interactions and cultural differences
During the Middle Ages, local associations known as futuwwa clubs developed across the Islamic lands. There were usually several futuwwah in each town. These clubs catered to varying interests, primarily sports, and might involve distinctive manners of dress and custom. They were known for their hospitality, idealism and loyalty to the group. They often had a militaristic aspect, purportedly for the mutual protection of the membership. These clubs commonly crossed social strata, including among their membership local notables, dhimmi and slaves – to the exclusion of those associated with the local ruler, or amir.
Muslims and Jews were sometimes partners in trade, with the Muslim taking days off on Fridays and Jews taking off on Saturdays.
Andrew Wheatcroft describes how some social customs such as different conceptions of dirt and cleanliness made it difficult for the religious communities to live close to each other, either under Muslim or under Christian rule.
In modern times
The dhimma and the jizya poll tax are no longer imposed in Muslim majority countries. In the 21st century, jizya is widely regarded as being at odds with contemporary secular conceptions of citizens' civil rights and equality before the law, although there have been occasional reports of religious minorities in conflict zones and areas subject to political instability being forced to pay jizya.
In 2009 it was claimed that a group of militants that referred to themselves as the Taliban imposed the jizya on Pakistan's minority Sikh community after occupying some of their homes and kidnapping a Sikh leader.
As late as 2013, in Egypt jizya was reportedly being imposed by the Muslim Brotherhood on 15,000 Christian Copts of Dalga Village.
In February 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) announced that it intended to extract jizya from Christians in the city of Raqqa, Syria, which it controlled at the time. Christians who refused to accept the dhimma contract and pay the tax were to have to either convert to Islam, leave or be executed. Wealthy Christians would have to pay half an ounce of gold, the equivalent of $664 twice a year; middle-class Christians were to have to pay half that amount and poorer ones were to be charged one-fourth that amount. In June, 2014 the Institute for the Study of War reported that ISIL claims to have collected jizya and fay. On 18 July 2014 ISIL ordered the Christians in Mosul to accept the dhimma contract and pay the jizya or convert to Islam. If they refused to accept either of the options they would be killed.
See also
Notes
References
Bosworth, C. E. (1982). The Concept of Dhimma in Early Islam In Benjamin Braude and B. Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society 2 vols., New York: Holmes & Meier Publishing.
Further reading
Nabil Luka Babawi: Les droits et les devoirs des chrétiens dans l'état islamique et leurs conséquences sur la sécurité nationale, thèse de doctorat.
Mark. R. Cohen: Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, 1994.
Maribel Fierro and John Tolan, eds, The legal status of ḏimmī-s in the Islamic West (second/eighth-ninth/fifteenth centuries) (Turnhoult, 2013).
Nicola Melis, "Il concetto di ğihād", in P. Manduchi (a cura di), Dalla penna al mouse. Gli strumenti di diffusione del concetto di ğihād, Angeli, Milano 2006, pp. 23–54.
Nicola Melis, "Lo statuto giuridico degli ebrei dell'Impero Ottomano", in M. Contu – N. Melis – G. Pinna (a cura di), Ebraismo e rapporti con le culture del Mediterraneo nei secoli XVIII–XX, Giuntina, Firenze 2003.
Nicola Melis, Trattato sulla guerra. Il Kitāb al-ğihād di Molla Hüsrev, Aipsa, Cagliari 2002.
Mohammad Amin Al-Midani: "La question des minorités et le statut des non-musulmans en Islam." In: La religion est-elle un obstacle à l'application des droits de l'homme?. colloque tenu les 10–11 décembre 2004 à Lyon.
M. Levy-Rubin: "Shurut 'Umar and its alternatives: the legal debate on the status of the dhimmis." In: Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam. 30/2005
Pessah Shinar: "Some remarks regarding the colours of male Jewish dress in North Africa and their Arabic-Islamic context." In: Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam. 24/2000, pp. 380–395
External links
Islamic and Christian Spain in the early Middle Ages. Thomas F. Glick: Chapter 5: Ethnic relations
Islam and its tolerance level
Islamic Teaching On Dhimmi Status Creates An Atmosphere Of Intolerance from the Religious Freedom Packet of the Order of Saint Andrew the Apostle
Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East
Jihad, the Arab Conquests and the Position of Non-Muslim Subjects
Islam and other religions
Islamic terminology
Arabic words and phrases in Sharia
Religion and politics
Religious discrimination
Politics of the Ottoman Empire
Social history | [
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] |
Duke Paoa Kahinu Mokoe Hulikohola Kahanamoku (August 24, 1890 – January 22, 1968) was a competition swimmer who popularized the sport of surfing. A Native Hawaiian, he was born to a minor noble family less than three years before the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. He lived to see the territory's admission as a state, and became a United States citizen. He was a five-time Olympic medalist in swimming, winning medals in 1912, 1920 and 1924.
Kahanamoku joined fraternal organizations: he was a Scottish Rite Freemason in the Honolulu lodge, and a Shriner. He worked as a law enforcement officer, an actor, a beach volleyball player, and a businessman.
Early years
According to Kahanamoku, he was born in Honolulu at Haleʻākala, the home of Bernice Pauahi Bishop, which was later converted into the Arlington Hotel. He had five brothers, including Samuel and Sargent, and three sisters.
In 1893, his family moved to Kālia, Waikiki (near the present site of Hilton Hawaiian Village), to be closer to his mother's parents and family. Kahanamoku grew up with his siblings and 31 Paoa cousins. He attended the Waikiki Grammar School, Kaahumanu School, and the Kamehameha Schools, although he never graduated because he had to quit to help support the family.
"Duke" was not a title or a nickname, but a given name. He was named after his father, Duke Halapu Kahanamoku, who was christened by Bernice Pauahi Bishop in honor of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who was visiting Hawaii at the time. His father was a policeman. His mother Julia Paakonia Lonokahikina Paoa was a deeply religious woman with a strong sense of family ancestry.
Although his parents were not part of the formal Hawaiian Royal Family, they were from prominent Hawaiian ohana (families). The Kahanamoku and the Paoa ohana were considered to be lower-ranking nobles, who were in service to the aliʻi nui, or royalty. His paternal grandfather was Kahanamoku and his grandmother, Kapiolani Kaoeha (sometimes spelled Kahoea), a descendant of Alapainui. They were kahu, retainers and trusted advisors of the Kamehamehas, to whom they were related. His maternal grandparents Paoa, son of Paoa Hoolae and Hiikaalani, and Mele Uliama, were also of aliʻi descent.
Growing up on the outskirts of Waikiki, Kahanamoku spent much of his youth at the beach, where he developed his surfing and swimming skills. In his youth, Kahanamoku preferred a traditional surf board, which he called his "papa nui", constructed after the fashion of ancient Hawaiian olo boards. Made from the wood of a koa tree, it was long and weighed . The board was without a skeg, which had yet to be invented. In his later surfing career, he would often use smaller boards but always preferred those made of wood.
Kahanamoku was also a powerful swimmer. On August 11, 1911, Kahanamoku was timed at 55.4 seconds in the freestyle, beating the existing world record by 4.6 seconds, in the salt water of Honolulu Harbor. He also broke the record in the and equaled it in the . But the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), in disbelief, would not recognize these feats until many years later. The AAU initially claimed that the judges must have been using alarm clocks rather than stopwatches and later claimed that ocean currents aided Kahanamoku.
He was initiated, passed and raised to the sublime degree of Master Mason in Hawaiian Lodge Masonic Lodge No 21
and was also a Noble (member) of the Shriners fraternal organization.
Career
Kahanamoku easily qualified for the U.S. Olympic swimming team in 1912. At the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, he won a gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle, and a silver medal with the second-place U.S. team in the men's 4×200-meter freestyle relay.
During the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp, Kahanamoku won gold medals in both the 100 meters (bettering fellow Hawaiian Pua Kealoha) and in the relay. He finished the 100 meters with a silver medal during the 1924 Olympics in Paris, with the gold going to Johnny Weissmuller and the bronze to Kahanamoku's brother, Samuel. By then age 34, Kahanamoku won no more Olympic medals. But he served as an alternate for the U.S. water polo team at the 1932 Summer Olympics.
Post-Olympic career
Between Olympic competitions, and after retiring from the Olympics, Kahanamoku traveled internationally to give swimming exhibitions. It was during this period that he popularized the sport of surfing, previously known only in Hawaii, by incorporating surfing exhibitions into his touring exhibitions as well. He attracted people to surfing in mainland America first in 1912 while in Southern California.
His surfing exhibition at Sydney, Australia's Freshwater Beach on December 24, 1914, is widely regarded as a seminal event in the development of surfing in Australia. The board that Kahanamoku built from a piece of pine from a local hardware store is retained by the Freshwater Surf Club. A statue of Kahanamoku was erected in his honor on the Northern headland of Freshwater Beach, New South Wales.
During his time living in Southern California, Kahanamoku performed in Hollywood as a background actor and a character actor in several films. He made connections in this way with people who could further publicize the sport of surfing. Kahanamoku was involved with the Los Angeles Athletic Club, acting as a lifeguard and competing in both swimming and water polo teams.
While living in Newport Beach, California, on June 14, 1925, Kahanamoku rescued eight men from a fishing vessel that capsized in heavy surf while it was attempting to enter the city's harbor. Using his surfboard, Kahanamoku made repeated trips from shore to the capsized ship, and helped rescue several people. Two other surfers saved four more fishermen, while five succumbed to the seas before they could be rescued. At the time the Newport Beach police chief called Kahanamoku's efforts "The most superhuman surfboard rescue act the world has ever seen." It also led to lifeguards across the US to begin using surfboards as standard equipment for water rescues.
In 1940, Kahanamoku married Nadine Alexander, who accompanied him when he traveled. He was the first person to be inducted into both the Swimming Hall of Fame and the Surfing Hall of Fame. The Duke Kahanamoku Invitational Surfing Championships in Hawaii, the first major professional surfing contest event ever held in the huge surf on the North Shore of Oahu, was named in his honor. He is a member of the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame.
Later Kahanamoku was elected to serve as the Sheriff of Honolulu, Hawaii from 1932 to 1961, completing 13 consecutive terms. During World War II, he also served as a military police officer for the United States; Hawai'i was not yet a state and was administered.
In the postwar period, he also appeared in a number of television programs and films, such as Mister Roberts (1955). He was well-liked throughout the Hollywood community.
Kahanamoku became a friend and surfing companion of heiress Doris Duke. She built a home (now a museum) on Oahu named Shangri-la.
Duncan v. Kahanamoku
In 1946, Kahanamoku was the pro forma defendant in the landmark Supreme Court case Duncan v. Kahanamoku. While Kahanamoku was a military police officer during World War II, he arrested Duncan, a civilian shipfitter, for public intoxication.
At the time, Hawaii, not yet a state, was being administered by the United States under the Hawaiian Organic Act. This effectively instituted martial law on the island. After Duncan was tried by a military tribunal, he appealed to the Supreme Court. In a post hoc ruling, the court ruled that trial by military tribunal for the civilian was, in this case, unconstitutional.
Death and legacy
Kahanamoku died of a heart attack on January 22, 1968, at age 77. For his burial at sea, a long motorcade of mourners, accompanied by a 30-man police escort, traveled in procession across town to Waikiki Beach. Reverend Abraham Akaka, the pastor of Kawaiahao Church, performed the service. A group of beach boys sang Hawaiian songs, including "Aloha Oe", and Kahanamoku's ashes were scattered into the ocean.
Statues and monuments
In 1994 a statue of Kahanamoku by Barry Donohoo was inaugurated in Freshwater, NSW, Australia. It is the showpiece of the Australian Surfers Walk of Fame.
On February 28, 2015, a monument featuring a replica of Kahanamoku's surfboard was unveiled at New Brighton beach, Christchurch, New Zealand in honor of the 100th anniversary of Kahanamoku's visit to New Brighton.
A statue of Kahanamoku was installed in Huntington Beach, California. A nearby restaurant is named for him and is close to Huntington Beach pier. The City of Huntington Beach identifies with the legacy of surfing, and a museum dedicated to that sport is located here.
Additional tributes
Hawaii music promoter Kimo Wilder McVay capitalized on Kahanamoku's popularity by naming his Waikiki showroom "Duke Kahanamoku's" at the International Market Place and giving Kahanamoku a financial interest in the showroom in exchange for the use of his name. It was a major Waikiki showroom in the 1960s and is remembered as the home of Don Ho & The Aliis from 1964 through 1969. The showroom continued to be known as Duke Kahanamoku's until Hawaii showman Jack Cione bought it in the mid-1970s and renamed it Le Boom Boom.
Kahanamoku's name is also used by Duke's Canoe Club & Barefoot Bar, known as Duke's Waikiki, a beachfront bar and restaurant in the Outrigger Waikiki on the Beach Hotel. There is a chain of restaurants named after him in California, Florida and Hawaii called Duke's.
On August 24, 2002, the 112th anniversary of Kahanamoku's birth, the U.S. Postal Service issued a first-class commemorative stamp with Duke's picture on it. The First Day Ceremony was held at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki and was attended by thousands. At this ceremony, attendees could attach the Duke stamp to an envelope and get it canceled with a First Day of Issue postmark. These first day covers are very collectible.
On August 24, 2015, a Google Doodle honored the 125th anniversary of Duke Kahanamoku's birthday.
Filmography
See also
Google Arts & Culture - "Duke Paoa Kahanamoku"
Google Maps - Public Art "Duke Kahanamoku"
Duke Paoa Kahanamoku Lagoon
List of multiple Olympic gold medalists
List of Olympic medalists in swimming (men)
World record progression 100 metres freestyle
World record progression 4 × 200 metres freestyle relay
References
Further reading
Kahanamoku, Duke. "Do's and Don't's." Photoplay, September 1925. Tie-in to Adventure.
Paniccia, Patti. "Who Owns the Duke?: The battle for the trademark to Duke Kahanamoku’s name has been far less dignified than the man himself." Honolulu Magazine. November 1, 2006. http://www.honolulumagazine.com/Honolulu-Magazine/November-2006/Who-Owns-the-Duke/
External links
External links
Duke Kahanamoku (USA) – Honor Swimmer profile at International Swimming Hall of Fame
Surfline bio of Duke
Undated photo of Kahanamoku from the Library of Congress collection
Image of Duke Kahanamoku surfing in Los Angeles, California, circa 1920. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive (Collection 1429). UCLA Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.
1890 births
1968 deaths
Male actors from Hawaii
American male freestyle swimmers
American surfers
American male water polo players
Burials at sea
World record setters in swimming
Hawaiian nobility
Kamehameha Schools alumni
Medalists at the 1912 Summer Olympics
Medalists at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Medalists at the 1924 Summer Olympics
Native Hawaiian sportspeople
Olympic gold medalists for the United States in swimming
Olympic silver medalists for the United States in swimming
Olympic water polo players of the United States
Sportspeople from Hawaii
Swimmers at the 1912 Summer Olympics
Swimmers at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Swimmers at the 1924 Summer Olympics
Water polo players at the 1920 Summer Olympics
Hawaii sheriffs
Native Hawaiian surfers
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In finance, a derivative is a contract that derives its value from the performance of an underlying entity. This underlying entity can be an asset, index, or interest rate, and is often simply called the "underlying". Derivatives can be used for a number of purposes, including insuring against price movements (hedging), increasing exposure to price movements for speculation, or getting access to otherwise hard-to-trade assets or markets.
Some of the more common derivatives include forwards, futures, options, swaps, and variations of these such as synthetic collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. Most derivatives are traded over-the-counter (off-exchange) or on an exchange such as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, while most insurance contracts have developed into a separate industry. In the United States, after the financial crisis of 2007–2009, there has been increased pressure to move derivatives to trade on exchanges.
Derivatives are one of the three main categories of financial instruments, the other two being equity (i.e., stocks or shares) and debt (i.e., bonds and mortgages). The oldest example of a derivative in history, attested to by Aristotle, is thought to be a contract transaction of olives, entered into by ancient Greek philosopher Thales, who made a profit in the exchange. Bucket shops, outlawed in 1936, are a more recent historical example.
Basics
Derivatives are contracts between two parties that specify conditions (especially the dates, resulting values and definitions of the underlying variables, the parties' contractual obligations, and the notional amount) under which payments are to be made between the parties. The assets include commodities, stocks, bonds, interest rates and currencies, but they can also be other derivatives, which adds another layer of complexity to proper valuation. The components of a firm's capital structure, e.g., bonds and stock, can also be considered derivatives, more precisely options, with the underlying being the firm's assets, but this is unusual outside of technical contexts.
From the economic point of view, financial derivatives are cash flows that are conditioned stochastically and discounted to present value. The market risk inherent in the underlying asset is attached to the financial derivative through contractual agreements and hence can be traded separately. The underlying asset does not have to be acquired. Derivatives therefore allow the breakup of ownership and participation in the market value of an asset. This also provides a considerable amount of freedom regarding the contract design. That contractual freedom allows derivative designers to modify the participation in the performance of the underlying asset almost arbitrarily. Thus, the participation in the market value of the underlying can be effectively weaker, stronger (leverage effect), or implemented as inverse. Hence, specifically the market price risk of the underlying asset can be controlled in almost every situation.
There are two groups of derivative contracts: the privately traded over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives such as swaps that do not go through an exchange or other intermediary, and exchange-traded derivatives (ETD) that are traded through specialized derivatives exchanges or other exchanges.
Derivatives are more common in the modern era, but their origins trace back several centuries. One of the oldest derivatives is rice futures, which have been traded on the Dojima Rice Exchange since the eighteenth century. Derivatives are broadly categorized by the relationship between the underlying asset and the derivative (such as forward, option, swap); the type of underlying asset (such as equity derivatives, foreign exchange derivatives, interest rate derivatives, commodity derivatives, or credit derivatives); the market in which they trade (such as exchange-traded or over-the-counter); and their pay-off profile.
Derivatives may broadly be categorized as "lock" or "option" products. Lock products (such as swaps, futures, or forwards) obligate the contractual parties to the terms over the life of the contract. Option products (such as interest rate swaps) provide the buyer the right, but not the obligation to enter the contract under the terms specified.
Derivatives can be used either for risk management (i.e. to "hedge" by providing offsetting compensation in case of an undesired event, a kind of "insurance") or for speculation (i.e. making a financial "bet"). This distinction is important because the former is a prudent aspect of operations and financial management for many firms across many industries; the latter offers managers and investors a risky opportunity to increase profit, which may not be properly disclosed to stakeholders.
Along with many other financial products and services, derivatives reform is an element of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. The Act delegated many rule-making details of regulatory oversight to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and those details are not finalized nor fully implemented as of late 2012.
Size of market
To give an idea of the size of the derivative market, The Economist has reported that as of June 2011, the over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives market amounted to approximately $700 trillion, and the size of the market traded on exchanges totaled an additional $83 trillion. For the fourth quarter 2017 the European Securities Market Authority estimated the size of European derivatives market at a size of €660 trillion with 74 million outstanding contracts.
However, these are "notional" values, and some economists say that these aggregated values greatly exaggerate the market value and the true credit risk faced by the parties involved. For example, in 2010, while the aggregate of OTC derivatives exceeded $600 trillion, the value of the market was estimated to be much lower, at $21 trillion. The credit-risk equivalent of the derivative contracts was estimated at $3.3 trillion.
Still, even these scaled-down figures represent huge amounts of money. For perspective, the budget for total expenditure of the United States government during 2012 was $3.5 trillion, and the total current value of the U.S. stock market is an estimated $23 trillion. Meanwhile, the world annual Gross Domestic Product is about $65 trillion.
At least for one type of derivative, Credit Default Swaps (CDS), for which the inherent risk is considered high , the higher, nominal value remains relevant. It was this type of derivative that investment magnate Warren Buffett referred to in his famous 2002 speech in which he warned against "financial weapons of mass destruction". CDS notional value in early 2012 amounted to $25.5 trillion, down from $55 trillion in 2008.
Usage
Derivatives are used for the following:
Hedge or to mitigate risk in the underlying, by entering into a derivative contract whose value moves in the opposite direction to their underlying position and cancels part or all of it out
Create option ability where the value of the derivative is linked to a specific condition or event (e.g., the underlying reaching a specific price level)
Obtain exposure to the underlying where it is not possible to trade in the underlying (e.g., weather derivatives)
Provide leverage (or gearing), such that a small movement in the underlying value can cause a large difference in the value of the derivative
Speculate and make a profit if the value of the underlying asset moves the way they expect (e.g. moves in a given direction, stays in or out of a specified range, reaches a certain level)
Switch asset allocations between different asset classes without disturbing the underlying assets, as part of transition management
Avoid paying taxes. For example, an equity swap allows an investor to receive steady payments, e.g. based on SONIA rate, while avoiding paying capital gains tax and keeping the stock.
For arbitraging purpose, allowing a riskless profit by simultaneously entering into transactions into two or more markets.
Mechanics and valuation
Lock products are theoretically valued at zero at the time of execution and thus do not typically require an up-front exchange between the parties. Based upon movements in the underlying asset over time, however, the value of the contract will fluctuate, and the derivative may be either an asset (i.e., "in the money") or a liability (i.e., "out of the money") at different points throughout its life. Importantly, either party is therefore exposed to the credit quality of its counterparty and is interested in protecting itself in an event of default.
Option products have immediate value at the outset because they provide specified protection (intrinsic value) over a given time period (time value). One common form of option product familiar to many consumers is insurance for homes and automobiles. The insured would pay more for a policy with greater liability protections (intrinsic value) and one that extends for a year rather than six months (time value). Because of the immediate option value, the option purchaser typically pays an up front premium. Just like for lock products, movements in the underlying asset will cause the option's intrinsic value to change over time while its time value deteriorates steadily until the contract expires. An important difference between a lock product is that, after the initial exchange, the option purchaser has no further liability to its counterparty; upon maturity, the purchaser will execute the option if it has positive value (i.e., if it is "in the money") or expire at no cost (other than to the initial premium) (i.e., if the option is "out of the money").
Hedging
Derivatives allow risk related to the price of the underlying asset to be transferred from one party to another. For example, a wheat farmer and a miller could sign a futures contract to exchange a specified amount of cash for a specified amount of wheat in the future. Both parties have reduced a future risk: for the wheat farmer, the uncertainty of the price, and for the miller, the availability of wheat. However, there is still the risk that no wheat will be available because of events unspecified by the contract, such as the weather, or that one party will renege on the contract. Although a third party, called a clearing house, insures a futures contract, not all derivatives are insured against counter-party risk.
From another perspective, the farmer and the miller both reduce a risk and acquire a risk when they sign the futures contract: the farmer reduces the risk that the price of wheat will fall below the price specified in the contract and acquires the risk that the price of wheat will rise above the price specified in the contract (thereby losing additional income that he could have earned). The miller, on the other hand, acquires the risk that the price of wheat will fall below the price specified in the contract (thereby paying more in the future than he otherwise would have) and reduces the risk that the price of wheat will rise above the price specified in the contract. In this sense, one party is the insurer (risk taker) for one type of risk, and the counter-party is the insurer (risk taker) for another type of risk.
Hedging also occurs when an individual or institution buys an asset (such as a commodity, a bond that has coupon payments, a stock that pays dividends, and so on) and sells it using a futures contract. The individual or institution has access to the asset for a specified amount of time, and can then sell it in the future at a specified price according to the futures contract. Of course, this allows the individual or institution the benefit of holding the asset, while reducing the risk that the future selling price will deviate unexpectedly from the market's current assessment of the future value of the asset.
Derivatives trading of this kind may serve the financial interests of certain particular businesses. For example, a corporation borrows a large sum of money at a specific interest rate. The interest rate on the loan reprices every six months. The corporation is concerned that the rate of interest may be much higher in six months. The corporation could buy a forward rate agreement (FRA), which is a contract to pay a fixed rate of interest six months after purchases on a notional amount of money. If the interest rate after six months is above the contract rate, the seller will pay the difference to the corporation, or FRA buyer. If the rate is lower, the corporation will pay the difference to the seller. The purchase of the FRA serves to reduce the uncertainty concerning the rate increase and stabilize earnings.
Speculation
Derivatives can be used to acquire risk, rather than to hedge against risk. Thus, some individuals and institutions will enter into a derivative contract to speculate on the value of the underlying asset. Speculators look to buy an asset in the future at a low price according to a derivative contract when the future market price is high, or to sell an asset in the future at a high price according to a derivative contract when the future market price is less.
Speculative trading in derivatives gained a great deal of notoriety in 1995 when Nick Leeson, a trader at Barings Bank, made poor and unauthorized investments in futures contracts. Through a combination of poor judgment, lack of oversight by the bank's management and regulators, and unfortunate events like the Kobe earthquake, Leeson incurred a $1.3 billion loss that bankrupted the centuries-old institution.
Arbitrage
Individuals and institutions may also look for arbitrage opportunities, as when the current buying price of an asset falls below the price specified in a futures contract to sell the asset.
Proportion used for hedging and speculation
The true proportion of derivatives contracts used for hedging purposes is unknown, but it appears to be relatively small. Also, derivatives contracts account for only 3–6% of the median firms' total currency and interest rate exposure. Nonetheless, we know that many firms' derivatives activities have at least some speculative component for a variety of reasons.
Types
In broad terms, there are two groups of derivative contracts, which are distinguished by the way they are traded in the market:
Over-the-counter derivatives
Over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives are contracts that are traded (and privately negotiated) directly between two parties, without going through an exchange or other intermediary. Products such as swaps, forward rate agreements, exotic options – and other exotic derivatives – are almost always traded in this way. The OTC derivative market is the largest market for derivatives, and is largely unregulated with respect to disclosure of information between the parties, since the OTC market is made up of banks and other highly sophisticated parties, such as hedge funds. Reporting of OTC amounts is difficult because trades can occur in private, without activity being visible on any exchange.
According to the Bank for International Settlements, who first surveyed OTC derivatives in 1995, reported that the "gross market value, which represent the cost of replacing all open contracts at the prevailing market prices, ... increased by 74% since 2004, to $11 trillion at the end of June 2007 (BIS 2007:24)." Positions in the OTC derivatives market increased to $516 trillion at the end of June 2007, 135% higher than the level recorded in 2004. The total outstanding notional amount is US$708 trillion (as of June 2011). Of this total notional amount, 67% are interest rate contracts, 8% are credit default swaps (CDS), 9% are foreign exchange contracts, 2% are commodity contracts, 1% are equity contracts, and 12% are other. Because OTC derivatives are not traded on an exchange, there is no central counter-party. Therefore, they are subject to counterparty risk, like an ordinary contract, since each counter-party relies on the other to perform.
Exchange-traded derivatives
Exchange-traded derivatives (ETD) are those derivatives instruments that are traded via specialized derivatives exchanges or other exchanges. A derivatives exchange is a market where individuals trade standardized contracts that have been defined by the exchange. A derivatives exchange acts as an intermediary to all related transactions, and takes initial margin from both sides of the trade to act as a guarantee. The world's largest derivatives exchanges (by number of transactions) are the Korea Exchange (which lists KOSPI Index Futures & Options), Eurex (which lists a wide range of European products such as interest rate & index products), and CME Group (made up of the 2007 merger of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade and the 2008 acquisition of the New York Mercantile Exchange). According to BIS, the combined turnover in the world's derivatives exchanges totaled US$344 trillion during Q4 2005. By December 2007 the Bank for International Settlements reported that "derivatives traded on exchanges surged 27% to a record $681 trillion."
Inverse ETFs and leveraged ETFs
Inverse exchange-traded funds (IETFs) and leveraged exchange-traded funds (LETFs) are two special types of exchange traded funds (ETFs) that are available to common traders and investors on major exchanges like the NYSE and Nasdaq. To maintain these products' net asset value, these funds' administrators must employ more sophisticated financial engineering methods than what's usually required for maintenance of traditional ETFs. These instruments must also be regularly rebalanced and re-indexed each day.
Common derivative contract
Some of the common variants of derivative contracts are as follows:
Forwards: tailored contract between two parties, where payment takes place at a specific time in the future at today's pre-determined price.
Futures: contracts to buy or sell an asset on a future date at a price specified today. A futures contract differs from a forward contract in that the futures contract is a standardized contract written by a clearing house that operates an exchange where the contract can be bought and sold; the forward contract is a non-standardized contract written by the parties themselves.
Options: contracts that give the owner the right, but not the obligation, to buy (in the case of a call option) or sell (in the case of a put option) an asset. The price at which the sale takes place is known as the strike price, and is specified at the time the parties enter into the option. The option contract also specifies a maturity date. In the case of a European option, the owner has the right to require the sale to take place on (but not before) the maturity date; in the case of an American option, the owner can require the sale to take place at any time up to the maturity date. If the owner of the contract exercises this right, the counter-party has the obligation to carry out the transaction. Options are of two types: call option and put option. The buyer of a call option has a right to buy a certain quantity of the underlying asset, at a specified price on or before a given date in the future, but he has no obligation to carry out this right. Similarly, the buyer of a put option has the right to sell a certain quantity of an underlying asset, at a specified price on or before a given date in the future, but he has no obligation to carry out this right.
Binary options: contracts that provide the owner with an all-or-nothing profit profile.
Warrants: apart from the commonly used short-dated options which have a maximum maturity period of one year, there exist certain long-dated options as well, known as warrants. These are generally traded over the counter.
Swaps: contracts to exchange cash (flows) on or before a specified future date based on the underlying value of currencies exchange rates, bonds/interest rates, commodities exchange, stocks or other assets. Another term which is commonly associated with swap is swaption, a term for what is basically an option on the forward swap. Similar to call and put options, swaptions are of two kinds: receiver and payer. In the case of a receiver swaption there is an option wherein one can receive fixed and pay floating; in the case of a payer swaption one has the option to pay fixed and receive floating.
Swaps can basically be categorized into two types:
Interest rate swap: These basically necessitate swapping only interest associated cash flows in the same currency, between two parties.
Currency swap: In this kind of swapping, the cash flow between the two parties includes both principal and interest. Also, the money which is being swapped is in different currency for both parties.
Some common examples of these derivatives are the following:
Collateralized debt obligation
A collateralized debt obligation (CDO) is a type of structured asset-backed security (ABS). An "asset-backed security" is used as an umbrella term for a type of security backed by a pool of assets—including collateralized debt obligations and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) (Example: "The capital market in which asset-backed securities are issued and traded is composed of three main categories: ABS, MBS and CDOs".)—and sometimes for a particular type of that security—one backed by consumer loans (example: "As a rule of thumb, securitization issues backed by mortgages are called MBS, and securitization issues backed by debt obligations are called CDO, [and] Securitization issues backed by consumer-backed products—car loans, consumer loans and credit cards, among others—are called ABS.) Originally developed for the corporate debt markets, over time CDOs evolved to encompass the mortgage and mortgage-backed security (MBS) markets.
Like other private-label securities backed by assets, a CDO can be thought of as a promise to pay investors in a prescribed sequence, based on the cash flow the CDO collects from the pool of bonds or other assets it owns. The CDO is "sliced" into "tranches", which "catch" the cash flow of interest and principal payments in sequence based on seniority. If some loans default and the cash collected by the CDO is insufficient to pay all of its investors, those in the lowest, most "junior" tranches suffer losses first. The last to lose payment from default are the safest, most senior tranches. Consequently, coupon payments (and interest rates) vary by tranche with the safest/most senior tranches paying the lowest and the lowest tranches paying the highest rates to compensate for higher default risk. As an example, a CDO might issue the following tranches in order of safeness: Senior AAA (sometimes known as "super senior"); Junior AAA; AA; A; BBB; Residual.
Separate special-purpose entities—rather than the parent investment bank—issue the CDOs and pay interest to investors. As CDOs developed, some sponsors repackaged tranches into yet another iteration called "CDO-Squared" or the "CDOs of CDOs".
In the early 2000s, CDOs were generally diversified, but by 2006–2007—when the CDO market grew to hundreds of billions of dollars—this changed. CDO collateral became dominated not by loans, but by lower level (BBB or A) tranches recycled from other asset-backed securities, whose assets were usually non-prime mortgages. These CDOs have been called "the engine that powered the mortgage supply chain" for nonprime mortgages, and are credited with giving lenders greater incentive to make non-prime loans leading up to the 2007-9 subprime mortgage crisis.
Credit default swap
A credit default swap (CDS) is a financial swap agreement that the seller of the CDS will compensate the buyer (the creditor of the reference loan) in the event of a loan default (by the debtor) or other credit event. The buyer of the CDS makes a series of payments (the CDS "fee" or "spread") to the seller and, in exchange, receives a payoff if the loan defaults. It was invented by Blythe Masters from JP Morgan in 1994.
In the event of default the buyer of the CDS receives compensation (usually the face value of the loan), and the seller of the CDS takes possession of the defaulted loan. However, anyone with sufficient collateral to trade with a bank or hedge fund can purchase a CDS, even buyers who do not hold the loan instrument and who have no direct insurable interest in the loan (these are called "naked" CDSs). If there are more CDS contracts outstanding than bonds in existence, a protocol exists to hold a credit event auction; the payment received is usually substantially less than the face value of the loan.
Credit default swaps have existed since the early 1990s, and increased in use after 2003. By the end of 2007, the outstanding CDS amount was $62.2 trillion, falling to $26.3 trillion by mid-year 2010 but reportedly $25.5 trillion in early 2012. CDSs are not traded on an exchange and there is no required reporting of transactions to a government agency. During the 2007–2010 financial crisis the lack of transparency in this large market became a concern to regulators as it could pose a systemic risk.
In March 2010, the [DTCC] Trade Information Warehouse (see Sources of Market Data) announced it would give regulators greater access to its credit default swaps database.
CDS data can be used by financial professionals, regulators, and the media to monitor how the market views credit risk of any entity on which a CDS is available, which can be compared to that provided by credit rating agencies. U.S. courts may soon be following suit.
Most CDSs are documented using standard forms drafted by the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA), although there are many variants. In addition to the basic, single-name swaps, there are basket default swaps (BDSs), index CDSs, funded CDSs (also called credit-linked notes), as well as loan-only credit default swaps (LCDS). In addition to corporations and governments, the reference entity can include a special-purpose vehicle issuing asset-backed securities.
Some claim that derivatives such as CDS are potentially dangerous in that they combine priority in bankruptcy with a lack of transparency. A CDS can be unsecured (without collateral) and be at higher risk for a default.
Forwards
In finance, a forward contract or simply a forward is a non-standardized contract between two parties to buy or to sell an asset at a specified future time at an amount agreed upon today, making it a type of derivative instrument. This is in contrast to a spot contract, which is an agreement to buy or sell an asset on its spot date, which may vary depending on the instrument, for example most of the FX contracts have Spot Date two business days from today. The party agreeing to buy the underlying asset in the future assumes a long position, and the party agreeing to sell the asset in the future assumes a short position. The price agreed upon is called the delivery price, which is equal to the forward price at the time the contract is entered into.
The price of the underlying instrument, in whatever form, is paid before control of the instrument changes. This is one of the many forms of buy/sell orders where the time and date of trade is not the same as the value date where the securities themselves are exchanged.
The forward price of such a contract is commonly contrasted with the spot price, which is the price at which the asset changes hands on the spot date. The difference between the spot and the forward price is the forward premium or forward discount, generally considered in the form of a profit, or loss, by the purchasing party. Forwards, like other derivative securities, can be used to hedge risk (typically currency or exchange rate risk), as a means of speculation, or to allow a party to take advantage of a quality of the underlying instrument which is time-sensitive.
A closely related contract is a futures contract; they differ in certain respects. Forward contracts are very similar to futures contracts, except they are not exchange-traded, or defined on standardized assets. Forwards also typically have no interim partial settlements or "true-ups" in margin requirements like futures—such that the parties do not exchange additional property securing the party at gain and the entire unrealized gain or loss builds up while the contract is open. However, being traded over the counter (OTC), forward contracts specification can be customized and may include mark-to-market and daily margin calls. Hence, a forward contract arrangement might call for the loss party to pledge collateral or additional collateral to better secure the party at gain. In other words, the terms of the forward contract will determine the collateral calls based upon certain "trigger" events relevant to a particular counterparty such as among other things, credit ratings, value of assets under management or redemptions over a specific time frame (e.g., quarterly, annually).
Futures
In finance, a 'futures contract' (more colloquially, futures) is a standardized contract between two parties to buy or sell a specified asset of standardized quantity and quality for a price agreed upon today (the futures price) with delivery and payment occurring at a specified future date, the delivery date, making it a derivative product (i.e. a financial product that is derived from an underlying asset). The contracts are negotiated at a futures exchange, which acts as an intermediary between buyer and seller. The party agreeing to buy the underlying asset in the future, the "buyer" of the contract, is said to be "long", and the party agreeing to sell the asset in the future, the "seller" of the contract, is said to be "short".
While the futures contract specifies a trade taking place in the future, the purpose of the futures exchange is to act as intermediary and mitigate the risk of default by either party in the intervening period. For this reason, the futures exchange requires both parties to put up an initial amount of cash (performance bond), the margin. Margins, sometimes set as a percentage of the value of the futures contract, need to be proportionally maintained at all times during the life of the contract to underpin this mitigation because the price of the contract will vary in keeping with supply and demand and will change daily and thus one party or the other will theoretically be making or losing money. To mitigate risk and the possibility of default by either party, the product is marked to market on a daily basis whereby the difference between the prior agreed-upon price and the actual daily futures price is settled on a daily basis. This is sometimes known as the variation margin where the futures exchange will draw money out of the losing party's margin account and put it into the other party's thus ensuring that the correct daily loss or profit is reflected in the respective account. If the margin account goes below a certain value set by the Exchange, then a margin call is made and the account owner must replenish the margin account. This process is known as "marking to market". Thus on the delivery date, the amount exchanged is not the specified price on the contract but the spot value (i.e., the original value agreed upon, since any gain or loss has already been previously settled by marking to market). Upon marketing the strike price is often reached and creates much income for the "caller".
A closely related contract is a forward contract. A forward is like a futures in that it specifies the exchange of goods for a specified price at a specified future date. However, a forward is not traded on an exchange and thus does not have the interim partial payments due to marking to market. Nor is the contract standardized, as on the exchange.
Unlike an option, both parties of a futures contract must fulfill the contract on the delivery date. The seller delivers the underlying asset to the buyer, or, if it is a cash-settled futures contract, then cash is transferred from the futures trader who sustained a loss to the one who made a profit. To exit the commitment prior to the settlement date, the holder of a futures position can close out its contract obligations by taking the opposite position on another futures contract on the same asset and settlement date. The difference in futures prices is then a profit or loss..
Mortgage-backed securities
A mortgage-backed security (MBS) is an asset-backed security that is secured by a mortgage, or more commonly a collection ("pool") of sometimes hundreds of mortgages. The mortgages are sold to a group of individuals (a government agency or investment bank) that "securitizes", or packages, the loans together into a security that can be sold to investors. The mortgages of an MBS may be residential or commercial, depending on whether it is an Agency MBS or a Non-Agency MBS; in the United States they may be issued by structures set up by government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, or they can be "private-label", issued by structures set up by investment banks. The structure of the MBS may be known as "pass-through", where the interest and principal payments from the borrower or homebuyer pass through it to the MBS holder, or it may be more complex, made up of a pool of other MBSs. Other types of MBS include collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs, often structured as real estate mortgage investment conduits) and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs).
The shares of subprime MBSs issued by various structures, such as CMOs, are not identical but rather issued as tranches (French for "slices"), each with a different level of priority in the debt repayment stream, giving them different levels of risk and reward. Tranches—especially the lower-priority, higher-interest tranches—of an MBS are/were often further repackaged and resold as collaterized debt obligations. These subprime MBSs issued by investment banks were a major issue in the subprime mortgage crisis of 2006–2008
.
The total face value of an MBS decreases over time, because like mortgages, and unlike bonds, and most other fixed-income securities, the principal in an MBS is not paid back as a single payment to the bond holder at maturity but rather is paid along with the interest in each periodic payment (monthly, quarterly, etc.). This decrease in face value is measured by the MBS's "factor", the percentage of the original "face" that remains to be repaid.
Options
In finance, an option is a contract which gives the buyer (the owner) the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell an underlying asset or instrument at a specified strike price on or before a specified date. The seller has the corresponding obligation to fulfill the transaction—that is to sell or buy—if the buyer (owner) "exercises" the option. The buyer pays a premium to the seller for this right. An option that conveys to the owner the right to buy something at a certain price is a "call option"; an option that conveys the right of the owner to sell something at a certain price is a "put option". Both are commonly traded, but for clarity, the call option is more frequently discussed.
Options valuation is a topic of ongoing research in academic and practical finance. In basic terms, the value of an option is commonly decomposed into two parts:
The first part is the "intrinsic value", defined as the difference between the market value of the underlying and the strike price of the given option.
The second part is the "time value", which depends on a set of other factors which, through a multivariable, non-linear interrelationship, reflect the discounted expected value of that difference at expiration.
Although options valuation has been studied since the 19th century, the contemporary approach is based on the Black–Scholes model, which was first published in 1973.
Options contracts have been known for many centuries. However, both trading activity and academic interest increased when, as from 1973, options were issued with standardized terms and traded through a guaranteed clearing house at the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Today, many options are created in a standardized form and traded through clearing houses on regulated options exchanges, while other over-the-counter options are written as bilateral, customized contracts between a single buyer and seller, one or both of which may be a dealer or market-maker. Options are part of a larger class of financial instruments known as derivative products or simply derivatives.
Swaps
A swap is a derivative in which two counterparties exchange cash flows of one party's financial instrument for those of the other party's financial instrument. The benefits in question depend on the type of financial instruments involved. For example, in the case of a swap involving two bonds, the benefits in question can be the periodic interest (coupon) payments associated with such bonds. Specifically, two counterparties agree to the exchange one stream of cash flows against another stream. These streams are called the swap's "legs". The swap agreement defines the dates when the cash flows are to be paid and the way they are accrued and calculated. Usually at the time when the contract is initiated, at least one of these series of cash flows is determined by an uncertain variable such as a floating interest rate, foreign exchange rate, equity price, or commodity price.
The cash flows are calculated over a notional principal amount. Contrary to a future, a forward or an option, the notional amount is usually not exchanged between counterparties. Consequently, swaps can be in cash or collateral.
Swaps can be used to hedge certain risks such as interest rate risk, or to speculate on changes in the expected direction of underlying prices.
Swaps were first introduced to the public in 1981 when IBM and the World Bank entered into a swap agreement. Today, swaps are among the most heavily traded financial contracts in the world: the total amount of interest rates and currency swaps outstanding is more than $348 trillion in 2010, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The five generic types of swaps, in order of their quantitative importance, are: interest rate swaps, currency swaps, credit swaps, commodity swaps and equity swaps (there are many other types).
Economic function of the derivative market
Some of the salient economic functions of the derivative market include:
Prices in a structured derivative market not only replicate the discernment of the market participants about the future but also lead the prices of underlying to the professed future level. On the expiration of the derivative contract, the prices of derivatives congregate with the prices of the underlying. Therefore, derivatives are essential tools to determine both current and future prices.
The derivatives market reallocates risk from the people who prefer risk aversion to the people who have an appetite for risk.
The intrinsic nature of derivatives market associates them to the underlying spot market. Due to derivatives there is a considerable increase in trade volumes of the underlying spot market. The dominant factor behind such an escalation is increased participation by additional players who would not have otherwise participated due to absence of any procedure to transfer risk.
As supervision, reconnaissance of the activities of various participants becomes tremendously difficult in assorted markets; the establishment of an organized form of market becomes all the more imperative. Therefore, in the presence of an organized derivatives market, speculation can be controlled, resulting in a more meticulous environment.
Third parties can use publicly available derivative prices as educated predictions of uncertain future outcomes, for example, the likelihood that a corporation will default on its debts.
In a nutshell, there is a substantial increase in savings and investment in the long run due to augmented activities by derivative market participant.
Valuation
Market and arbitrage-free prices
Two common measures of value are:
Market price, i.e. the price at which traders are willing to buy or sell the contract
Arbitrage-free price, meaning that no risk-free profits can be made by trading in these contracts (see rational pricing)
Determining the market price
For exchange-traded derivatives, market price is usually transparent (often published in real time by the exchange, based on all the current bids and offers placed on that particular contract at any one time). Complications can arise with OTC or floor-traded contracts though, as trading is handled manually, making it difficult to automatically broadcast prices. In particular with OTC contracts, there is no central exchange to collate and disseminate prices.
Determining the arbitrage-free price
The arbitrage-free price for a derivatives contract can be complex, and there are many different variables to consider. Arbitrage-free pricing is a central topic of financial mathematics. For futures/forwards the arbitrage free price is relatively straightforward, involving the price of the underlying together with the cost of carry (income received less interest costs), although there can be complexities.
However, for options and more complex derivatives, pricing involves developing a complex pricing model: understanding the stochastic process of the price of the underlying asset is often crucial. A key equation for the theoretical valuation of options is the Black–Scholes formula, which is based on the assumption that the cash flows from a European stock option can be replicated by a continuous buying and selling strategy using only the stock. A simplified version of this valuation technique is the binomial options model.
OTC represents the biggest challenge in using models to price derivatives. Since these contracts are not publicly traded, no market price is available to validate the theoretical valuation. Most of the model's results are input-dependent (meaning the final price depends heavily on how we derive the pricing inputs).
Therefore, it is common that OTC derivatives are priced by Independent Agents that both counterparties involved in the deal designate upfront (when signing the contract).
Risks
Derivatives are often subject to the following criticisms:
Hidden tail risk
According to Raghuram Rajan, a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), "... it may well be that the managers of these firms [investment funds] have figured out the correlations between the various instruments they hold and believe they are hedged. Yet as Chan and others (2005) point out, the lessons of summer 1998 following the default on Russian government debt is that correlations that are zero or negative in normal times can turn overnight to one – a phenomenon they term "phase lock-in". A hedged position "can become unhedged at the worst times, inflicting substantial losses on those who mistakenly believe they are protected".
See the FRTB framework, which seeks to address this to some extent.
Leverage
The use of derivatives can result in large losses because of the use of leverage, or borrowing. Derivatives allow investors to earn large returns from small movements in the underlying asset's price. However, investors could lose large amounts if the price of the underlying moves against them significantly. There have been several instances of massive losses in derivative markets, such as the following:
American International Group (AIG) lost more than US$18 billion through a subsidiary over the preceding three quarters on credit default swaps (CDSs). The United States Federal Reserve Bank announced the creation of a secured credit facility of up to US$85 billion, to prevent the company's collapse by enabling AIG to meet its obligations to deliver additional collateral to its credit default swap trading partners.
The loss of US$7.2 Billion by Société Générale in January 2008 through mis-use of futures contracts.
The loss of US$6.4 billion in the failed fund Amaranth Advisors, which was long natural gas in September 2006 when the price plummeted.
The loss of US$4.6 billion in the failed fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998.
The loss of US$1.3 billion equivalent in oil derivatives in 1993 and 1994 by Metallgesellschaft AG.
The loss of US$1.2 billion equivalent in equity derivatives in 1995 by Barings Bank.
UBS AG, Switzerland's biggest bank, suffered a $2 billion loss through unauthorized trading discovered in September 2011.
Derivatives typically have a large notional value. As such, there is the danger that their use could result in losses for which the investor would be unable to compensate. The possibility that this could lead to a chain reaction ensuing in an economic crisis was pointed out by famed investor Warren Buffett in Berkshire Hathaway's 2002 annual report. Buffett called them 'financial weapons of mass destruction.' A potential problem with derivatives is that they comprise an increasingly larger notional amount of assets which may lead to distortions in the underlying capital and equities markets themselves. Investors begin to look at the derivatives markets to make a decision to buy or sell securities and so what was originally meant to be a market to transfer risk now becomes a leading indicator.(See Berkshire Hathaway Annual Report for 2002)
Counter party risk
Some derivatives (especially swaps) expose investors to counterparty risk, or risk arising from the other party in a financial transaction. Different types of derivatives have different levels of counter party risk. For example, standardized stock options by law require the party at risk to have a certain amount deposited with the exchange, showing that they can pay for any losses; banks that help businesses swap variable for fixed rates on loans may do credit checks on both parties. However, in private agreements between two companies, for example, there may not be benchmarks for performing due diligence and risk analysis.
Financial reform and government regulation
Under US law and the laws of most other developed countries, derivatives have special legal exemptions that make them a particularly attractive legal form to extend credit. The strong creditor protections afforded to derivatives counterparties, in combination with their complexity and lack of transparency however, can cause capital markets to underprice credit risk. This can contribute to credit booms, and increase systemic risks. Indeed, the use of derivatives to conceal credit risk from third parties while protecting derivative counterparties contributed to the financial crisis of 2008 in the United States.
In the context of a 2010 examination of the ICE Trust, an industry self-regulatory body, Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission which regulates most derivatives, was quoted saying that the derivatives marketplace as it functions now "adds up to higher costs to all Americans". More oversight of the banks in this market is needed, he also said. Additionally, the report said, "[t]he Department of Justice is looking into derivatives, too. The department's antitrust unit is actively investigating 'the possibility of anticompetitive practices in the credit derivatives clearing, trading and information services industries', according to a department spokeswoman."
For legislators and committees responsible for financial reform related to derivatives in the United States and elsewhere, distinguishing between hedging and speculative derivatives activities has been a nontrivial challenge. The distinction is critical because regulation should help to isolate and curtail speculation with derivatives, especially for "systemically significant" institutions whose default could be large enough to threaten the entire financial system. At the same time, the legislation should allow for responsible parties to hedge risk without unduly tying up working capital as collateral that firms may better employ elsewhere in their operations and investment.
In this regard, it is important to distinguish between financial (e.g. banks) and non-financial end-users of derivatives (e.g. real estate development companies) because these firms' derivatives usage is inherently different. More importantly, the reasonable collateral that secures these different counterparties can be very different. The distinction between these firms is not always straight forward (e.g. hedge funds or even some private equity firms do not neatly fit either category). Finally, even financial users must be differentiated, as 'large' banks may classified as "systemically significant" whose derivatives activities must be more tightly monitored and restricted than those of smaller, local and regional banks.
Over-the-counter dealing will be less common as the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act comes into effect. The law mandated the clearing of certain swaps at registered exchanges and imposed various restrictions on derivatives. To implement Dodd-Frank, the CFTC developed new rules in at least 30 areas. The Commission determines which swaps are subject to mandatory clearing and whether a derivatives exchange is eligible to clear a certain type of swap contract.
Nonetheless, the above and other challenges of the rule-making process have delayed full enactment of aspects of the legislation relating to derivatives. The challenges are further complicated by the necessity to orchestrate globalized financial reform among the nations that comprise the world's major financial markets, a primary responsibility of the Financial Stability Board whose progress is ongoing.
In the U.S., by February 2012 the combined effort of the SEC and CFTC had produced over 70 proposed and final derivatives rules. However, both of them had delayed adoption of a number of derivatives regulations because of the burden of other rulemaking, litigation and opposition to the rules, and many core definitions (such as the terms "swap", "security-based swap", "swap dealer", "security-based swap dealer", "major swap participant" and "major security-based swap participant") had still not been adopted. SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro opined: "At the end of the day, it probably does not make sense to harmonize everything [between the SEC and CFTC rules] because some of these products are quite different and certainly the market structures are quite different." On February 11, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released two final rules toward establishing a reporting and public disclosure framework for security-based swap transaction data. The two rules are not completely harmonized with the requirements with CFTC requirements.
In November 2012, the SEC and regulators from Australia, Brazil, the European Union, Hong Kong, Japan, Ontario, Quebec, Singapore, and Switzerland met to discuss reforming the OTC derivatives market, as had been agreed by leaders at the 2009 G-20 Pittsburgh summit in September 2009. In December 2012, they released a joint statement to the effect that they recognized that the market is a global one and "firmly support the adoption and enforcement of robust and consistent standards in and across jurisdictions", with the goals of mitigating risk, improving transparency, protecting against market abuse, preventing regulatory gaps, reducing the potential for arbitrage opportunities, and fostering a level playing field for market participants. They also agreed on the need to reduce regulatory uncertainty and provide market participants with sufficient clarity on laws and regulations by avoiding, to the extent possible, the application of conflicting rules to the same entities and transactions, and minimizing the application of inconsistent and duplicative rules. At the same time, they noted that "complete harmonization – perfect alignment of rules across jurisdictions" would be difficult, because of jurisdictions' differences in law, policy, markets, implementation timing, and legislative and regulatory processes.
On December 20, 2013 the CFTC provided information on its swaps regulation "comparability" determinations. The release addressed the CFTC's cross-border compliance exceptions. Specifically it addressed which entity level and in some cases transaction-level requirements in six jurisdictions (Australia, Canada, the European Union, Hong Kong, Japan, and Switzerland) it found comparable to its own rules, thus permitting non-US swap dealers, major swap participants, and the foreign branches of US Swap Dealers and major swap participants in these jurisdictions to comply with local rules in lieu of Commission rules.
Reporting
Mandatory reporting regulations are being finalized in a number of countries, such as Dodd Frank Act in the US, the European Market Infrastructure Regulations (EMIR) in Europe, as well as regulations in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Canada, and other countries. The OTC Derivatives Regulators Forum (ODRF), a group of over 40 worldwide regulators, provided trade repositories with a set of guidelines regarding data access to regulators, and the Financial Stability Board and CPSS IOSCO also made recommendations in with regard to reporting.
DTCC, through its "Global Trade Repository" (GTR) service, manages global trade repositories for interest rates, and commodities, foreign exchange, credit, and equity derivatives. It makes global trade reports to the CFTC in the U.S., and plans to do the same for ESMA in Europe and for regulators in Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore. It covers cleared and uncleared OTC derivatives products, whether or not a trade is electronically processed or bespoke.
Glossary
Bilateral netting: A legally enforceable arrangement between a bank and a counter-party that creates a single legal obligation covering all included individual contracts. This means that a bank's obligation, in the event of the default or insolvency of one of the parties, would be the net sum of all positive and negative fair values of contracts included in the bilateral netting arrangement.
Counterparty: The legal and financial term for the other party in a financial transaction.
Credit derivative: A contract that transfers credit risk from a protection buyer to a credit protection seller. Credit derivative products can take many forms, such as credit default swaps, credit linked notes and total return swaps.
Derivative: A financial contract whose value is derived from the performance of assets, interest rates, currency exchange rates, or indexes. Derivative transactions include a wide assortment of financial contracts including structured debt obligations and deposits, swaps, futures, options, caps, floors, collars, forwards and various combinations thereof.
Exchange-traded derivative contracts: Standardized derivative contracts (e.g., futures contracts and options) that are transacted on an organized futures exchange.
Gross negative fair value: The sum of the fair values of contracts where the bank owes money to its counter-parties, without taking into account netting. This represents the maximum losses the bank's counter-parties would incur if the bank defaults and there is no netting of contracts, and no bank collateral was held by the counter-parties.
Gross positive fair value: The sum total of the fair values of contracts where the bank is owed money by its counter-parties, without taking into account netting. This represents the maximum losses a bank could incur if all its counter-parties default and there is no netting of contracts, and the bank holds no counter-party collateral.
High-risk mortgage securities: Securities where the price or expected average life is highly sensitive to interest rate changes, as determined by the U.S. Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council policy statement on high-risk mortgage securities.
Notional amount: The nominal or face amount that is used to calculate payments made on swaps and other risk management products. This amount generally does not change hands and is thus referred to as notional.
Over-the-counter (OTC) derivative contracts: Privately negotiated derivative contracts that are transacted off organized futures exchanges.
Structured notes: Non-mortgage-backed debt securities, whose cash flow characteristics depend on one or more indices and / or have embedded forwards or options.
Total risk-based capital: The sum of tier 1 plus tier 2 capital. Tier 1 capital consists of common shareholders equity, perpetual preferred shareholders equity with noncumulative dividends, retained earnings, and minority interests in the equity accounts of consolidated subsidiaries. Tier 2 capital consists of subordinated debt, intermediate-term preferred stock, cumulative and long-term preferred stock, and a portion of a bank's allowance for loan and lease losses.
See also
Credit derivative
Derivatives law
Equity derivative
Exotic derivative
Financial engineering
Foreign exchange derivative
Freight derivative
Inflation derivative
Interest rate derivative
Property derivatives
Weather derivative
References
Further reading
External links
Understanding Derivatives: Markets and Infrastructure (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago)
"Derivatives simple guide", BBC News
Investment-foundations: Derivatives, CFA Institute
"European Union proposals on derivatives regulation – 2008 onwards"
" Derivatives Regulatory Roulette", PwC Financial Services Regulatory Practice (December 2013)
Securities (finance)
Financial law
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Des Moines () is the capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Iowa. It is also the county seat of Polk County. A small part of the city extends into Warren County. It was incorporated on September 22, 1851, as Fort Des Moines, which was shortened to "Des Moines" in 1857. It is located on, and named after, the Des Moines River, which likely was adapted from the early French name, Rivière des Moines, meaning "River of the Monks". The city's population was 214,133 as of the 2020 census. The six-county metropolitan area is ranked 83rd in terms of population in the United States with 699,292 residents according to the 2019 estimate by the United States Census Bureau, and is the largest metropolitan area fully located within the state. A portion of the larger Omaha, Nebraska, metropolitan area extends into three counties of southwest Iowa.
Des Moines is a major center of the US insurance industry and has a sizable financial services and publishing business base. The city was credited as the "number one spot for U.S. insurance companies" in a Business Wire article and named the third-largest "insurance capital" of the world. The city is the headquarters for the Principal Financial Group, Ruan Transportation, TMC Transportation, EMC Insurance Companies, and Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield. Other major corporations such as Wells Fargo, Cognizant, Voya Financial, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company, ACE Limited, Marsh, Monsanto, and Corteva have large operations in or near the metropolitan area. In recent years, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Facebook have built data-processing and logistical facilities in the Des Moines area.
Des Moines is an important city in U.S. presidential politics; as the state's capital, it is the site of the first caucuses of the presidential primary cycle. Many presidential candidates set up campaign headquarters in Des Moines. A 2007 article in The New York Times said, "If you have any desire to witness presidential candidates in the most close-up and intimate of settings, there is arguably no better place to go than Des Moines."
Etymology
Des Moines takes its name from Fort Des Moines (1843–46), which was named for the Des Moines River. This was adopted from the name given by French colonists. Des Moines (; formerly ) translates literally to either "from the monks" or "of the monks".
The historian Virgil Vogel claimed that the name was derived from Moingona, an Algonquian clan name, which means "Loon".
Some historians and researchers lacking linguistic or Algonquianist training concluded that Moingona meant "people by the portage" or something similar, a reference to the Des Moines Rapids. This was where the earliest known encounters between the Moingona and European explorers took place.
In 2015, Michael McCafferty of Indiana University, while studying the Miami-Illinois language, concluded that the name was actually a derisive term coined by the Peoria tribe. McCafferty agrees with other linguists that the "Moines" in Des Moines is a French derivation of Moingoana. What he discovered, however, was that it wasn't the actual name of the neighboring tribe; it was an insulting nickname they hurled at their rivals. It translates, essentially, as "the feces-faces."
One popular interpretation of "Des Moines" ignores Vogel's research, and concludes that it refers to a group of French Trappist monks, who in the 17th century lived in huts built on top of what is now known as the ancient Monks Mound at Cahokia, the major center of Mississippian culture, which developed in what is present-day Illinois, east of the Mississippi River and the city of St. Louis. This was some from the Des Moines River.
Prehistory
Prehistoric inhabitants of early Des Moines
Based on archaeological evidence, the junction of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers has attracted humans for at least 7,000 years. Several prehistoric occupation areas have been identified by archaeologists in downtown Des Moines. Discovered in December 2010, the "Palace" is an expansive, 7,000-year-old site found during excavations prior to construction of the new wastewater treatment plant in southeastern Des Moines. It contains well-preserved house deposits and numerous graves. More than 6,000 artifacts were found at this site. State of Iowa archaeologist John Doershuk was assisted by University of Iowa archaeologists at this dig.
At least three Late Prehistoric villages, dating from about AD 1300 to 1700, stood in or near what developed later as downtown Des Moines. In addition, 15 to 18 prehistoric American Indian mounds were observed in this area by early settlers. All have been destroyed during development of the city.
History
Origin of Fort Des Moines
Des Moines traces its origins to May 1843, when Captain James Allen supervised the construction of a fort on the site where the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers merge. Allen wanted to use the name Fort Raccoon; however, the U.S. War Department preferred Fort Des Moines. The fort was built to control the Sauk and Meskwaki tribes, whom the government had moved to the area from their traditional lands in eastern Iowa. The fort was abandoned in 1846 after the Sauk and Meskwaki were removed from the state and shifted to the Indian Territory.
The Sauk and Meskwaki did not fare well in Des Moines. The illegal whiskey trade, combined with the destruction of traditional lifeways, led to severe problems for their society. One newspaper reported:
"It is a fact that the location of Fort Des Moines among the Sac and Fox Indians (under its present commander) for the last two years, had corrupted them more and lowered them deeper in the scale of vice and degradation, than all their intercourse with the whites for the ten years previous".After official removal, the Meskwaki continued to return to Des Moines until around 1857.
Archaeological excavations have shown that many fort-related features survived under what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway and First Street. Soldiers stationed at Fort Des Moines opened the first coal mines in the area, mining coal from the riverbank for the fort's blacksmith.
Early, non-Native American, settlement
Settlers occupied the abandoned fort and nearby areas. On May 25, 1846, the state legislature designated Fort Des Moines as the seat of Polk County. Arozina Perkins, a school teacher who spent the winter of 1850–1851 in the town of Fort Des Moines, was not favorably impressed:
This is one of the strangest looking "cities" I ever saw... This town is at the juncture of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers. It is mostly a level prairie with a few swells or hills around it. We have a court house of "brick" and one church, a plain, framed building belonging to the Methodists. There are two taverns here, one of which has a most important little bell that rings together some fifty boarders. I cannot tell you how many dwellings there are, for I have not counted them; some are of logs, some of brick, some framed, and some are the remains of the old dragoon houses... The people support two papers and there are several dry goods shops. I have been into but four of them... Society is as varied as the buildings are. There are people from nearly every state, and Dutch, Swedes, etc.
In May 1851, much of the town was destroyed during the Flood of 1851. "The Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers rose to an unprecedented height, inundating the entire country east of the Des Moines River. Crops were utterly destroyed, houses and fences swept away." The city started to rebuild from scratch.
Era of growth
On September 22, 1851, Des Moines was incorporated as a city; the charter was approved by voters on October 18. In 1857, the name "Fort Des Moines" was shortened to "Des Moines", and it was designated as the second state capital, previously at Iowa City. Growth was slow during the Civil War period, but the city exploded in size and importance after a railroad link was completed in 1866.
In 1864, the Des Moines Coal Company was organized to begin the first systematic mining in the region. Its first mine, north of town on the river's west side, was exhausted by 1873. The Black Diamond mine, near the south end of the West Seventh Street Bridge, sank a mine shaft to reach a coal bed. By 1876, this mine employed 150 men and shipped 20 carloads of coal per day. By 1885, numerous mine shafts were within the city limits, and mining began to spread into the surrounding countryside. By 1893, 23 mines were in the region. By 1908, Des Moines' coal resources were largely exhausted. In 1912, Des Moines still had eight locals of the United Mine Workers union, representing 1,410 miners. This was about 1.7% of the city's population in 1910.
By 1880, Des Moines had a population of 22,408, making it Iowa's largest city. It displaced the three Mississippi River ports: Burlington, Dubuque, and Davenport, that had alternated holding the position since the territorial period. Des Moines has remained Iowa's most populous city. In 1910, the Census Bureau reported Des Moines' population as 97.3% white and 2.7% black, reflecting its early settlement pattern primarily by ethnic Europeans.
"City Beautiful" project, decline and rebirth
At the turn of the 20th century, encouraged by the Civic Committee of the Des Moines Women's Club, Des Moines undertook a "City Beautiful" project in which large Beaux Arts public buildings and fountains were constructed along the Des Moines River. The former Des Moines Public Library building (now the home of the World Food Prize); the United States central Post Office, built by the federal government (now the Polk County Administrative Building, with a newer addition); and the City Hall are surviving examples of the 1900–1910 buildings. They form the Civic Center Historic District.
The ornate riverfront balustrades that line the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers were built by the federal Civilian Conservation Corps in the mid-1930s, during the Great Depression under Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as a project to provide local employment and improve infrastructure. The ornamental fountains that stood along the riverbank were buried in the 1950s when the city began a postindustrial decline that lasted until the late 1980s. The city has since rebounded, transforming from a blue-collar industrial city to a white-collar professional city.
In 1907, the city adopted a city commission government known as the Des Moines Plan, comprising an elected mayor and four commissioners, all elected at-large, who were responsible for public works, public property, public safety, and finance. Considered progressive at the time, it diluted the votes of ethnic and national minorities, who generally could not command the majority to elect a candidate of their choice.
That form of government was scrapped in 1950 in favor of a council-manager government, with the council members elected at-large. In 1967, the city changed its government to elect four of the seven city council members from single-member districts or wards, rather than at-large. This enabled a broader representation of voters. As with many major urban areas, the city core began losing population to the suburbs in the 1960s (the peak population of 208,982 was recorded in 1960), as highway construction led to new residential construction outside the city. The population was 198,682 in 2000 and grew slightly to 200,538 in 2009. The growth of the outlying suburbs has continued, and the overall metropolitan-area population is over 600,000 today.
During the Great Flood of 1993, heavy rains throughout June and early July caused the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers to rise above flood stage levels. The Des Moines Water Works was submerged by floodwaters during the early morning hours of July 11, 1993, leaving an estimated 250,000 people without running water for 12 days and without drinking water for 20 days. Des Moines suffered major flooding again in June 2008 with a major levee breach. The Des Moines river is controlled upstream by Saylorville Reservoir. In both 1993 and 2008, the flooding river overtopped the reservoir spillway.
Today, Des Moines is a member of ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability USA. Through ICLEI, Des Moines has implemented "The Tomorrow Plan", a regional plan focused on developing central Iowa in a sustainable fashion, centrally-planned growth, and resource consumption to manage the local population.
Cityscape
The skyline of Des Moines changed in the 1970s and the 1980s, when several new skyscrapers were built. Additional skyscrapers were built in the 1990s, including Iowa's tallest. Before then, the 19-story Equitable Building, from 1924, was the tallest building in the city and the tallest building in Iowa. The 25-story Financial Center was completed in 1973 and the 36-story Ruan Center was completed in 1974. They were later joined by the 33-story Des Moines Marriott Hotel (1981), the 25-story HUB Tower and 25-story Plaza Building (1985). Iowa's tallest building, Principal Financial Group's 45-story tower at 801 Grand was built in 1991, and the 19-story EMC Insurance Building was erected in 1997.
During this time period, the Civic Center of Greater Des Moines (1979) was developed; it hosts Broadway shows and special events. Also constructed were the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden (1979), a large city botanical garden/greenhouse on the east side of the river; the Polk County Convention Complex (1985), and the State of Iowa Historical Museum (1987). The Des Moines skywalk also began to take shape during the 1980s. The skywalk system is long and connects many downtown buildings.
In the early 21st century, the city has had more major construction in the downtown area. The new Science Center of Iowa and Blank IMAX Dome Theater and the Iowa Events Center opened in 2005. The new central branch of the Des Moines Public Library, designed by renowned architect David Chipperfield of London, opened on April 8, 2006.
The World Food Prize Foundation, which is based in Des Moines, completed adaptation and restoration of the former Des Moines Public Library building in October 2011. The former library now serves as the home and headquarters of the Norman Borlaug/World Food Prize Hall of Laureates.
Geography
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of , of which is land and is covered by water. It is above sea level at the confluence of the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers.
In November 2005, Des Moines voters approved a measure that allowed the city to annex parcels of land in the northeast, southeast, and southern corners of Des Moines without agreement by local residents, particularly areas bordering the Iowa Highway 5/U.S. 65 bypass. The annexations became official on June 26, 2009, as and around 868 new residents were added to the city of Des Moines. An additional were voluntarily annexed to the city over that same period.
Metropolitan area
The Des Moines-West Des Moines Metropolitan Statistical Area consists of six central Iowa counties: Dallas, Guthrie, Jasper, Madison, Polk, and Warren. The area had a 2010 census population of 606,3475 and an estimated 2019 population of 699,292. The Des Moines-Ames-West Des Moines Combined Statistical Area consists of the Des Moines-West Des Moines Metropolitan Statistical Area, the Ames Metropolitan Statistical Area, the Oskaloosa Micropolitan Statistical Area, and the Pella Micropolitan Statistical Area. The 2010 census population of this area was 778,013, and the estimated 2019 population was 877,991. Des Moines' suburban communities include Altoona, Ankeny, Bondurant, Carlisle, Clive, Grimes, Johnston, Norwalk, Pleasant Hill, Urbandale, Waukee, West Des Moines, and Windsor Heights.
Climate
At the center of North America and far removed from large bodies of water, the Des Moines area has a hot summer type humid continental climate (Köppen Dfa), with warm to hot, humid summers and cold, dry winters. Summer temperatures can often climb into the range, occasionally reaching . Humidity can be high in spring and summer, with frequent afternoon thunderstorms. Fall brings pleasant temperatures and colorful fall foliage. Winters vary from moderately cold to bitterly cold, with low temperatures venturing below quite often. Snowfall averages per season, and annual precipitation averages , with a peak in the warmer months. Winters are slightly colder than Chicago, but still warmer than Minneapolis, with summer temperatures being very similar between the Upper Midwest metropolitan areas.
Demographics
2010 census
As of the census of 2010, there were 203,433 people, 81,369 households, and 47,491 families residing in the city. Population density was . There were 88,729 housing units at an average density of . The racial makeup of the city for Unincorporated areas not merged with the city proper was 66.2% White, 15.5% African Americans, 0.5% Native American, 4.0% Asian, and 2.6% from Two or more races. People of Hispanic or Latino origin, of any race, made up 12.1% of the population. The city's racial make up during the 2010 census was 76.4% White, 10.2% African American, 0.5% Native American, 4.4% Asian (1.2% Vietnamese, 0.9% Laotian, 0.4% Burmese, 0.3% Asian Indian, 0.3% Thai, 0.2% Chinese, 0.2% Cambodian, 0.2% Filipino, 0.1% Hmong, 0.1% Korean, 0.1% Nepalese), 0.1% Pacific Islander, 5.0% from other races, and 3.4% from two or more races. People of Hispanic or Latino origin, of any race, formed 12.0% of the population (9.4% Mexican, 0.7% Salvadoran, 0.3% Guatemalan, 0.3% Puerto Rican, 0.1% Honduran, 0.1% Ecuadorian, 0.1% Cuban, 0.1% Spaniard, 0.1% Spanish). Non-Hispanic Whites were 70.5% of the population in 2010.
There were 81,369 households, of which 31.6% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 38.9% were married couples living together, 14.2% had a female householder with no husband present, 5.3% had a male householder with no wife present, and 41.6% were non-families. 32.5% of all households were made up of individuals, and 9.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.43 and the average family size was 3.11.
The median age in the city was 33.5 years. 24.8% of residents were under the age of 18; 10.9% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 29.4% were from 25 to 44; 23.9% were from 45 to 64; and 11% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 48.9% male and 51.1% female.
2000 census
As of the 2000 census, there were 198,682 people, 80,504 households, and 48,704 families in the city. The population density was 2,621.3 people per square mile (1,012.0/km). There were 85,067 housing units at an average density of 1,122.3 per square mile (433.3/km). The racial makeup of the city was 82.3% white, 8.07% Black, 0.35% American Indian, 3.50% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 3.52% from other races, and 2.23% from two or more races. 6.61% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. 20.9% were of German, 10.3% Irish, 9.1% "American" and 8.0% English ancestry, according to Census 2000.
There were 80,504 households, out of which 29.5% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 43.7% were married couples living together, 12.6% had a female householder with no husband present, and 39.5% were non-families. 31.9% of all households were made up of individuals, and 10.2% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.39 and the average family size was 3.04.
Age spread: 24.8% under the age of 18, 10.6% from 18 to 24, 31.8% from 25 to 44, 20.4% from 45 to 64, and 12.4% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 34 years. For every 100 females, there were 93.8 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 90.5 males.
The median income for a household in the city was $38,408, and the median income for a family was $46,590. Males had a median income of $31,712 versus $25,832 for females. The per capita income for the city was $19,467. About 7.9% of families and 11.4% of the population were below the poverty line, including 14.9% of those under age 18 and 7.6% of those ages 65 or over.
Economy
Many insurance companies are headquartered in Des Moines, including the Principal Financial Group, EMC Insurance Group, Fidelity & Guaranty Life, Allied Insurance, GuideOne Insurance, Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield of Iowa, FBL Financial Group, and American Republic Insurance Company. Iowa has one of the lowest insurance premium tax in the nation at 1%, and doesn't charge any premium taxes on qualified life insurance plans, making the state attractive to insurance business. Des Moines has been referred to as the "Hartford of the West" and "Insurance Capital" because of this. The Principal is one of two Fortune 500 companies with headquarters in Iowa (the other being Casey's General Stores), ranking 201st on the magazine's list in 2020.
As a center of financial and insurance services, other major corporations headquartered outside of Iowa have a presence in the Des Moines Metro area, including Wells Fargo, Voya Financial, and Electronic Data Systems (EDS). The Meredith Corporation, a leading publishing and marketing company, was also based in Des Moines prior to its acquisition by IAC and merger with Dotdash in 2021. Meredith published Better Homes and Gardens, one of the most widely circulated publications in the United States. Des Moines was also the headquarters of Golf Digest magazine.
Other major employers in Des Moines include UnityPoint Health, Mercy Medical Center, MidAmerican Energy Company, CDS Global, UPS, Firestone Agricultural Tire Company, EDS, Drake University, Titan Tire, The Des Moines Register, Anderson Erickson, Dee Zee and EMCO.
In 2017, Kemin Industries opened a state-of-the-art worldwide headquarters building in Des Moines.
Culture
Arts and theatre
The City of Des Moines is a cultural center for Iowa and home to several art and history museums and performing arts groups. The Des Moines Performing Arts routinely hosts touring Broadway shows and other live professional theater. Its president and CEO, Jeff Chelsvig, is a member of the League of American Theatres and Producers, Inc. The Temple for Performing Arts and Des Moines Playhouse are other venues for live theatre, comedy, and performance arts.
The Des Moines Metro Opera has been a cultural resource in Des Moines since 1973. The Opera offers educational and outreach programs and is one of the largest performing arts organizations in the state. Ballet Des Moines was established in 2002. Performing three productions each year, the Ballet also provides opportunities for education and outreach.
The Des Moines Symphony performs frequently at different venues. In addition to performing seven pairs of classical concerts each season, the Symphony also entertains with New Year's Eve Pops and its annual Yankee Doodle Pops concerts.
The Metro Arts Alliance produces Jazz in July every year, that offers free jazz shows daily at various venues throughout the city during the entire month of July.
Wells Fargo Arena is the Des Moines area's primary venue for sporting events and concerts since its opening in 2005. Named for title sponsor Wells Fargo Financial Services, Wells Fargo Arena holds 16,980 and books large, national touring acts for arena concert performances, while several smaller venues host local, regional, and national bands. It is the home of the Iowa Wolves of the NBA G League, the Iowa Wild of the American Hockey League, and the Iowa Barnstormers of the Indoor Football League.
The Simon Estes Riverfront Amphitheater is an outdoor concert venue on the east bank of the Des Moines River which hosts music events such as the Alive Concert Series.
The Des Moines Art Center, with a wing designed by architect I. M. Pei, presents art exhibitions and educational programs as well as studio art classes. The Center houses a collection of artwork from the 19th century to the present. An extension of the art center is downtown in an urban museum space, featuring three or four exhibitions each year.
The Pappajohn Sculpture Park was established in 2009. It showcases a collection of 24 sculptures donated by Des Moines philanthropists John and Mary Pappajohn. Nearby is the Temple for Performing Arts, a cultural center for the city. Next to the Temple is the Central Library, designed by renowned English architect David Chipperfield.
Salisbury House and Gardens is a 42-room historic house museum on of woodlands in the South of Grand neighborhood of Des Moines. It is named after—and loosely inspired by—King's House in Salisbury, England. Built in the 1920s by cosmetics magnate Carl Weeks and his wife, Edith, the Salisbury House contains authentic 16th-century English oak and rafters dating to Shakespeare's days, numerous other architectural features re-purposed from other historic English homes, and an internationally significant collection of original fine art, tapestries, decorative art, furniture, musical instruments, and rare books and documents. The Salisbury House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and has been featured on A&E's America's Castles and PBS's Antiques Roadshow. Prominent artists in the Salisbury House collection include Joseph Stella, Lillian Genth, Anthony van Dyck and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Built in 1877 by prominent pioneer businessman Hoyt Sherman, Hoyt Sherman Place mansion was Des Moines' first public art gallery and houses a distinctive collection of 19th and 20th century artwork. Its restored 1,250-seat theater features an intricate rococo plaster ceiling and excellent acoustics and is used for a variety of cultural performances and entertainment.
Attractions
Arising in the east and facing westward toward downtown, the Iowa State Capitol building with its , 23-karat gold leafed dome towering above the city is a favorite of sightseers. Four smaller domes flank the main dome. The Capitol houses the governor's offices, legislature, and the old Supreme Court Chambers. The ornate interior also features a grand staircase, mural "Westward", five-story law library, scale model of the USS Iowa, and collection of first lady dolls. Guided tours are available.
The Capitol grounds include a World War II memorial with sculpture and Wall of Memories, the 1894 Soldiers and Sailors Monument of the Civil War and memorials honoring those who served in the Spanish–American, Korean, and Vietnam Wars.
The West Capitol Terrace provides the entrance from the west to the state's grandest building, the State Capitol Building. The "people's park" at the foot of the Capitol complex includes a promenade and landscaped gardens, in addition to providing public space for rallies and special events. A granite map of Iowa depicting all 99 counties rests at the base of the terrace and has become an attraction for in-state visitors, many of whom walk over the map to find their home county.
Iowa's history lives on in the State of Iowa Historical Museum. This modern granite and glass structure at the foot of the State Capitol Building houses permanent and temporary exhibits exploring the people, places, events, and issues of Iowa's past. The showcase includes native wildlife, American Indian and pioneer artifacts, and political and military items. The museum features a genealogy and Iowa history library, museum gift shop, and cafe.
Terrace Hill, a National Historic Landmark and Iowa Governor's Residence, is among the best examples of American Victorian Second Empire architecture. This opulent 1869 home was built by Iowa's first millionaire, Benjamin F. Allen, and restored to the late 19th century period. It overlooks downtown Des Moines and is situated on with a re-created Victorian formal garden. Tours are conducted Tuesdays through Saturdays from March through December.
The Science Center of Iowa and Blank IMAX Dome Theater offers seven interactive learning areas, live programs, and hands-on activities encouraging learning and fun for all ages. Among its three theaters include the 216-seat Blank IMAX Dome Theater, 175-seat John Deere Adventure Theater featuring live performances, and a domed Star Theater.
The Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, an indoor conservatory of over 15,000 exotic plants, is one of the largest collections of tropical, subtropical, and desert-growing plants in the Midwest. The Center blooms with thousands of flowers year-round. Nearby are the Robert D. Ray Asian Gardens and Pavilion, named in honor of the former governor whose influence helped relocate thousands of Vietnamese refugees to Iowa homes in the 1970s and 1980s. Developed by the city's Asian community, the Gardens include a three-story Chinese pavilion, bonsai landscaping, and granite sculptures to highlight the importance of diversity and recognize Asian American contributions in Iowa.
Blank Park Zoo is a landscaped zoological park on the south side. Among the exhibits include a tropical rain forest, Australian Outback, and Africa. The Zoo offers education classes, tours, and rental facilities.
The Iowa Primate Learning Sanctuary was established as a scientific research facility with a campus housing bonobos and orangutans for the noninvasive interdisciplinary study of their cognitive and communicative capabilities.
The East Village, on the east side of the Des Moines River, begins at the river and extends about five blocks east to the State Capitol Building, offering an eclectic blend of historic buildings, hip eateries, boutiques, art galleries, and a wide variety of other retail establishments mixed with residences.
Adventureland Park is an amusement park in neighboring Altoona, just northeast of Des Moines. The park boasts more than 100 rides, shows, and attractions, including five rollercoasters. A hotel and campground is just outside the park. Also in Altoona is Prairie Meadows Racetrack and Casino, an entertainment venue for gambling and horse racing. Open 24 hours a day, year-round, the racetrack and casino features live racing, plus over 1,750 slot machines, table games, and concert and show entertainment.
Living History Farms in suburban Urbandale tells the story of Midwestern agriculture and rural life in an open-air museum with interpreters dressed in period costume who recreate the daily routines of early Iowans. Open daily from May through October, the Living History Farms include a 1700 Ioway Indian village, 1850 pioneer farm, 1875 frontier town, 1900 horse-powered farm, and a modern crop center.
Wallace House was the home of the first Henry Wallace, a national leader in agriculture and conservation and the first editor of Wallaces' Farmer farm journal. This restored 1883 Italianate Victorian houses exhibits, artifacts, and information covering four generations of Henry Wallaces and other family members.
Historic Jordan House in West Des Moines is a stately Victorian home built in 1850 and added to in 1870 by the first white settler in West Des Moines, James C. Jordan. Completely refurbished, this mansion was part of the Underground Railroad and today houses 16 period rooms, a railroad museum, West Des Moines community history, and a museum dedicated to the Underground Railroad in Iowa. In 1893 Jordan's daughter Eda was sliding down the banister when she fell off and broke her neck. She died two days later, and her ghost is reputed to haunt the house.
The Chicago Tribune wrote that Iowa's capital city has "walker-friendly downtown streets and enough outdoor sculpture, sleek buildings, storefronts and cafes to delight the most jaded stroller".
Festivals and events
Des Moines plays host to a growing number of nationally acclaimed cultural events, including the annual Des Moines Arts Festival in June, Metro Arts Jazz in July, Iowa State Fair in August, and the World Food & Music Festival in September. On Saturdays from May through October, the Downtown Farmers' Market draws visitors from across the state. Local parades include Saint Patrick's Day Parade, Drake Relays Parade, Capitol City Pride Parade, Iowa State Fair Parade, Labor Day Parade, and Beaverdale Fall Festival Parade.
Other annual festivals and events include: Des Moines Beer Week, 80/35 Music Festival, 515 Alive Music Festival, ArtFest Midwest, Blue Ribbon Bacon Fest, CelebrAsian Heritage Festival, Des Moines Pride Festival, Des Moines Renaissance Faire, Festa Italiana, Festival of Trees and Lights, World Food & Music Festival, I'll Make Me a World Iowa, Latino Heritage Festival, Oktoberfest, Winefest, ImaginEve!, Iowa's Premier Beer, Wine & Food Show, and Wild Rose Film Festival.
Museums
Des Moines Art Center
Des Moines Police Museum & Historical Society
Fort Des Moines Museum and Education Center
Jordan House Museum
Hoyt Sherman Place
Salisbury House
Science Center of Iowa
State Historical Society of Iowa
Terrace Hill – Official residence of the governor of Iowa
Wallace House Museum
World Food Prize Hall of Laureates
Wells Fargo History Museum
Government
Des Moines operates under a council–manager form of government. The council consists of a mayor (Frank Cownie) and is elected in citywide vote, two at-large members, and four members representing each of the city's four wards. In 2014, Jonathan Gano was appointed as the new Public Works Director. In 2015, Dana Wingert was appointed as Police Chief. In 2018, Steven L. Naber was appointed as the new City Engineer.
The council members include:
A plan to merge the governments of Des Moines and Polk County was rejected by voters during the November 2, 2004, election. The consolidated city-county government would have had a full-time mayor and a 15-member council that would have been divided among the city and its suburbs. Each suburb would still have retained its individual government but with the option to join the consolidated government at any time. Although a full merger was soundly rejected, many city and county departments and programs have been consolidated.
Transportation
Des Moines has an extensive skywalk system within its downtown core. With over four miles of enclosed walkway, it is one of the largest of such systems in the United States. The Des Moines Skywalk System has been criticized for hurting street-level business, though a recent initiative has been made to make street-level Skywalk entrances more visible.
Interstate 235 (I-235) cuts through the city, and I-35 and I-80 both pass through the Des Moines metropolitan area, as well as the city of Des Moines. On the northern side of the city of Des Moines and passing through the cities of Altoona, Clive, Johnston, Urbandale and West Des Moines, I-35 and I-80 converge into a long concurrency while I-235 takes a direct route through Des Moines, Windsor Heights, and West Des Moines before meeting up with I-35 and I-80 on the western edge of the metro. The Des Moines Bypass passes south and east of the city. Other routes in and around the city include US 6, US 69, Iowa 28, Iowa 141, Iowa 163, Iowa 330, and Iowa 415.
Des Moines's public transit system, operated by DART (Des Moines Area Regional Transit), which was the Des Moines Metropolitan Transit Authority until October 2006, consists entirely of buses, including regular in-city routes and express and commuter buses to outlying suburban areas.
Characteristics of household ownership of cars in Des Moines are similar to national averages. In 2015, 8.5 percent of Des Moines households lacked a car, and increased to 9.6 percent in 2016. The national average was 8.7 percent in 2016. Des Moines averaged 1.71 cars per household in 2016, compared to a national average of 1.8.
Burlington Trailways, Jefferson Lines, and Megabus run long-distance, inter-city bus routes through Des Moines.
Although Des Moines was historically a train hub, it does not have passenger train service. For east-west traffic it was served by The Rock Island's Corn Belt Rocket express from Omaha to the west, to Chicago in the east. The Rock Island also offered the Twin Star Rocket to Minneapolis to the north and Dallas and Houston to the south. Northward and northwest bound, there were Chicago and North Western trains to destinations including Minneapolis. The Wabash Railroad ran service to the southeast to St. Louis.
The nearest Amtrak station is in Osceola, about south of Des Moines. The Osceola station is served by the Chicago–San Francisco California Zephyr; there is no Osceola–Des Moines Amtrak Thruway Motorcoach connecting service. There have been proposals to extend Amtrak's planned Chicago–Moline Quad City Rocket to Des Moines via the Iowa Interstate Railroad.
The Des Moines International Airport (DSM), on Fleur Drive in the southern part of Des Moines, offers nonstop service to destinations within the United States. The only international service is cargo service, but there have been discussions about adding an international terminal.
Education
The Des Moines Public Schools district is the largest community school district in Iowa with 32,062 enrolled students as of the 2012–2013 school year. The district consists of 63 schools: 38 elementary schools, eleven middle schools, five high schools (East, Hoover, Lincoln, North, and Roosevelt), and ten special schools and programs. Small parts of the city are instead served by Carlisle Community Schools, Johnston Community School District, the Southeast Polk Community School District and the Saydel School District Grand View Christian School is the only private school in the city, although Des Moines Christian School (in Des Moines from 1947 to 2006) in Urbandale, Dowling Catholic High School in West Des Moines, and Ankeny Christian Academy on the north side of the metro area serve some city residents.
Des Moines is also home to the main campuses of three four-year private colleges: Drake University, Grand View University, and Mercy College of Health Sciences. The University of Iowa has a satellite facility in the city's Western Gateway Park, while Iowa State University hosts Master of Business Administration classes downtown. Simpson College, Upper Iowa University, William Penn University, and Purdue University Global. Des Moines Area Community College is the area's community college with campuses in Ankeny, Des Moines, and West Des Moines. The city is also home to Des Moines University, an osteopathic medical school.
Media
The Des Moines market, which originally consisted of Polk, Dallas, Story, and Warren counties, was ranked 91st by Arbitron as of the fall of 2007 with a population of 512,000 aged 12 and older. But in June 2011 it was moved up to 72nd with the addition of Boone, Clarke, Greene, Guthrie, Jasper, Lucas, Madison and Marion counties.
Radio
Commercial stations
iHeartMedia owns five radio stations in the area, including WHO 1040 AM, a 50,000-watt AM news/talk station that has the highest ratings in the area and once employed future President Ronald Reagan as a sportscaster. In addition to WHO, iHeartMedia owns KDRB 100.3 FM (adult hits), KKDM 107.5 FM (contemporary hits), KXNO-FM 106.3, and KXNO 1460 AM (sports radio). They also own news/talk station KASI 1430 AM and hot adult contemporary station KCYZ 105.1 FM, both of which broadcast from Ames.
Cumulus Media owns five stations that broadcast from facilities in Urbandale: KBGG 1700 AM (sports), KGGO 94.9 FM (classic rock), KHKI 97.3 FM (country music), KJJY 92.5 FM (country music), and KWQW 98.3 FM (classic hip hop).
Saga Communications owns seven stations in the area: KAZR 103.3 FM (rock), KIOA 93.3 FM (oldies), KIOA-HD2 99.9FM & 93.3 HD2 (Rhythmic Top 40), KOEZ 104.1 FM (soft adult contemporary), KPSZ 940 AM (contemporary Christian music & religious teaching), KRNT 1350 AM (ESPN Radio), and KSTZ 102.5 FM (adult contemporary hits).
Other stations in the Des Moines area include religious stations KWKY 1150 AM, and KPUL 101.7 FM.
Non-commercial stations
Non-commercial radio stations in the Des Moines area include KDPS 88.1 FM, a station operated by the Des Moines Public Schools; KWDM 88.7 FM, a station operated by Valley High School; KJMC 89.3 FM, an urban contemporary station; K213DV 90.5 FM, the contemporary Christian K-Love affiliate for the area; and KDFR 91.3 FM, operated by Family Radio. Iowa Public Radio broadcasts several stations in the Des Moines area, all of which are owned by Iowa State University and operated on campus. WOI 640 am, the networks flagship station, and WOI-FM 90.1, the networks flagship "Studio One" station, are both based out of Ames and serve as the area's National Public Radio outlets. The network also operates classical stations KICG, KICJ, KICL and KICP. The University of Northwestern – St. Paul operates Contemporary Christian simulcasts of KNWI-FM at 107.1 Osceola/Des Moines, KNWM-FM at 96.1 Madrid/Ames/Des Moines, and K264CD at 100.7 in downtown Des Moines.
Low-power FM stations include KFMG-LP 99.1, a community radio station broadcasting from the Hotel Fort Des Moines and also webstreamed.
Television
The Des Moines-Ames media market consists of 35 central Iowa counties: Adair, Adams, Appanoose, Audubon, Boone, Calhoun, Carroll, Clarke, Dallas, Decatur, Franklin, Greene, Guthrie, Hamilton, Hardin, Humboldt, Jasper, Kossuth, Lucas, Madison, Mahaska, Marion, Marshall, Monroe, Pocahontas, Polk, Poweshiek, Ringgold, Story, Taylor, Union, Warren, Wayne, Webster, and Wright. It was ranked 71st by Nielsen Media Research for the 2008–2009 television season with 432,410 television households.
Commercial television stations serving Des Moines include CBS affiliate KCCI channel 8, NBC affiliate WHO-DT channel 13, and Fox affiliate KDSM-TV channel 17. ABC affiliate WOI-TV channel 5 and CW affiliate KCWI-TV channel 23 are both licensed to Ames and broadcast from studios in West Des Moines. KFPX-TV channel 39, the local ION affiliate, is licensed to Newton. Two non-commercial stations are also licensed to Des Moines: KDIN channel 11, the local PBS member station and flagship of the Iowa Public Television network, and KDMI channel 19, a TCT affiliate. Mediacom is the Des Moines area's cable television provider. Television sports listings for Des Moines and Iowa can be found on the Des Moines Register website.
Print
The Des Moines Register is the city's primary daily newspaper. As of March 31, 2007, the Register ranked 71st in circulation among daily newspapers in the United States according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations with 146,050 daily and 233,229 Sunday subscribers. Weekly newspapers include Juice, a publication aimed at the 25–34 demographic published by the Register on Wednesdays; Cityview, an alternative weekly published on Thursdays; and the Des Moines Business Record, a business journal published on Sundays, along with the West Des Moines Register, the Johnston Register, and the Waukee Register on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays depending on the address of the subscriber. Additionally, magazine publisher Meredith Corporation was based in Des Moines prior to its aquisition by IAC and merger with Dotdash in 2021.
Sports and recreation
Sports
Des Moines hosts professional minor league teams in several sports — baseball, basketball, hockey, indoor football, and soccer — and is home to the sports teams of Drake University which play in NCAA Division I.
Des Moines is also home to the Drake University Bulldogs, an NCAA Division I member of the Missouri Valley Conference, primarily playing northwest of downtown at the on-campus Drake Stadium and Knapp Center. Drake Stadium is home to the famed Drake Relays each April. In addition to the Drake Relays, Drake Stadium has hosted multiple NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships and USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships.
The Des Moines Menace soccer club, a member of USL League Two, also play at Drake Stadium.
Des Moines is home to the Iowa Cubs baseball team of the Triple-A East. The I-Cubs, which are the Triple-A affiliate of the major league Chicago Cubs, play their home games at Principal Park near the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers.
Wells Fargo Arena of the Iowa Events Center is home to the Iowa Barnstormers of the Indoor Football League, the Iowa Wild of the American Hockey League, and the Iowa Wolves of the NBA G League. The Barnstormers relaunched as an af2 club in 2008 before joining a relaunched Arena Football League in 2010 and the Indoor Football League in 2015; the Barnstormers had previously played in the Arena Football League from 1994 to 2000 (featuring future NFL Hall of Famer and Super Bowl MVP quarterback Kurt Warner) before relocating to New York. The Iowa Energy, a D-League team, began play in 2007. They were bought by the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2017 and were renamed the Iowa Wolves to reflect the new ownership. The Wild, the AHL affiliate of the National Hockey League's Minnesota Wild have played at Wells Fargo Arena since 2013; previously, the Iowa Chops played four seasons in Des Moines (known as the Iowa Stars for three of those seasons.)
Additionally, the Des Moines Buccaneers of the United States Hockey League play at Buccaneer Arena in suburban Urbandale.
The Vikings of Grand View University also compete in intercollegiate athletics in Des Moines. A member of the Heart of America Athletic Conference, within the NAIA, they field 21 varsity athletic teams. They were NAIA National Champions in football in 2013.
The Principal Charity Classic, a Champions Tour golf event, is held at Wakonda Club in late May or early June. The IMT Des Moines Marathon is held throughout the city each October.
Parks and recreation
Des Moines has 76 city parks and three golf courses, as well as three family aquatic centers, five community centers and three swimming pools. The city has of trails. The first major park was Greenwood Park. The park commissioners purchased the land on April 21, 1894.
The Principal Riverwalk is a riverwalk park district being constructed along the banks of the Des Moines River in the downtown. Primarily funded by the Principal Financial Group, the Riverwalk is a multi-year jointly funded project also funded by the city and state. Upon completion, it will feature a recreational trail connecting the east and west sides of downtown via two pedestrian bridges. A landscaped promenade along the street level is planned. The Riverwalk includes the downtown Brenton Skating Plaza, open from November through March.
Gray's Lake, part of the of Gray's Lake Park, features a boat rental facility, fishing pier, floating boardwalks, and a park resource center. Located just south of the downtown, the centerpiece of the park is a lighted Kruidenier Trail, encircling it entirely.
From downtown Des Moines primarily along the east bank of the Des Moines River, the Neil Smith and John Pat Dorrian Trails are paved recreational trails that connect Gray's Lake northward to the east shore of Saylorville Lake, Big Creek State Park, and the recreational trails of Ankeny including the High Trestle Trail. These trails are near several recreational facilities including the Pete Crivaro Park, Principal Park, the Principal Riverwalk, the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, Union Park and its Heritage Carousel of Des Moines, Birdland Park and the Birdland Marina/Boatramp on the Des Moines River, Riverview Park, McHenry Park, and River Drive Park. Although outside of Des Moines, Jester Park has of land along the western shore of Saylorville Lake and can be reached from the Neil Smith Trail over the Saylorville Dam.
Just west of Gray's Lake are the of the Des Moines Water Works Park. The Water Works Park is along the banks of the Raccoon River immediately upstream from where the Raccoon River empties into the Des Moines River. The Des Moines Water Works Facility, which obtains the city's drinking water from the Raccoon River, is entirely within the Water Works Park. A bridge in the park crosses the Raccoon River. The Water Works Park recreational trails link to downtown Des Moines by travelling past Gray's Lake and back across the Raccoon River via either along the Meredith Trail near Principal Park, or along the Martin Luther King Jr. Parkway. The Water Works Park trails connect westward to Valley Junction and the recreational trails of the western suburbs: Windsor Heights, Urbandale, Clive, and Waukee. Also originating from Water Works Park, the Great Western Trail is an journey southward from Des Moines to Martensdale through the Willow Creek Golf Course, Orilla, and Cumming. Often, the location for summer music festivals and concerts, Water Works Park was the overnight campground for thousands of bicyclists on Tuesday, July 23, 2013, during RAGBRAI XLI.
Sister cities
The Greater Des Moines Sister City Commission, with members from the City of Des Moines and the suburbs of Cumming, Norwalk, Windsor Heights, Johnston, Urbandale, and Ankeny, maintains sister city relationships with:
Kōfu, Japan (1958)
Saint-Étienne, France (1985)
Shijiazhuang, China (1985)
Stavropol, Russia (1992)
Pristina, Kosovo (2018) (Kosovo also opened Consulate in downtown Des Moines in 2015 – List of diplomatic missions of Kosovo)
Catanzaro, Italy (2006)
Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia (1987)
See also
List of people from Des Moines, Iowa
B-Bop's (1988)
Moingona
Des Moines Police Department
Des Moines-class cruiser
Notes
References
Bibliography
Friedericks, William B. Covering Iowa: The History of the Des Moines Register and Tribune Company, 1849-1985 (Iowa State University Press, 2000), 318 pp.
External links
Des Moines Featured on NPR's State of the Re:Union
The Des Moines Post
Greater Des Moines Convention & Visitors Bureau
Cities in Iowa
Cities in Polk County, Iowa
Cities in Warren County, Iowa
County seats in Iowa
Des Moines metropolitan area
Populated places established in 1843
1843 establishments in Iowa Territory | [
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Ethical egoism is the normative ethical position that moral agents ought to act in their own self-interest. It differs from psychological egoism, which claims that people can only act in their self-interest. Ethical egoism also differs from rational egoism, which holds that it is rational to act in one's self-interest.
Ethical egoism holds, therefore, that actions whose consequences will benefit the doer are ethical.
Ethical egoism contrasts with ethical altruism, which holds that moral agents have an obligation to help others. Egoism and altruism both contrast with ethical utilitarianism, which holds that a moral agent should treat one's self (also known as the subject) with no higher regard than one has for others (as egoism does, by elevating self-interests and "the self" to a status not granted to others). But it also holds that one is not obligated to sacrifice one's own interests (as altruism does) to help others' interests, so long as one's own interests (i.e. one's own desires or well-being) are substantially equivalent to the others' interests and well-being, but they have the choice to do so. Egoism, utilitarianism, and altruism are all forms of consequentialism, but egoism and altruism contrast with utilitarianism, in that egoism and altruism are both agent-focused forms of consequentialism (i.e. subject-focused or subjective). However, utilitarianism is held to be agent-neutral (i.e. objective and impartial): it does not treat the subject's (i.e. the self's, i.e. the moral "agent's") own interests as being more or less important than the interests, desires, or well-being of others.
Ethical egoism does not, however, require moral agents to harm the interests and well-being of others when making moral deliberation; e.g. what is in an agent's self-interest may be incidentally detrimental, beneficial, or neutral in its effect on others. Individualism allows for others' interest and well-being to be disregarded or not, as long as what is chosen is efficacious in satisfying the self-interest of the agent. Nor does ethical egoism necessarily entail that, in pursuing self-interest, one ought always to do what one wants to do; e.g. in the long term, the fulfillment of short-term desires may prove detrimental to the self. Fleeting pleasure, then, takes a back seat to protracted eudaimonia. In the words of James Rachels, "Ethical egoism ... endorses selfishness, but it doesn't endorse foolishness."
Ethical egoism is often used as the philosophical basis for support of right-libertarianism and individualist anarchism. These are political positions based partly on a belief that individuals should not coercively prevent others from exercising freedom of action.
Forms
Ethical egoism can be broadly divided into three categories: individual, personal, and universal. An individual ethical egoist would hold that all people should do whatever benefits "my" (the individual's) self-interest; a personal ethical egoist would hold that they should act in their self-interest, but would make no claims about what anyone else ought to do; a universal ethical egoist would argue that everyone should act in ways that are in their self-interest.
History
Ethical egoism was introduced by the philosopher Henry Sidgwick in his book The Methods of Ethics, written in 1874. Sidgwick compared egoism to the philosophy of utilitarianism, writing that whereas utilitarianism sought to maximize overall pleasure, egoism focused only on maximizing individual pleasure.
Philosophers before Sidgwick have also retroactively been identified as ethical egoists. One ancient example is the philosophy of Yang Zhu (4th century BC), Yangism, who views wei wo, or "everything for myself", as the only virtue necessary for self-cultivation. Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics were exponents of virtue ethics, and "did not accept the formal principle that whatever the good is, we should seek only our own good, or prefer it to the good of others." However, the beliefs of the Cyrenaics have been referred to as a "form of egoistic hedonism", and while some refer to Epicurus' hedonism as a form of virtue ethics, others argue his ethics are more properly described as ethical egoism.
Justifications
Philosopher James Rachels, in an essay that takes as its title the theory's name, outlines the three arguments most commonly touted in its favor:
"The first argument," writes Rachels, "has several variations, each suggesting the same general point:
"Each of us is intimately familiar with our own individual wants and needs. Moreover, each of us is uniquely placed to pursue those wants and needs effectively. At the same time, we know the desires and needs of others only imperfectly, and we are not well situated to pursue them. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that if we set out to be 'our brother's keeper,' we would often bungle the job and end up doing more mischief than good."
To give charity to someone is to degrade them, implying as it does that they are reliant on such munificence and quite unable to look out for themselves. "That," reckons Rachels, "is why the recipients of 'charity' are so often resentful rather than appreciative."
Altruism, ultimately, denies an individual's value and is therefore destructive both to society and its individual components, viewing life merely as a thing to be sacrificed. Philosopher Ayn Rand is quoted as writing that, "[i]f a man accepts the ethics of altruism, his first concern is not how to live his life but how to sacrifice it." Moreover, "[t]he basic principle of altruism is that man has no right to exist for his own sake, that service to others is the only justification for his existence, and that self-sacrifice is his highest moral duty, virtue or value." Rather, she writes, "[t]he purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live."
All of our commonly accepted moral duties, from doing no harm unto others to speaking always the truth to keeping promises, are rooted in the one fundamental principle of self-interest.
It has been observed, however, that the very act of eating (especially, when there are others starving in the world) is such an act of self-interested discrimination. Ethical egoists such as Rand who readily acknowledge the (conditional) value of others to an individual, and who readily endorse empathy for others, have argued the exact reverse from Rachels, that it is altruism which discriminates: "If the sensation of eating a cake is a value, then why is it an immoral indulgence in your stomach, but a moral goal for you to achieve in the stomach of others?" It is therefore altruism which is an arbitrary position, according to Rand.
Criticism
It has been argued that extreme ethical egoism is self-defeating. Faced with a situation of limited resources, egoists would consume as much of the resource as they could, making the overall situation worse for everybody. Egoists may respond that if the situation becomes worse for everybody, that would include the egoist, so it is not, in fact, in their rational self-interest to take things to such extremes. However, the (unregulated) tragedy of the commons and the (one off) prisoner's dilemma are cases in which, on the one hand, it is rational for an individual to seek to take as much as possible even though that makes things worse for everybody, and on the other hand, those cases are not self-refuting since that behaviour remains rational even though it is ultimately self-defeating, i.e. self-defeating does not imply self-refuting. Egoists might respond that a tragedy of the commons, however, assumes some degree of public land. That is, a commons forbidding homesteading requires regulation. Thus, an argument against the tragedy of the commons, in this belief system, is fundamentally an argument for private property rights and the system that recognizes both property rights and rational self-interest—capitalism. More generally, egoists might say that an increasing respect for individual rights uniquely allows for increasing wealth creation and increasing usable resources despite a fixed amount of raw materials (e.g. the West pre-1776 versus post-1776, East versus West Germany, Hong Kong versus mainland China, North versus South Korea, etc.).
It is not clear how to apply a private ownership model to many examples of "commons", however. Examples include large fisheries, the atmosphere and the ocean.
Some perhaps decisive problems with ethical egoism have been pointed out.
One is that an ethical egoist would not want ethical egoism to be universalized: as it would be in the egoist's best self-interest if others acted altruistically towards them, they wouldn't want them to act egoistically; however, that is what they consider to be morally binding. Their moral principles would demand of others not to follow them, which can be considered self-defeating and leads to the question: "How can ethical egoism be considered morally binding if its advocates do not want it to be universally applied?"
Another objection (e.g. by James Rachels) states that the distinction ethical egoism makes between "yourself" and "the rest" – demanding to view the interests of "yourself" as more important – is arbitrary, as no justification for it can be offered; considering that the merits and desires of "the rest" are comparable to those of "yourself" while lacking a justifiable distinction, Rachels concludes that "the rest" should be given the same moral consideration as "yourself".
Notable proponents
The term ethical egoism has been applied retroactively to philosophers such as Bernard de Mandeville and to many other materialists of his generation, although none of them declared themselves to be egoists. Note that materialism does not necessarily imply egoism, as indicated by Karl Marx, and the many other materialists who espoused forms of collectivism. It has been argued that ethical egoism can lend itself to individualist anarchism such as that of Benjamin Tucker, or the combined anarcho-communism and egoism of Emma Goldman, both of whom were proponents of many egoist ideas put forward by Max Stirner. In this context, egoism is another way of describing the sense that the common good should be enjoyed by all. However, most notable anarchists in history have been less radical, retaining altruism and a sense of the importance of the individual that is appreciable but does not go as far as egoism. Recent trends to greater appreciation of egoism within anarchism tend to come from less classical directions such as post-left anarchy or Situationism (e.g. Raoul Vaneigem). Egoism has also been referenced by anarcho-capitalists, such as Murray Rothbard.
Philosopher Max Stirner, in his book The Ego and Its Own, was the first philosopher to call himself an egoist, though his writing makes clear that he desired not a new idea of morality (ethical egoism), but rather a rejection of morality (amoralism), as a nonexistent and limiting "spook"; for this, Stirner has been described as the first individualist anarchist. Other philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and David Gauthier, have argued that the conflicts which arise when people each pursue their own ends can be resolved for the best of each individual only if they all voluntarily forgo some of their aims—that is, one's self-interest is often best pursued by allowing others to pursue their self-interest as well so that liberty is equal among individuals. Sacrificing one's short-term self-interest to maximize one's long-term self-interest is one form of "rational self-interest" which is the idea behind most philosophers' advocacy of ethical egoism. Egoists have also argued that one's actual interests are not immediately obvious, and that the pursuit of self-interest involves more than merely the acquisition of some good, but the maximizing of one's chances of survival and/or happiness.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that egoistic or "life-affirming" behavior stimulates jealousy or "ressentiment" in others, and that this is the psychological motive for the altruism in Christianity. Sociologist Helmut Schoeck similarly considered envy the motive of collective efforts by society to reduce the disproportionate gains of successful individuals through moral or legal constraints, with altruism being primary among these. In addition, Nietzsche (in Beyond Good and Evil) and Alasdair MacIntyre (in After Virtue) have pointed out that the ancient Greeks did not associate morality with altruism in the way that post-Christian Western civilization has done.
Aristotle's view is that we have duties to ourselves as well as to other people (e.g. friends) and to the polis as a whole. The same is true for Thomas Aquinas, Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant, who claim that there are duties to ourselves as Aristotle did, although it has been argued that, for Aristotle, the duty to one's self is primary.
Ayn Rand argued that there is a positive harmony of interests among free, rational humans, such that no moral agent can rationally coerce another person consistently with their own long-term self-interest. Rand argued that other people are an enormous value to an individual's well-being (through education, trade and affection), but also that this value could be fully realized only under conditions of political and economic freedom. According to Rand, voluntary trade alone can assure that human interaction is mutually beneficial. Rand's student, Leonard Peikoff has argued that the identification of one's interests itself is impossible absent the use of principles, and that self-interest cannot be consistently pursued absent a consistent adherence to certain ethical principles. Recently, Rand's position has also been defended by such writers as Tara Smith, Tibor Machan, Allan Gotthelf, David Kelley, Douglas Rasmussen, Nathaniel Branden, Harry Binswanger, Andrew Bernstein, and Craig Biddle.
Philosopher David L. Norton identified himself as an "ethical individualist", and, like Rand, saw a harmony between an individual's fidelity to their own self-actualization, or "personal destiny", and the achievement of society's well-being.
See also
Adam Smith and the invisible hand
Baruch Spinoza
Epicurus
Thomas Hobbes
Behavioral economics
Cārvāka, an egoistic Indian philosophy
Ethical solipsism
Hedonism
Helping behavior
Objectivism
Profit motive
Rational expectations
Yangism, an egoistic Chinese philosophy
Footnotes
References
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.
Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics.
Baier, Kurt, 1990, "Egoism" in A Companion to Ethics, Peter Singer (ed.), Blackwell: Oxford.
Biddle, Craig, Loving Life: The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It, 2002, Glen Allen.
Branden, Nathaniel, The Psychology of Self-Esteem, 1969, Nash.
Hobbes, Thomas, 1968, Leviathan, C. B. Macpherson (ed.), Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Machan, Tibor, Classical Individualism: The Supreme Importance of Each Human Being, 1998, Routledge.
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1886, Beyond Good and Evil.
Norton, David, Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism, 1976, Princeton University Press.
Paul, E. & F. Miller & J. Paul (1997). Self-Interest. Cambridge University Press
Peikoff, Leonard, "Why Should One Act on Principle?," The Objectivist Forum, 1988.
Rachels, James. "Ethical Egoism." In Reason & Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy, edited by Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau, 532–40. California: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008. .
Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged, 1957, Random House.
Rand, Ayn, 1964, The Virtue of Selfishness. Signet.
Rosenstand, Nina. 2000. 'Chapter 3: Myself or Others?'. In The Moral of the Story. (3rd Edition). Mountain View, Calif: Mayfield Publishing: 127–67.
Schoeck, Helmut, Der Neid. Eine Theorie der Gesellschaft (Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour), 1966, 1st English ed. 1969.
Smith, Tara, Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality, 2000, Rowman & Littlefield. .
Smith, Tara, The Virtuous Egoist: Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics, 2006, Cambridge University Press. .
Waller, Bruce, N. 2005. "Egoism." In Consider Ethics: Theory, Readings, and Contemporary Issues. New York: Pearson Longman: 79–83.
External links
Merriam-Webster Dictionary entry for egoism
Egoism
Normative ethics
Anarchist theory
Libertarianism
Individualism
Consequentialism
Ethical theories
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An encyclopedia (American English), encyclopædia (archaic spelling), or encyclopaedia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either from all branches or from a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles or entries that are often arranged alphabetically by article name and sometimes by thematic categories. Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in most dictionaries. Generally speaking, encyclopedia articles focus on factual information concerning the subject named in the article's title; this is unlike dictionary entries, which focus on linguistic information about words, such as their etymology, meaning, pronunciation, use, and grammatical forms.
Encyclopedias have existed for around 2,000 years and have evolved considerably during that time as regards language (written in a major international or a vernacular language), size (few or many volumes), intent (presentation of a global or a limited range of knowledge), cultural perspective (authoritative, ideological, didactic, utilitarian), authorship (qualifications, style), readership (education level, background, interests, capabilities), and the technologies available for their production and distribution (hand-written manuscripts, small or large print runs, Internet). As a valued source of reliable information compiled by experts, printed versions found a prominent place in libraries, schools and other educational institutions.
The appearance of digital and open-source versions in the 21st century, such as Wikipedia, has vastly expanded the accessibility, authorship, readership, and variety of encyclopedia entries.
Etymology
The word encyclopedia (encyclo|pedia) comes from the Koine Greek , transliterated , meaning 'general education' from (), meaning 'circular, recurrent, required regularly, general' and (), meaning 'education, rearing of a child'; together, the phrase literally translates as 'complete instruction' or 'complete knowledge'. However, the two separate words were reduced to a single word due to a scribal error by copyists of a Latin manuscript edition of Quintillian in 1470. The copyists took this phrase to be a single Greek word, enkyklopaedia, with the same meaning, and this spurious Greek word became the New Latin word encyclopaedia, which in turn came into English. Because of this compounded word, fifteenth-century readers and since have often, and incorrectly, thought that the Roman authors Quintillian and Pliny described an ancient genre.
Characteristics
The modern encyclopedia was developed from the dictionary in the 18th century. Historically, both encyclopedias and dictionaries have been researched and written by well-educated, well-informed content experts, but they are significantly different in structure. A dictionary is a linguistic work which primarily focuses on alphabetical listing of words and their definitions. Synonymous words and those related by the subject matter are to be found scattered around the dictionary, giving no obvious place for in-depth treatment. Thus, a dictionary typically provides limited information, analysis or background for the word defined. While it may offer a definition, it may leave the reader lacking in understanding the meaning, significance or limitations of a term, and how the term relates to a broader field of knowledge.
To address those needs, an encyclopedia article is typically not limited to simple definitions, and is not limited to defining an individual word, but provides a more extensive meaning for a subject or discipline. In addition to defining and listing synonymous terms for the topic, the article is able to treat the topic's more extensive meaning in more depth and convey the most relevant accumulated knowledge on that subject. An encyclopedia article also often includes many maps and illustrations, as well as bibliography and statistics. An encyclopedia is, theoretically, not written in order to convince, although one of its goals is indeed to convince its reader of its own veracity.
Four major elements
Four major elements define an encyclopedia: its subject matter, its scope, its method of organization, and its method of production:
Encyclopedias can be general, containing articles on topics in every field (the English-language Encyclopædia Britannica and German Brockhaus are well-known examples). General encyclopedias may contain guides on how to do a variety of things, as well as embedded dictionaries and gazetteers. There are also encyclopedias that cover a wide variety of topics from a particular cultural, ethnic, or national perspective, such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia or Encyclopaedia Judaica.
Works of encyclopedic scope aim to convey the important accumulated knowledge for their subject domain, such as an encyclopedia of medicine, philosophy or law. Works vary in the breadth of material and the depth of discussion, depending on the target audience.
Some systematic method of organization is essential to making an encyclopedia usable for reference. There have historically been two main methods of organizing printed encyclopedias: the alphabetical method (consisting of a number of separate articles, organized in alphabetical order) and organization by hierarchical categories. The former method is today the more common, especially for general works. The fluidity of electronic media, however, allows new possibilities for multiple methods of organization of the same content. Further, electronic media offer new capabilities for search, indexing and cross reference. The epigraph from Horace on the title page of the 18th century Encyclopédie suggests the importance of the structure of an encyclopedia: "What grace may be added to commonplace matters by the power of order and connection."
As modern multimedia and the information age have evolved, new methods have emerged for the collection, verification, summation, and presentation of information of all kinds. Projects such as Everything2, Encarta, h2g2, and Wikipedia are examples of new forms of the encyclopedia as information retrieval becomes simpler. The method of production for an encyclopedia historically has been supported in both for-profit and non-profit contexts. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia mentioned above was entirely state sponsored, while the Britannica was supported as a for-profit institution. By comparison, Wikipedia is supported by volunteers contributing in a non-profit environment under the organization of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Encyclopedic dictionaries
Some works entitled "dictionaries" are actually similar to encyclopedias, especially those concerned with a particular field (such as the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, and Black's Law Dictionary). The Macquarie Dictionary, Australia's national dictionary, became an encyclopedic dictionary after its first edition in recognition of the use of proper nouns in common communication, and the words derived from such proper nouns.
Differences between encyclopedias and dictionaries
There are some broad differences between encyclopedias and dictionaries. Most noticeably, encyclopedia articles are longer, fuller and more thorough than entries in most general-purpose dictionaries. There are differences in content as well. Generally speaking, dictionaries provide linguistic information about words themselves, while encyclopedias focus more on the thing for which those words stand. Thus, while dictionary entries are inextricably fixed to the word described, encyclopedia articles can be given a different entry name. As such, dictionary entries are not fully translatable into other languages, but encyclopedia articles can be.
In practice, however, the distinction is not concrete, as there is no clear-cut difference between factual, "encyclopedic" information and linguistic information such as appears in dictionaries. Thus encyclopedias may contain material that is also found in dictionaries, and vice versa. In particular, dictionary entries often contain factual information about the thing named by the word.
Largest encyclopedias
As of the early 2020s, the largest encyclopedias are the Chinese Baike.com (18 million articles) and Baidu Baike (16 million), followed by English Wikipedia (6 million), German (+2 million) and French Wikipedia (+2 million), all of which are wholly online. More than a dozen other Wikipedias have 1 million articles or more, of variable quality and length. Measuring an encyclopedia's size by its articles is an ambiguous method since the online Chinese encyclopedias cited above allow multiple articles on the same topic, while Wikipedia's accept only one single common article per topic but allow automated creation of nearly empty articles.
History
Encyclopedias have progressed from the beginning of history in written form, through medieval and modern times in print, and most recently, displayed on computer and distributed via computer networks, including the Internet.
Written encyclopedias
The earliest encyclopedic work to have survived to modern times is the Naturalis Historia of Pliny the Elder, a Roman statesman living in the 1st century AD. He compiled a work of 37 chapters covering natural history, architecture, medicine, geography, geology, and all aspects of the world around him. This work became very popular in Antiquity, was one of the first classical manuscripts to be printed in 1470, and has remained popular ever since as a source of information on the Roman world, and especially Roman art, Roman technology and Roman engineering.
The Spanish scholar Isidore of Seville was the first Christian writer to try to compile a summa of universal knowledge, the Etymologiae (c. 600–625), also known by classicists as the Origines (abbreviated Orig.). This encyclopedia—the first such Christian epitome—formed a huge compilation of 448 chapters in 20 volumes based on hundreds of classical sources, including Natural Historia. Of Etymologiae in its time it was said quaecunque fere sciri debentur, "practically everything that it is necessary to know". Among the areas covered were: grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, geometry, music, astronomy, medicine, law, the Catholic Church and heretical sects, pagan philosophers, languages, cities, animals and birds, the physical world, geography, public buildings, roads, metals, rocks, agriculture, ships, clothes, food, and tools.
Another Christian encyclopedia was the Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum of Cassiodorus (543-560) dedicated to the Christian Divinity and to the seven liberal arts. The encyclopedia of Suda, a massive 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia, had 30 000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers. The text was arranged alphabetically with some slight deviations from common vowel order and place in the Greek alphabet.
From India, the Siribhoovalaya (Kannada: ಸಿರಿಭೂವಲಯ), dated between 800 A.D to 15th century, is a work of kannada literature written by Kumudendu Muni, a Jain monk. It is unique because rather than employing alphabets, it is composed entirely in Kannada numerals. Many philosophies which existed in the Jain classics are eloquently and skillfully interpreted in the work.
The enormous encyclopedic work in China of the Four Great Books of Song, compiled by the 11th century during the early Song dynasty (960–1279), was a massive literary undertaking for the time. The last encyclopedia of the four, the Prime Tortoise of the Record Bureau, amounted to 9.4 million Chinese characters in 1000 written volumes.
There were many great encyclopedists throughout Chinese history, including the scientist and statesman Shen Kuo (1031–1095) with his Dream Pool Essays of 1088, the statesman, inventor, and agronomist Wang Zhen (active 1290–1333) with his Nong Shu of 1313, and the written Tiangong Kaiwu of Song Yingxing (1587–1666), the latter of whom was termed the "Diderot of China" by British historian Joseph Needham.
Printed encyclopedias
Before the advent of the printing press, encyclopedic works were all hand copied and thus rarely available, beyond wealthy patrons or monastic men of learning: they were expensive, and usually written for those extending knowledge rather than those using it.
During the Renaissance, the creation of printing allowed a wider diffusion of encyclopedias and every scholar could have his or her own copy. The by Giorgio Valla was posthumously printed in 1501 by Aldo Manuzio in Venice. This work followed the traditional scheme of liberal arts. However, Valla added the translation of ancient Greek works on mathematics (firstly by Archimedes), newly discovered and translated. The Margarita Philosophica by Gregor Reisch, printed in 1503, was a complete encyclopedia explaining the seven liberal arts.
Financial, commercial, legal, and intellectual factors changed the size of encyclopedias. Middle classes had more time to read and encyclopedias helped them to learn more. Publishers wanted to increase their output so some countries like Germany started selling books missing alphabetical sections, to publish faster. Also, publishers could not afford all the resources by themselves, so multiple publishers would come together with their resources to create better encyclopedias. Later, rivalry grew, causing copyright to occur due to weak underdeveloped laws.
John Harris is often credited with introducing the now-familiar alphabetic format in 1704 with his English Lexicon Technicum: Or, A Universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences: Explaining not only the Terms of Art, but the Arts Themselves – to give its full title. Organized alphabetically, its content does indeed contain explanation not merely of the terms used in the arts and sciences, but of the arts and sciences themselves. Sir Isaac Newton contributed his only published work on chemistry to the second volume of 1710.
The Encyclopædia Britannica, had a modest beginning in Scotland: the first edition, issued between 1768 and 1771, had just three hastily completed volumes – A–B, C–L, and M–Z – with a total of 2,391 pages. By 1797, when the third edition was completed, it had been expanded to 18 volumes addressing a full range of topics, with articles contributed by a range of authorities on their subjects.
The German-language Conversations-Lexikon was published at Leipzig from 1796 to 1808, in 6 volumes. Paralleling other 18th century encyclopedias, its scope was expanded beyond that of earlier publications, in an effort at comprehensiveness. It was, however, intended not for scholarly use but to provide results of research and discovery in a simple and popular form without extensive detail. This format, a contrast to the Encyclopædia Britannica, was widely imitated by later 19th century encyclopedias in Britain, the United States, France, Spain, Italy and other countries. Of the influential late-18th century and early-19th century encyclopedias, the Conversations-Lexikon is perhaps most similar in form to today's encyclopedias.
The Encyclopædia Britannica appeared in various editions throughout the nineteenth century, and the growth of popular education and the Mechanics' Institutes, spearheaded by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge led to the production of the Penny Cyclopaedia, as its title suggests issued in weekly numbers at a penny each like a newspaper.
In the early 20th century, the Encyclopædia Britannica reached its eleventh edition, and inexpensive encyclopedias such as Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia and Everyman's Encyclopaedia were common.
In the United States, the 1950s and 1960s saw the introduction of several large popular encyclopedias, often sold on installment plans. The best known of these were World Book and Funk and Wagnalls. As many as 90% were sold door to door. Jack Lynch says in his book You Could Look It Up that encyclopedia salespeople were so common that they became the butt of jokes. He describes their sales pitch saying, "They were selling not books but a lifestyle, a future, a promise of social mobility." A 1961 World Book ad said, "You are holding your family's future in your hands right now," while showing a feminine hand holding an order form.
Digital encyclopedias
By the late 20th century, encyclopedias were being published on CD-ROMs for use with personal computers. Microsoft's Encarta, launched in 1993, was a landmark example as it had no printed equivalent. Articles were supplemented with video and audio files as well as numerous high-quality images. After sixteen years, Microsoft discontinued the Encarta line of products in 2009.
Digital encyclopedias enable "Encyclopedia Services" (e.g. Wikimedia Enterprise) to facilitate programatic access to the content.
Free encyclopedias
The concept of a free encyclopedia began with the Interpedia proposal on Usenet in 1993, which outlined an Internet-based online encyclopedia to which anyone could submit content and that would be freely accessible. Early projects in this vein included Everything2 and Open Site. In 1999, Richard Stallman proposed the GNUPedia, an online encyclopedia which, similar to the GNU operating system, would be a "generic" resource. The concept was very similar to Interpedia, but more in line with Stallman's GNU philosophy.
It was not until Nupedia and later Wikipedia that a stable free encyclopedia project was able to be established on the Internet.
The English Wikipedia, which was started in 2001, became the world's largest encyclopedia in 2004 at the 300,000 article stage. By late 2005, Wikipedia had produced over two million articles in more than 80 languages with content licensed under the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License. As of August 2009, Wikipedia had over 3 million articles in English and well over 10 million combined in over 250 languages. Wikipedia currently has articles in English.
Since 2003, other free encyclopedias like the Chinese-language Baidu Baike and Hudong, as well as English language encyclopedias such as Citizendium and Knol have appeared, the latter of which has been discontinued.
Online encyclopedias
In January 1995, Project Gutenberg started to publish the ASCII text of the Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911), but disagreement about the method halted the work after the first volume. For trademark reasons this has been published as the Gutenberg Encyclopedia. Project Gutenberg later restarted work on digitising and proofreading this encyclopedia. Project Gutenberg has published volumes in alphabetic order the most recent publication is Volume 17 Slice 8: Matter–Mecklenburg published on 7 April 2013. The latest Britannica was digitized by its publishers, and sold first as a CD-ROM, and later as an online service.
In 2001, ASCII text of all 28 volumes was published on Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition by source; a copyright claim was added to the materials included. The website no longer exists.
Other digitization projects have made progress in other titles. One example is Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) digitized by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
A successful digitization of an encyclopedia was the Bartleby Project's online adaptation of the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, in early 2000 and is updated periodically.
Other websites provide online encyclopedias, some of which are also available on Wikisource, but which may be more complete than those on Wikisource, or maybe different editions (see List of online encyclopedias).
Another related branch of activity is the creation of new, free content on a volunteer basis. In 1991, the participants of the Usenet newsgroup started a project to produce a real version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a fictional encyclopedia used in the works of Douglas Adams. It became known as Project Galactic Guide. Although it originally aimed to contain only real, factual articles, the policy was changed to allow and encourage semi-real and unreal articles as well. Project Galactic Guide contains over 1700 articles, but no new articles have been added since 2000; this is probably partly due to the founding of h2g2, a more official project along similar lines.
The 1993 Interpedia proposal was planned as an encyclopedia on the Internet to which everyone could contribute materials. The project never left the planning stage and was overtaken by a key branch of old printed encyclopedias.
Another early online encyclopedia was called the Global Encyclopedia. In November 1995 a review of it was presented by James Rettig (Assistant Dean of University Libraries for Reference and Information Services) College of William & Mary at the 15th Annual Charleston Conference on library acquisitions and related issues. He said of the Global Encyclopedia:
He then gives several examples of article entries such as Iowa City:
Wikipedia is a free content, multilingual online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteer contributors through a model of open collaboration. It is the largest and most-read reference work in history. Wikipedia originally developed from another encyclopedia project called Nupedia.
CD-ROM encyclopedias
A CD-ROM encyclopedia is an encyclopedia delivered as reference software on a CD-ROM disc for use on a personal computer. This was the usual way computer users accessed encyclopedic knowledge from the 1980s and 1990s. Later DVD discs replaced CD-ROMs and from mid-2000s internet encyclopedias became dominant and replaced disc-based software encyclopedias. Some examples of CD-ROM encyclopedia are Encarta, Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, and Britannica.
CD-ROM encyclopedias were usually a macOS or Microsoft Windows (3.0, 3.1 or 95/98) application on a CD-ROM disc. The user would execute the encyclopedia's software program to see a menu that allowed them to start browsing the encyclopedia's articles, and most encyclopedias also supported a way to search the contents of the encyclopedia. The article text was usually hyperlinked and also included photographs, audio clips (for example in articles about historical speeches or musical instruments), and video clips. In the CD-ROM age the video clips had usually a low resolution, often 160x120 or 320x240 pixels. Such encyclopedias which made use of photos, audio and video were also called multimedia encyclopedias. However, because of the online encyclopedia, CD-ROM encyclopedias have been declared obsolete.
See also
Bibliography of encyclopedias
Biographical dictionary
Encyclopedic knowledge
Encyclopedism
Fictitious entry
History of science and technology
Lexicography
Library science
Lists of encyclopedias
Thesaurus
Speculum literature
Notes
References
C. Codoner, S. Louis, M. Paulmier-Foucart, D. Hüe, M. Salvat, A. Llinares, L'Encyclopédisme. Actes du Colloque de Caen, A. Becq (dir.), Paris, 1991.
External links
Encyclopaedia and Hypertext
Internet Accuracy Project – Biographical errors in encyclopedias and almanacs
Encyclopedia – Diderot's article on the Encyclopedia from the original Encyclopédie.
De expetendis et fugiendis rebus – First Renaissance encyclopedia
Errors and inconsistencies in several printed reference books and encyclopedias
Digital encyclopedias put the world at your fingertips CNET article
Encyclopedias online University of Wisconsin Stout listing by category
Chambers' Cyclopaedia, 1728, with the 1753 supplement
Encyclopædia Americana, 1851, Francis Lieber ed. (Boston: Mussey & Co.) at the University of Michigan Making of America site
Encyclopædia Britannica, articles and illustrations from 9th ed., 1875–89, and 10th ed., 1902–03.
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] |
In mathematics, an ellipse is a plane curve surrounding two focal points, such that for all points on the curve, the sum of the two distances to the focal points is a constant. As such, it generalizes a circle, which is the special type of ellipse in which the two focal points are the same. The elongation of an ellipse is measured by its eccentricity , a number ranging from (the limiting case of a circle) to (the limiting case of infinite elongation, no longer an ellipse but a parabola).
An ellipse has a simple algebraic solution for its area, but only approximations for its perimeter (also known as circumference), for which integration is required to obtain an exact solution.
Analytically, the equation of a standard ellipse centered at the origin with width and height is:
Assuming , the foci are for . The standard parametric equation is:
Ellipses are the closed type of conic section: a plane curve tracing the intersection of a cone with a plane (see figure). Ellipses have many similarities with the other two forms of conic sections, parabolas and hyperbolas, both of which are open and unbounded. An angled cross section of a cylinder is also an ellipse.
An ellipse may also be defined in terms of one focal point and a line outside the ellipse called the directrix: for all points on the ellipse, the ratio between the distance to the focus and the distance to the directrix is a constant. This constant ratio is the above-mentioned eccentricity:
Ellipses are common in physics, astronomy and engineering. For example, the orbit of each planet in the Solar System is approximately an ellipse with the Sun at one focus point (more precisely, the focus is the barycenter of the Sunplanet pair). The same is true for moons orbiting planets and all other systems of two astronomical bodies. The shapes of planets and stars are often well described by ellipsoids. A circle viewed from a side angle looks like an ellipse: that is, the ellipse is the image of a circle under parallel or perspective projection. The ellipse is also the simplest Lissajous figure formed when the horizontal and vertical motions are sinusoids with the same frequency: a similar effect leads to elliptical polarization of light in optics.
The name, (, "omission"), was given by Apollonius of Perga in his Conics.
Definition as locus of points
An ellipse can be defined geometrically as a set or locus of points in the Euclidean plane:
Given two fixed points called the foci and a distance which is greater than the distance between the foci, the ellipse is the set of points such that the sum of the distances is equal to :
The midpoint of the line segment joining the foci is called the center of the ellipse. The line through the foci is called the major axis, and the line perpendicular to it through the center is the minor axis. The major axis intersects the ellipse at two vertices , which have distance to the center. The distance of the foci to the center is called the focal distance or linear eccentricity. The quotient is the eccentricity.
The case yields a circle and is included as a special type of ellipse.
The equation can be viewed in a different way (see figure):
If is the circle with center and radius , then the distance of a point to the circle equals the distance to the focus :
is called the circular directrix (related to focus ) of the ellipse. This property should not be confused with the definition of an ellipse using a directrix line below.
Using Dandelin spheres, one can prove that any section of a cone with a plane is an ellipse, assuming the plane does not contain the apex and has slope less than that of the lines on the cone.
In Cartesian coordinates
Standard equation
The standard form of an ellipse in Cartesian coordinates assumes that the origin is the center of the ellipse, the x-axis is the major axis, and:
the foci are the points ,
the vertices are .
For an arbitrary point the distance to the focus is
and to the other focus . Hence the point is on the ellipse whenever:
Removing the radicals by suitable squarings and using (see diagram) produces the standard equation of the ellipse:
or, solved for y:
The width and height parameters are called the semi-major and semi-minor axes. The top and bottom points are the co-vertices. The distances from a point on the ellipse to the left and right foci are and .
It follows from the equation that the ellipse is symmetric with respect to the coordinate axes and hence with respect to the origin.
Parameters
Principal axes
Throughout this article, the semi-major and semi-minor axes are denoted and , respectively, i.e.
In principle, the canonical ellipse equation may have (and hence the ellipse would be taller than it is wide). This form can be converted to the standard form by transposing the variable names and and the parameter names and
Linear eccentricity
This is the distance from the center to a focus: .
Eccentricity
The eccentricity can be expressed as:
assuming An ellipse with equal axes () has zero eccentricity, and is a circle.
Semi-latus rectum
The length of the chord through one focus, perpendicular to the major axis, is called the latus rectum. One half of it is the semi-latus rectum . A calculation shows:
The semi-latus rectum is equal to the radius of curvature at the vertices (see section curvature).
Tangent
An arbitrary line intersects an ellipse at 0, 1, or 2 points, respectively called an exterior line, tangent and secant. Through any point of an ellipse there is a unique tangent. The tangent at a point of the ellipse has the coordinate equation:
A vector parametric equation of the tangent is:
with
Proof:
Let be a point on an ellipse and be the equation of any line containing . Inserting the line's equation into the ellipse equation and respecting yields:
There are then cases:
Then line and the ellipse have only point in common, and is a tangent. The tangent direction has perpendicular vector , so the tangent line has equation for some . Because is on the tangent and the ellipse, one obtains .
Then line has a second point in common with the ellipse, and is a secant.
Using (1) one finds that is a tangent vector at point , which proves the vector equation.
If and are two points of the ellipse such that , then the points lie on two conjugate diameters (see below). (If , the ellipse is a circle and "conjugate" means "orthogonal".)
Shifted ellipse
If the standard ellipse is shifted to have center , its equation is
The axes are still parallel to the x- and y-axes.
General ellipse
In analytic geometry, the ellipse is defined as a quadric: the set of points of the Cartesian plane that, in non-degenerate cases, satisfy the implicit equation
provided
To distinguish the degenerate cases from the non-degenerate case, let ∆ be the determinant
Then the ellipse is a non-degenerate real ellipse if and only if C∆ < 0. If C∆ > 0, we have an imaginary ellipse, and if ∆ = 0, we have a point ellipse.
The general equation's coefficients can be obtained from known semi-major axis , semi-minor axis , center coordinates , and rotation angle (the angle from the positive horizontal axis to the ellipse's major axis) using the formulae:
These expressions can be derived from the canonical equation by an affine transformation of the coordinates :
Conversely, the canonical form parameters can be obtained from the general form coefficients by the equations:
Parametric representation
Standard parametric representation
Using trigonometric functions, a parametric representation of the standard ellipse is:
The parameter t (called the eccentric anomaly in astronomy) is not the angle of with the x-axis, but has a geometric meaning due to Philippe de La Hire (see Drawing ellipses below).
Rational representation
With the substitution and trigonometric formulae one obtains
and the rational parametric equation of an ellipse
which covers any point of the ellipse except the left vertex .
For this formula represents the right upper quarter of the ellipse moving counter-clockwise with increasing The left vertex is the limit
Rational representations of conic sections are commonly used in computer-aided design (see Bezier curve).
Tangent slope as parameter
A parametric representation, which uses the slope of the tangent at a point of the ellipse
can be obtained from the derivative of the standard representation :
With help of trigonometric formulae one obtains:
Replacing and of the standard representation yields:
Here is the slope of the tangent at the corresponding ellipse point, is the upper and the lower half of the ellipse. The vertices, having vertical tangents, are not covered by the representation.
The equation of the tangent at point has the form . The still unknown can be determined by inserting the coordinates of the corresponding ellipse point :
This description of the tangents of an ellipse is an essential tool for the determination of the orthoptic of an ellipse. The orthoptic article contains another proof, without differential calculus and trigonometric formulae.
General ellipse
Another definition of an ellipse uses affine transformations:
Any ellipse is an affine image of the unit circle with equation .
Parametric representation
An affine transformation of the Euclidean plane has the form , where is a regular matrix (with non-zero determinant) and is an arbitrary vector. If are the column vectors of the matrix , the unit circle , , is mapped onto the ellipse:
Here is the center and are the directions of two conjugate diameters, in general not perpendicular.
Vertices
The four vertices of the ellipse are , for a parameter defined by:
(If , then .) This is derived as follows. The tangent vector at point is:
At a vertex parameter , the tangent is perpendicular to the major/minor axes, so:
Expanding and applying the identities gives the equation for
Area
From Apollonios theorem (see below) one obtains:
The area of an ellipse is
Semiaxes
With the abbreviations
the statements of Apollonios's theorem can be written as:
Solving this nonlinear system for yields the semiaxes:
Implicit representation
Solving the parametric representation for by Cramer's rule and using , one obtains the implicit representation
.
Conversely: If the equation
with
of an ellipse centered at the origin is given, then the two vectors
point to two conjugate points and the tools developed above are applicable.
Example: For the ellipse with equation the vectors are
.
Rotated Standard ellipse
For one obtains a parametric representation of the standard ellipse rotated by angle :
Ellipse in space
The definition of an ellipse in this section gives a parametric representation of an arbitrary ellipse, even in space, if one allows to be vectors in space.
Polar forms
Polar form relative to center
In polar coordinates, with the origin at the center of the ellipse and with the angular coordinate measured from the major axis, the ellipse's equation is
Polar form relative to focus
If instead we use polar coordinates with the origin at one focus, with the angular coordinate still measured from the major axis, the ellipse's equation is
where the sign in the denominator is negative if the reference direction points towards the center (as illustrated on the right), and positive if that direction points away from the center.
In the slightly more general case of an ellipse with one focus at the origin and the other focus at angular coordinate , the polar form is
The angle in these formulas is called the true anomaly of the point. The numerator of these formulas is the semi-latus rectum .
Eccentricity and the directrix property
Each of the two lines parallel to the minor axis, and at a distance of from it, is called a directrix of the ellipse (see diagram).
For an arbitrary point of the ellipse, the quotient of the distance to one focus and to the corresponding directrix (see diagram) is equal to the eccentricity:
The proof for the pair follows from the fact that and satisfy the equation
The second case is proven analogously.
The converse is also true and can be used to define an ellipse (in a manner similar to the definition of a parabola):
For any point (focus), any line (directrix) not through , and any real number with the ellipse is the locus of points for which the quotient of the distances to the point and to the line is that is:
The extension to , which is the eccentricity of a circle, is not allowed in this context in the Euclidean plane. However, one may consider the directrix of a circle to be the line at infinity (with being the radius of the circle) in the projective plane.
(The choice yields a parabola, and if , a hyperbola.)
Proof
Let , and assume is a point on the curve.
The directrix has equation . With , the relation produces the equations
and
The substitution yields
This is the equation of an ellipse (), or a parabola (), or a hyperbola (). All of these non-degenerate conics have, in common, the origin as a vertex (see diagram).
If , introduce new parameters so that , and then the equation above becomes
which is the equation of an ellipse with center , the x-axis as major axis, and
the major/minor semi axis .
Construction of a directrix
Because of point of directrix (see diagram) and focus are inverse with respect to the circle inversion at circle (in diagram green). Hence can be constructed as shown in the diagram. Directrix is the perpendicular to the main axis at point .
General ellipse
If the focus is and the directrix , one obtains the equation
(The right side of the equation uses the Hesse normal form of a line to calculate the distance .)
Focus-to-focus reflection property
An ellipse possesses the following property:
The normal at a point bisects the angle between the lines .
Proof
Because the tangent is perpendicular to the normal, the statement is true for the tangent and the supplementary angle of the angle between the lines to the foci (see diagram), too.
Let be the point on the line with the distance to the focus , is the semi-major axis of the ellipse. Let line be the bisector of the supplementary angle to the angle between the lines . In order to prove that is the tangent line at point , one checks that any point on line which is different from cannot be on the ellipse. Hence has only point in common with the ellipse and is, therefore, the tangent at point .
From the diagram and the triangle inequality one recognizes that holds, which means: . The equality is true from the Angle bisector theorem because and . But if is a point of the ellipse, the sum should be .
Application
The rays from one focus are reflected by the ellipse to the second focus. This property has optical and acoustic applications similar to the reflective property of a parabola (see whispering gallery).
Conjugate diameters
Definition of conjugate diameters
A circle has the following property:
The midpoints of parallel chords lie on a diameter.
An affine transformation preserves parallelism and midpoints of line segments, so this property is true for any ellipse. (Note that the parallel chords and the diameter are no longer orthogonal.)
Definition
Two diameters of an ellipse are conjugate if the midpoints of chords parallel to lie on
From the diagram one finds:
Two diameters of an ellipse are conjugate whenever the tangents at and are parallel to .
Conjugate diameters in an ellipse generalize orthogonal diameters in a circle.
In the parametric equation for a general ellipse given above,
any pair of points belong to a diameter, and the pair belong to its conjugate diameter.
For the common parametric representation of the ellipse with equation one gets: The points
(signs: (+,+) or (-,-) )
(signs: (-,+) or (+,-) )
are conjugate and
In case of a circle the last equation collapses to
Theorem of Apollonios on conjugate diameters
For an ellipse with semi-axes the following is true:
Let and be halves of two conjugate diameters (see diagram) then
.
The triangle with sides (see diagram) has the constant area , which can be expressed by , too. is the altitude of point and the angle between the half diameters. Hence the area of the ellipse (see section metric properties) can be written as .
The parallelogram of tangents adjacent to the given conjugate diameters has the
Proof
Let the ellipse be in the canonical form with parametric equation
.
The two points are on conjugate diameters (see previous section). From trigonometric formulae one obtains and
The area of the triangle generated by is
and from the diagram it can be seen that the area of the parallelogram is 8 times that of . Hence
Orthogonal tangents
For the ellipse the intersection points of orthogonal tangents lie on the circle .
This circle is called orthoptic or director circle of the ellipse (not to be confused with the circular directrix defined above).
Drawing ellipses
Ellipses appear in descriptive geometry as images (parallel or central projection) of circles. There exist various tools to draw an ellipse. Computers provide the fastest and most accurate method for drawing an ellipse. However, technical tools (ellipsographs) to draw an ellipse without a computer exist. The principle of ellipsographs were known to Greek mathematicians such as Archimedes and Proklos.
If there is no ellipsograph available, one can draw an ellipse using an approximation by the four osculating circles at the vertices.
For any method described below, knowledge of the axes and the semi-axes is necessary (or equivalently: the foci and the semi-major axis).
If this presumption is not fulfilled one has to know at least two conjugate diameters. With help of Rytz's construction the axes and semi-axes can be retrieved.
de La Hire's point construction
The following construction of single points of an ellipse is due to de La Hire. It is based on the standard parametric representation of an ellipse:
Draw the two circles centered at the center of the ellipse with radii and the axes of the ellipse.
Draw a line through the center, which intersects the two circles at point and , respectively.
Draw a line through that is parallel to the minor axis and a line through that is parallel to the major axis. These lines meet at an ellipse point (see diagram).
Repeat steps (2) and (3) with different lines through the center.
Pins-and-string method
The characterization of an ellipse as the locus of points so that sum of the distances to the foci is constant leads to a method of drawing one using two drawing pins, a length of string, and a pencil. In this method, pins are pushed into the paper at two points, which become the ellipse's foci. A string is tied at each end to the two pins; its length after tying is . The tip of the pencil then traces an ellipse if it is moved while keeping the string taut. Using two pegs and a rope, gardeners use this procedure to outline an elliptical flower bed—thus it is called the gardener's ellipse.
A similar method for drawing confocal ellipses with a closed string is due to the Irish bishop Charles Graves.
Paper strip methods
The two following methods rely on the parametric representation (see section parametric representation, above):
This representation can be modeled technically by two simple methods. In both cases center, the axes and semi axes have to be known.
Method 1
The first method starts with
a strip of paper of length .
The point, where the semi axes meet is marked by . If the strip slides with both ends on the axes of the desired ellipse, then point traces the ellipse. For the proof one shows that point has the parametric representation , where parameter is the angle of the slope of the paper strip.
A technical realization of the motion of the paper strip can be achieved by a Tusi couple (see animation). The device is able to draw any ellipse with a fixed sum , which is the radius of the large circle. This restriction may be a disadvantage in real life. More flexible is the second paper strip method.
A variation of the paper strip method 1 uses the observation that the midpoint of the paper strip is moving on the circle with center (of the ellipse) and radius . Hence, the paperstrip can be cut at point into halves, connected again by a joint at and the sliding end fixed at the center (see diagram). After this operation the movement of the unchanged half of the paperstrip is unchanged. This variation requires only one sliding shoe.
Method 2
The second method starts with
a strip of paper of length .
One marks the point, which divides the strip into two substrips of length and . The strip is positioned onto the axes as described in the diagram. Then the free end of the strip traces an ellipse, while the strip is moved. For the proof, one recognizes that the tracing point can be described parametrically by , where parameter is the angle of slope of the paper strip.
This method is the base for several ellipsographs (see section below).
Similar to the variation of the paper strip method 1 a variation of the paper strip method 2 can be established (see diagram) by cutting the part between the axes into halves.
Most ellipsograph drafting instruments are based on the second paperstrip method.
Approximation by osculating circles
From Metric properties below, one obtains:
The radius of curvature at the vertices is:
The radius of curvature at the co-vertices is:
The diagram shows an easy way to find the centers of curvature at vertex and co-vertex , respectively:
mark the auxiliary point and draw the line segment
draw the line through , which is perpendicular to the line
the intersection points of this line with the axes are the centers of the osculating circles.
(proof: simple calculation.)
The centers for the remaining vertices are found by symmetry.
With help of a French curve one draws a curve, which has smooth contact to the osculating circles.
Steiner generation
The following method to construct single points of an ellipse relies on the Steiner generation of a conic section:
Given two pencils of lines at two points (all lines containing and , respectively) and a projective but not perspective mapping of onto , then the intersection points of corresponding lines form a non-degenerate projective conic section.
For the generation of points of the ellipse one uses the pencils at the vertices . Let be an upper co-vertex of the ellipse and .
is the center of the rectangle . The side of the rectangle is divided into n equal spaced line segments and this division is projected parallel with the diagonal as direction onto the line segment and assign the division as shown in the diagram. The parallel projection together with the reverse of the orientation is part of the projective mapping between the pencils at and needed. The intersection points of any two related lines and are points of the uniquely defined ellipse. With help of the points the points of the second quarter of the ellipse can be determined. Analogously one obtains the points of the lower half of the ellipse.
Steiner generation can also be defined for hyperbolas and parabolas. It is sometimes called a parallelogram method because one can use other points rather than the vertices, which starts with a parallelogram instead of a rectangle.
As hypotrochoid
The ellipse is a special case of the hypotrochoid when , as shown in the adjacent image. The special case of a moving circle with radius inside a circle with radius is called a Tusi couple.
Inscribed angles and three-point form
Circles
A circle with equation is uniquely determined by three points not on a line. A simple way to determine the parameters uses the inscribed angle theorem for circles:
For four points (see diagram) the following statement is true:
The four points are on a circle if and only if the angles at and are equal.
Usually one measures inscribed angles by a degree or radian θ, but here the following measurement is more convenient:
In order to measure the angle between two lines with equations one uses the quotient:
Inscribed angle theorem for circles
For four points no three of them on a line, we have the following (see diagram):
The four points are on a circle, if and only if the angles at and are equal. In terms of the angle measurement above, this means:
At first the measure is available only for chords not parallel to the y-axis, but the final formula works for any chord.
Three-point form of circle equation
As a consequence, one obtains an equation for the circle determined by three non-colinear points :
For example, for the three-point equation is:
, which can be rearranged to
Using vectors, dot products and determinants this formula can be arranged more clearly, letting :
The center of the circle satisfies:
The radius is the distance between any of the three points and the center.
Ellipses
This section, we consider the family of ellipses defined by equations with a fixed eccentricity . It is convenient to use the parameter:
and to write the ellipse equation as:
where q is fixed and vary over the real numbers. (Such ellipses have their axes parallel to the coordinate axes: if , the major axis is parallel to the x-axis; if , it is parallel to the y-axis.)
Like a circle, such an ellipse is determined by three points not on a line.
For this family of ellipses, one introduces the following q-analog angle measure, which is not a function of the usual angle measure θ:
In order to measure an angle between two lines with equations one uses the quotient:
Inscribed angle theorem for ellipses
Given four points , no three of them on a line (see diagram).
The four points are on an ellipse with equation if and only if the angles at and are equal in the sense of the measurement above—that is, if
At first the measure is available only for chords which are not parallel to the y-axis. But the final formula works for any chord. The proof follows from a straightforward calculation. For the direction of proof given that the points are on an ellipse, one can assume that the center of the ellipse is the origin.
Three-point form of ellipse equation
A consequence, one obtains an equation for the ellipse determined by three non-colinear points :
For example, for and one obtains the three-point form
and after conversion
Analogously to the circle case, the equation can be written more clearly using vectors:
where is the modified dot product
Pole-polar relation
Any ellipse can be described in a suitable coordinate system by an equation . The equation of the tangent at a point of the ellipse is If one allows point to be an arbitrary point different from the origin, then
point is mapped onto the line , not through the center of the ellipse.
This relation between points and lines is a bijection.
The inverse function maps
line onto the point and
line onto the point
Such a relation between points and lines generated by a conic is called pole-polar relation or polarity. The pole is the point; the polar the line.
By calculation one can confirm the following properties of the pole-polar relation of the ellipse:
For a point (pole) on the ellipse, the polar is the tangent at this point (see diagram: ).
For a pole outside the ellipse, the intersection points of its polar with the ellipse are the tangency points of the two tangents passing (see diagram: ).
For a point within the ellipse, the polar has no point with the ellipse in common (see diagram: ).
The intersection point of two polars is the pole of the line through their poles.
The foci and , respectively, and the directrices and , respectively, belong to pairs of pole and polar. Because they are even polar pairs with respect to the circle , the directrices can be constructed by compass and straightedge (see Inversive geometry).
Pole-polar relations exist for hyperbolas and parabolas as well.
Metric properties
All metric properties given below refer to an ellipse with equation
except for the section on the area enclosed by a tilted ellipse, where the generalized form of Eq.() will be given.
Area
The area enclosed by an ellipse is:
where and are the lengths of the semi-major and semi-minor axes, respectively. The area formula is intuitive: start with a circle of radius (so its area is ) and stretch it by a factor to make an ellipse. This scales the area by the same factor: It is also easy to rigorously prove the area formula using integration as follows. Equation () can be rewritten as For this curve is the top half of the ellipse. So twice the integral of over the interval will be the area of the ellipse:
The second integral is the area of a circle of radius that is, So
An ellipse defined implicitly by has area
The area can also be expressed in terms of eccentricity and the length of the semi-major axis as (obtained by solving for flattening, then computing the semi-minor axis).
So far we have dealt with erect ellipses, whose major and minor axes are parallel to the and axes. However, some applications require tilted ellipses. In charged-particle beam optics, for instance, the enclosed area of an erect or tilted ellipse is an important property of the beam, its emittance. In this case a simple formula still applies, namely
where , are intercepts and , are maximum values. It follows directly from Apollonio's theorem.
Circumference
The circumference of an ellipse is:
where again is the length of the semi-major axis, is the eccentricity, and the function is the complete elliptic integral of the second kind,
which is in general not an elementary function.
The circumference of the ellipse may be evaluated in terms of using Gauss's arithmetic-geometric mean; this is a quadratically converging iterative method.
The exact infinite series is:
where is the double factorial (extended to negative odd integers by the recurrence relation , for ). This series converges, but by expanding in terms of James Ivory and Bessel derived an expression that converges much more rapidly:
Srinivasa Ramanujan gives two close approximations for the circumference in §16 of "Modular Equations and Approximations to "; they are
and
The errors in these approximations, which were obtained empirically, are of order and respectively.
Arc length
More generally, the arc length of a portion of the circumference, as a function of the angle subtended (or -coordinates of any two points on the upper half of the ellipse), is given by an incomplete elliptic integral. The upper half of an ellipse is parameterized by
Then the arc length from to is:
This is equivalent to
where is the incomplete elliptic integral of the second kind with parameter
Some lower and upper bounds on the circumference of the canonical ellipse with are
Here the upper bound is the circumference of a circumscribed concentric circle passing through the endpoints of the ellipse's major axis, and the lower bound is the perimeter of an inscribed rhombus with vertices at the endpoints of the major and the minor axes.
Curvature
The curvature is given by
radius of curvature at point :
Radius of curvature at the two vertices and the centers of curvature:
Radius of curvature at the two co-vertices and the centers of curvature:
In triangle geometry
Ellipses appear in triangle geometry as
Steiner ellipse: ellipse through the vertices of the triangle with center at the centroid,
inellipses: ellipses which touch the sides of a triangle. Special cases are the Steiner inellipse and the Mandart inellipse.
As plane sections of quadrics
Ellipses appear as plane sections of the following quadrics:
Ellipsoid
Elliptic cone
Elliptic cylinder
Hyperboloid of one sheet
Hyperboloid of two sheets
Applications
Physics
Elliptical reflectors and acoustics
If the water's surface is disturbed at one focus of an elliptical water tank, the circular waves of that disturbance, after reflecting off the walls, converge simultaneously to a single point: the second focus. This is a consequence of the total travel length being the same along any wall-bouncing path between the two foci.
Similarly, if a light source is placed at one focus of an elliptic mirror, all light rays on the plane of the ellipse are reflected to the second focus. Since no other smooth curve has such a property, it can be used as an alternative definition of an ellipse. (In the special case of a circle with a source at its center all light would be reflected back to the center.) If the ellipse is rotated along its major axis to produce an ellipsoidal mirror (specifically, a prolate spheroid), this property holds for all rays out of the source. Alternatively, a cylindrical mirror with elliptical cross-section can be used to focus light from a linear fluorescent lamp along a line of the paper; such mirrors are used in some document scanners.
Sound waves are reflected in a similar way, so in a large elliptical room a person standing at one focus can hear a person standing at the other focus remarkably well. The effect is even more evident under a vaulted roof shaped as a section of a prolate spheroid. Such a room is called a whisper chamber. The same effect can be demonstrated with two reflectors shaped like the end caps of such a spheroid, placed facing each other at the proper distance. Examples are the National Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol (where John Quincy Adams is said to have used this property for eavesdropping on political matters); the Mormon Tabernacle at Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah; at an exhibit on sound at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago; in front of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Foellinger Auditorium; and also at a side chamber of the Palace of Charles V, in the Alhambra.
Planetary orbits
In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler discovered that the orbits along which the planets travel around the Sun are ellipses with the Sun [approximately] at one focus, in his first law of planetary motion. Later, Isaac Newton explained this as a corollary of his law of universal gravitation.
More generally, in the gravitational two-body problem, if the two bodies are bound to each other (that is, the total energy is negative), their orbits are similar ellipses with the common barycenter being one of the foci of each ellipse. The other focus of either ellipse has no known physical significance. The orbit of either body in the reference frame of the other is also an ellipse, with the other body at the same focus.
Keplerian elliptical orbits are the result of any radially directed attraction force whose strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. Thus, in principle, the motion of two oppositely charged particles in empty space would also be an ellipse. (However, this conclusion ignores losses due to electromagnetic radiation and quantum effects, which become significant when the particles are moving at high speed.)
For elliptical orbits, useful relations involving the eccentricity are:
where
is the radius at apoapsis (the farthest distance)
is the radius at periapsis (the closest distance)
is the length of the semi-major axis
Also, in terms of and , the semi-major axis is their arithmetic mean, the semi-minor axis is their geometric mean, and the semi-latus rectum is their harmonic mean. In other words,
.
Harmonic oscillators
The general solution for a harmonic oscillator in two or more dimensions is also an ellipse. Such is the case, for instance, of a long pendulum that is free to move in two dimensions; of a mass attached to a fixed point by a perfectly elastic spring; or of any object that moves under influence of an attractive force that is directly proportional to its distance from a fixed attractor. Unlike Keplerian orbits, however, these "harmonic orbits" have the center of attraction at the geometric center of the ellipse, and have fairly simple equations of motion.
Phase visualization
In electronics, the relative phase of two sinusoidal signals can be compared by feeding them to the vertical and horizontal inputs of an oscilloscope. If the Lissajous figure display is an ellipse, rather than a straight line, the two signals are out of phase.
Elliptical gears
Two non-circular gears with the same elliptical outline, each pivoting around one focus and positioned at the proper angle, turn smoothly while maintaining contact at all times. Alternatively, they can be connected by a link chain or timing belt, or in the case of a bicycle the main chainring may be elliptical, or an ovoid similar to an ellipse in form. Such elliptical gears may be used in mechanical equipment to produce variable angular speed or torque from a constant rotation of the driving axle, or in the case of a bicycle to allow a varying crank rotation speed with inversely varying mechanical advantage.
Elliptical bicycle gears make it easier for the chain to slide off the cog when changing gears.
An example gear application would be a device that winds thread onto a conical bobbin on a spinning machine. The bobbin would need to wind faster when the thread is near the apex than when it is near the base.
Optics
In a material that is optically anisotropic (birefringent), the refractive index depends on the direction of the light. The dependency can be described by an index ellipsoid. (If the material is optically isotropic, this ellipsoid is a sphere.)
In lamp-pumped solid-state lasers, elliptical cylinder-shaped reflectors have been used to direct light from the pump lamp (coaxial with one ellipse focal axis) to the active medium rod (coaxial with the second focal axis).
In laser-plasma produced EUV light sources used in microchip lithography, EUV light is generated by plasma positioned in the primary focus of an ellipsoid mirror and is collected in the secondary focus at the input of the lithography machine.
Statistics and finance
In statistics, a bivariate random vector is jointly elliptically distributed if its iso-density contours—loci of equal values of the density function—are ellipses. The concept extends to an arbitrary number of elements of the random vector, in which case in general the iso-density contours are ellipsoids. A special case is the multivariate normal distribution. The elliptical distributions are important in finance because if rates of return on assets are jointly elliptically distributed then all portfolios can be characterized completely by their mean and variance—that is, any two portfolios with identical mean and variance of portfolio return have identical distributions of portfolio return.
Computer graphics
Drawing an ellipse as a graphics primitive is common in standard display libraries, such as the MacIntosh QuickDraw API, and Direct2D on Windows. Jack Bresenham at IBM is most famous for the invention of 2D drawing primitives, including line and circle drawing, using only fast integer operations such as addition and branch on carry bit. M. L. V. Pitteway extended Bresenham's algorithm for lines to conics in 1967. Another efficient generalization to draw ellipses was invented in 1984 by Jerry Van Aken.
In 1970 Danny Cohen presented at the "Computer Graphics 1970" conference in England a linear algorithm for drawing ellipses and circles. In 1971, L. B. Smith published similar algorithms for all conic sections and proved them to have good properties. These algorithms need only a few multiplications and additions to calculate each vector.
It is beneficial to use a parametric formulation in computer graphics because the density of points is greatest where there is the most curvature. Thus, the change in slope between each successive point is small, reducing the apparent "jaggedness" of the approximation.
Drawing with Bézier paths
Composite Bézier curves may also be used to draw an ellipse to sufficient accuracy, since any ellipse may be construed as an affine transformation of a circle. The spline methods used to draw a circle may be used to draw an ellipse, since the constituent Bézier curves behave appropriately under such transformations.
Optimization theory
It is sometimes useful to find the minimum bounding ellipse on a set of points. The ellipsoid method is quite useful for solving this problem.
See also
Cartesian oval, a generalization of the ellipse
Circumconic and inconic
Distance of closest approach of ellipses
Ellipse fitting
Elliptic coordinates, an orthogonal coordinate system based on families of ellipses and hyperbolae
Elliptic partial differential equation
Elliptical distribution, in statistics
Elliptical dome
Geodesics on an ellipsoid
Great ellipse
Kepler's laws of planetary motion
n-ellipse, a generalization of the ellipse for n foci
Oval
Spheroid, the ellipsoid obtained by rotating an ellipse about its major or minor axis
Stadium (geometry), a two-dimensional geometric shape constructed of a rectangle with semicircles at a pair of opposite sides
Steiner circumellipse, the unique ellipse circumscribing a triangle and sharing its centroid
Superellipse, a generalization of an ellipse that can look more rectangular or more "pointy"
True, eccentric, and mean anomaly
Notes
References
External links
Apollonius' Derivation of the Ellipse at Convergence
The Shape and History of The Ellipse in Washington, D.C. by Clark Kimberling
Ellipse circumference calculator
Collection of animated ellipse demonstrations
Trammel according Frans van Schooten
Conic sections
Plane curves
Elementary shapes
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The economic calculation problem (sometimes abbreviated ECP) is a criticism of using economic planning as a substitute for market-based allocation of the factors of production. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in his 1920 article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" and later expanded upon by Friedrich Hayek.
In his first article, Mises described the nature of the price system under capitalism and described how individual subjective values (while criticizing other theories of value) are translated into the objective information necessary for rational allocation of resources in society. He argued that economy planning necessarily leads to an irrational and inefficient allocation of resources. In market exchanges, prices reflect the supply and demand of resources, labor and products. In the article, Mises focused his criticism on the deficiencies of the socialisation of capital goods, but he later went on to elaborate on various different forms of socialism in his book Socialism. He briefly mentioned the problem in the 3rd book of Human Action: a Treatise on Economics, where he also elaborated on the different types of socialism, namely the "Hindenburg" and "Lenin" models, which are uniquely different, and showing why, in his view, market socialism still falls prey to the problems that are tied to socialism.
Mises and Hayek argued that economic calculation is only possible by information provided through market prices and that bureaucratic or technocratic methods of allocation lack methods to rationally allocate resources. Mises's analysis centered on price theory while Hayek went with a more feathered analysis of information and entrepreneurship. The debate raged in the 1920s and 1930s and that specific period of the debate has come to be known by economic historians as the socialist calculation debate. Mises' initial criticism received multiple reactions and led to the conception of trial-and-error market socialism, most notably the Lange–Lerner theorem.
In the 1920 paper, Mises argued that the pricing systems in socialist economies were necessarily deficient because if a public entity owned all the means of production, no rational prices could be obtained for capital goods as they were merely internal transfers of goods and not "objects of exchange", unlike final goods. Therefore, they were unpriced and hence the system would be necessarily irrational as the central planners would not know how to allocate the available resources efficiently. He wrote that "rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth". Mises developed his critique of socialism more completely in his 1922 book Socialism, arguing that the market price system is an expression of praxeology and can not be replicated by any form of bureaucracy.
Notable critics of both Mises's original argument and Hayek's newer proposition include Anarcho-Capitalist economist Bryan Caplan, computer programmer and Marxist Paul Cockshott, as well as other communists.
Theory
Comparing heterogeneous goods
Since capital goods and labor are highly heterogeneous (i.e. they have different characteristics that pertain to physical productivity), economic calculation requires a common basis for comparison for all forms of capital and labour.
As a means of exchange, money enables buyers to compare the costs of goods without having knowledge of their underlying factors; the consumer can simply focus on his personal cost-benefit decision. Therefore, the price system is said to promote economically efficient use of resources by agents who may not have explicit knowledge of all of the conditions of production or supply. This is called the signalling function of prices as well as the rationing function which prevents over-use of any resource.
Without the market process to fulfill such comparisons, critics of non-market socialism say that it lacks any way to compare different goods and services and would have to rely on calculation in kind. The resulting decisions, it is claimed, would therefore be made without sufficient knowledge to be considered rational.
Relating utility to capital and consumption goods
The common basis for comparison of capital goods must also be connected to consumer welfare. It must also be able to compare the desired trade-off between present consumption and delayed consumption (for greater returns later on) via investment in capital goods. The use of money as a medium of exchange and unit of account is necessary to solve the first two problems of economic calculation. Mises (1912) applied the marginal utility theory developed by Carl Menger to money.
Marginal consumer expenditures represent the marginal utility or additional consumer satisfaction expected by consumers as they spend money. This is similar to the equi-marginal principle developed by Alfred Marshall. Consumers equalize the marginal utility (amount of satisfaction) of the last dollar spent on each good. Thus, the exchange of consumer goods establishes prices that represent the marginal utility of consumers and money is representative of consumer satisfaction.
If money is also spent on capital goods and labor, then it is possible to make comparisons between capital goods and consumer goods. The exchange of consumer and capital/labor goods does not imply that capital goods are valued accurately, only that it is possible for the valuations of capital goods to be made. These first elements of the calculation critique of socialism are the most basic element, namely economic calculation requires the use of money across all goods. This is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for successful economic calculation. Without a price mechanism, Mises argues, socialism lacks the means to relate consumer satisfaction to economic activity. The incentive function of prices allows diffuse interests, like the interests of every household in cheap, high quality shoes to compete with the concentrated interests of the cobblers in expensive, poor quality shoes. Without it, a panel of experts set up to "rationalise production", likely closely linked to the cobblers for expertise, would tend to support the cobblers interests in a "conspiracy against the public". However, if this happens to all industries, everyone would be worse off than if they had been subject to the rigours of market competition.
The Mises theory of money and calculation conflicts directly with Marxist labour theory of value. Marxist theory allows for the possibility that labour content can serve as a common means of valuing capital goods, a position now out of favour with economists following the success of the theory of marginal utility.
Entrepreneurship
The third condition for economic calculation is the existence of genuine entrepreneurship and market rivalry.
According to Israel Kirzner (1973) and Don Lavoie (1985), entrepreneurs reap profits by supplying unfulfilled needs in all markets. Thus, entrepreneurship brings prices closer to marginal costs. The adjustment of prices in markets towards equilibrium (where supply and demand equal) gives them greater utilitarian significance. The activities of entrepreneurs make prices more accurate in terms of how they represent the marginal utility of consumers. Prices act as guides to the planning of production. Those who plan production use prices to decide which lines of production should be expanded or curtailed.
Entrepreneurs lack the profit motive to take risks under socialism and so are far less likely to attempt to supply consumer demands. Without the price system to match consumer utility to incentives for production, or even indicate those utilities "without providing incentives", state planners are much less likely to invest in new ideas to satisfy consumers' desires.
Coherent planning
The fourth condition for successful economic calculation is plan coordination among those who plan production. The problem of planning production is the knowledge problem explained by Hayek (1937, 1945), but first mentioned and illustrated by his mentor Mises in Socialism (1922), not to be mistaken with Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1951). The planning could either be done in a decentralised fashion, requiring some mechanism to make the individual plans coherent, or centrally, requiring a lot of information.
Within capitalism, the overall plan for production is composed of individual plans from capitalists in large and small enterprises. Since capitalists purchase labour and capital out of the same common pool of available yet scarce labor and capital, it is essential that their plans fit together in at least a semi-coherent fashion. Hayek (1937) defined an efficient planning process as one where all decision makers form plans that contain relevant data from the plans from others. Entrepreneurs acquire data on the plans from others through the price system. The price system is an indispensable communications network for plan coordination among entrepreneurs. Increases and decreases in prices inform entrepreneurs about the general economic situation, to which they must adjust their own plans.
As for socialism, Mises (1944) and Hayek (1937) insisted that bureaucrats in individual ministries could not coordinate their plans without a price system. If decentralized socialism cannot work, central authorities must plan production. However, central planners face the local knowledge problem in forming a comprehensive plan for production. Mises and Hayek saw centralization as inevitable in socialism. Opponents argued that in principle an economy can be seen as a set of equations. Thus, there should be no need for prices. Using information about available resources and the preferences of people, it should be possible to calculate an optimal solution for resource allocation. Friedrich von Hayek responded that the system of equations required too much information that would not be easily available and the ensuing calculations would be too difficult. This is partly because individuals possess useful knowledge but do not realise its importance, may have no incentive to transmit the information, or may have incentive to transmit false information about their preferences. He contended that the only rational solution is to utilize all the dispersed knowledge in the market place through the use of price signals. The early debates were made before the much greater calculating powers of modern computers became available but also before research on chaos theory. In the 1980s, Alexander Nove argued that the calculations would take millions of years even with the best computers. It may be impossible to make long-term predictions for a highly complex system such as an economy.
Hayek (1935, 1937, 1940, 1945) stressed the knowledge problem of central planning, partly because decentralized socialism seemed indefensible. Part of the reason that Hayek stressed the knowledge problem was also because he was mainly concerned with debating the proposal for market socialism and the Lange model by Oskar R. Lange (1938) and Hayek's student Abba Lerner (1934, 1937, 1938) which was developed in response to the calculation argument. Lange and Lerner conceded that prices were necessary in socialism. Lange and Lerner thought that socialist officials could simulate some markets (mainly spot markets) and the simulation of spot markets was enough to make socialism reasonably efficient. Lange argued that prices can be seen merely as an accounting practice. In principle, claim market socialists, socialist managers of state enterprises could use a price system, as an accounting system, in order to minimize costs and convey information to other managers. However, while this can deal with existing stocks of goods, providing a basis for values can be ascertained, it does not deal with the investment in new capital stocks. Hayek responded by arguing that the simulation of markets in socialism would fail due to a lack of genuine competition and entrepreneurship. Central planners would still have to plan production without the aid of economically meaningful prices. Lange and Lerner also admitted that socialism would lack any simulation of financial markets, and that this would cause problems in planning capital investment.
However, Hayek's argumentation is not only regarding computational complexity for the central planners. He further argues that much of the information individuals have cannot be collected or used by others. First, individuals may have no or little incentive to share their information with central or even local planners. Second, the individual may not be aware that he has valuable information; and when he becomes aware, it is only useful for a limited time, too short for it to be communicated to the central or local planners. Third, the information is useless to other individuals if it is not in a form that allows for meaningful comparisons of value (i.e. money prices as a common basis for comparison). Therefore, Hayek argues, individuals must acquire data through prices in real markets.
Financial markets
The fifth condition for successful economic calculation is the existence of well functioning financial markets. Economic efficiency depends heavily upon avoiding errors in capital investment. The costs of reversing errors in capital investment are potentially large. This is not just a matter of rearranging or converting capital goods that are found to be of little use. The time spent reconfiguring the structure of production is time lost in the production of consumer goods. Those who plan capital investment must anticipate future trends in consumer demand if they are to avoid investing too much in some lines of production and too little in other lines of production.
Capitalists plan production for profit. Capitalists use prices to form expectations that determine the composition of capital accumulation, the pattern of investment across industry. Those who invest in accordance with consumers' desires are rewarded with profits, those who do not are forced to become more efficient or go out of business.
Prices in futures markets play a special role in economic calculation. Futures markets develop prices for commodities in future time periods. It is in futures markets that entrepreneurs sort out plans for production based on their expectations. Futures markets are a link between entrepreneurial investment decisions and household consumer decisions. Since most goods are not explicitly traded in futures markets, substitute markets are needed. The stock market serves as a ‘continuous futures market’ that evaluates entrepreneurial plans for production (Lachmann 1978). Generally speaking, the problem of economic calculation is solved in financial markets as Mises argued:
The existence of financial markets is a necessary condition for economic calculation. The existence of financial markets itself does not automatically imply that entrepreneurial speculation will tend towards efficiency. Mises argued that speculation in financial markets tends towards efficiency because of a "trial and error" process. Entrepreneurs who commit relatively large errors in investment waste their funds over expanding some lines of production at the cost of other more profitable ventures where consumer demand is higher. The entrepreneurs who commit the worst errors by forming the least accurate expectations of future consumer demands incur financial losses. Financial losses remove these inept entrepreneurs from positions of authority in industry.
Entrepreneurs who commit smaller errors by anticipating consumer demand more correctly attain greater financial success. The entrepreneurs who form the most accurate opinions regarding the future state of markets (i.e. new trends in consumer demands) earn the highest profits and gain greater control of industry. Those entrepreneurs who anticipate future market trends therefore waste the least amount of real capital and find the most favorable terms for finance on markets for financial capital. Minimal waste of real capital goods implies the minimization of the opportunity costs of capital's economic calculation. The value of capital goods is brought into line with the value of future consumer goods through competition in financial markets, because competition for profits among capitalist financiers rewards entrepreneurs who value capital more correctly (i.e. anticipating future prices more correctly) and eliminates capitalists who value capital least correctly. To sum things up, the use of money in trading all goods (capital/labor and consumer) in all markets (spot and financial) combined with profit driven entrepreneurship and Darwinian natural selection in financial markets all combine to make rational economic calculation and allocation the outcome of the capitalist process.
Mises insisted that socialist calculation is impossible because socialism precludes the exchange of capital goods in terms of a generally accepted medium of exchange, or money. Investment in financial markets determines the capital structure of modern industry with some degree of efficiency. The egalitarian nature of socialism prohibits speculation in financial markets. Therefore, Mises concluded that socialism lacks any clear tendency towards improvement in the capital structure of industry.
Example
Mises gave the example of choosing between producing wine or oil, making the following point:
Such intermediate products would include land, warehouse storage, bottles, barrels, oil, transport, etc. Not only would these things have to be assembled, but they would have to compete with the attainment of other economic goals. Without pricing for capital goods, essentially, Mises is arguing, it is impossible to know what their rational/most efficient use is. Investment is particularly impossible as the potential future outputs cannot be measured by any current standard, let alone a monetary one required for economic calculation. The value consumers have for current consumption over future consumption cannot be expressed, quantified or implemented as investment is independent from savings.
Criticism
Efficiency of markets
Some academics and economists argue that the claim a free market is efficient, or even the most efficient, method of resource allocation is incorrect. Alexander Nove argued that Mises "tends to spoil his case by the implicit assumption that capitalism and optimum resource allocation go together" in Mises' "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth". Joan Robinson argued that many prices in modern capitalism are effectively "administered prices" created by "quasi monopolies", thus challenging the connection between capital markets and rational resource allocation. Robin Hahnel argued that free markets are in fact systematically inefficient because externalities are pervasive and because real-world markets are rarely truly competitive or in equilibrium. Socialist market abolitionists argue that whilst advocates of capitalism and the Austrian School in particular recognize equilibrium prices do not exist, they nonetheless claim that these prices can be used as a rational basis when this is not the case, hence markets are not efficient.
Joseph Schumpeter argued that large firms generally drive economic advancement through innovation and investment and so their proliferation is not necessarily bad. In countries with protectionist policies, foreign competition cannot fulfill this role, but the threat of potential competition, namely that as companies abuse their position new rivals could emerge and gain customers dissatisfied with the old companies, can still reduce the inefficiencies. Milton Friedman agreed that markets with monopolistic competition are not efficient, but he argued that in countries with free trade the pressure from foreign competition would make monopolies behave in a competitive manner.
Economic liberals and libertarian capitalists adamantly oppose any distortion of market structure by the introduction of government influence, asserting that such interference would be a form of central planning or state capitalism, insofar as it would redirect decision making from the private to the public sector. These libertarian capitalist analysts argue that monopolies and big business are not generally the result of a free market, or that they never arise from a free market; rather, they say that such concentration is enabled by governmental grants of franchises or privileges.
Equilibrium
Allin Cottrell, Paul Cockshott and Greg Michaelson argued that the contention that finding a true economic equilibrium is not just hard but impossible for a central planner applies equally well to a market system. As any universal Turing machine can do what any other Turing machine can, a central calculator in principle has no advantage over a system of dispersed calculators, i.e. a market, or vice versa.
In some economic models, finding an equilibrium is hard, and finding an Arrow–Debreu equilibrium is PPAD-complete. If the market can find an equilibrium in polynomial time, then the equivalence above can be used to prove that P=PPAD. This line of argument thus attempts to show that any claim to impossibility must necessarily involve a local knowledge problem, because the planning system is no less capable than the market if given full information.
Don Lavoie makes a local knowledge argument by taking this implication in reverse. The market socialists pointed out the formal similarity between the neoclassical model of Walrasian general equilibrium and that of market socialism which simply replace the Walrasian auctioneer with a planning board. According to Lavoie, this emphasizes the shortcomings of the model. By relying on this formal similarity, the market socialists must adopt the simplifying assumptions of the model. The model assumes that various sorts of information are given to the auctioneer or planning board. However, if not coordinated by a capital market, this information exists in a fundamentally distributed form, unavailable to the planners. If the planners somehow captured this information, it would immediately become stale and relatively useless, unless reality somehow imitated the changeless monotony of the equilibrium model. The existence and usability of this information depends on its creation and situation within a distributed discovery procedure.
Scale of problem
One criticism is that proponents of the theory overstate the strength of their case by describing socialism as impossible rather than inefficient. In explaining why he is not an Austrian School economist, anarcho-capitalist economist Bryan Caplan argues that while the economic calculation problem is a problem for socialism, he denies that Mises has shown it to be fatal or that it is this particular problem that led to the collapse of authoritarian socialist states. Caplan also states the exaggeration of the problem; in his view, Mises did not manage to prove why economic calculation made the socialist economy 'impossible', and even if there were serious doubts about the efficiency of cost benefit analysis, other arguments are plentiful (Caplan gives the example of the incentive problem).
Steady-state economy
Joan Robinson argued that in a steady-state economy there would be an effective abundance of means of production and so markets would not be needed. Mises acknowledged such a theoretical possibility in his original tract when he said the following: "The static state can dispense with economic calculation. For here the same events in economic life are ever recurring; and if we assume that the first disposition of the static socialist economy follows on the basis of the final state of the competitive economy, we might at all events conceive of a socialist production system which is rationally controlled from an economic point of view." However, he contended that stationary conditions never prevail in the real world. Changes in economic conditions are inevitable; and even if they were not, the transition to socialism would be so chaotic as to preclude the existence of such a steady-state from the start.
The purpose of the price mechanism is to allow individuals to recognise the opportunity cost of decisions. In a state of abundance, there is no such cost, which is to say that in situations where one need not economize, economics does not apply, e.g. areas with abundant fresh air and water. Otto Neurath and Hillel Ticktin argued that with detailed use of real unit accounting and demand surveys a planned economy could operate without a capital market in a situation of abundance.
Use of technology
In Towards a New Socialism'''s "Information and Economics: A Critique of Hayek" and "Against Mises", Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell argued that the use of computational technology now simplifies economic calculation and allows planning to be implemented and sustained. Len Brewster replied to this by arguing that Towards a New Socialism establishes what is essentially another form of a market economy, making the following point:
In response, Cockshott argued that the economic system is sufficiently far removed from a capitalist free-market economy to not count as one, saying:
Cosma Shalizi articulated the problems that come with planning using supercomputers in a 2012 essay. He cited the complexity of the problem as well as the difficulty of negotiating between preferences as being the central problems with such a system.
Leigh Phillips' and Michal Rozworski's 2019 book The People's Republic of Walmart argues that multinational corporations like Walmart and Amazon already operate centrally planned economies larger than the Soviet Union, proving that the economic calculation problem is surmountable.
See also
Decentralized planning (economics)
Economic planning
Enrico Barone
Input-output model
Lange model
Local knowledge problem
Market socialism
New Economic Policy
Otto Neurath
Post-scarcity economy
Production for use
Real prices and ideal prices
Red Plenty Self-managed economy
Socialism
Socialist calculation debate
Socialization (economics)
Tax choice
Transition economy
References
Bibliography
Boettke, Peter 1990 The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism.
Caldwell, B: 1997. Hayek and Socialism The Journal of Economic Literature V35 pp. 1856–1890.
Cottrell, Allin and Cockshott W. Paul "Calculation, Complexity and Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Once Again" Review of Political Economy
Cox, Robin 2005, "The Economic Calculation Controversy: Unravelling of a Myth".
Dickinson H. D. 1933 Price Formation in a Socialist Community in The Economic Journal.
Dickinson, H. D. 1939 The Economics of Socialism.
Hayek, F. A. 1935 Collectivist Economic Planning.
Hayek F. A. 1937 Economics and Knowledge Economica V4 N13 pp. 33–54.
Hayek F. A. 1940 The Competitive "Solution" Economica V7 N26 pp. 125–149.
Hayek, F. A. The Road to Serfdom.
Hayek, F. A. 1945 "The Use of Knowledge in Society" The American Economic Review.
Hayek, F. A. 1952 The Counter Revolution of Science.
Lachmann, L: 1978 Capital and Its Structure. Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, Kansas City.
Lange, Oscar 1967 The Computer and the Market in Socialism, Capitalism, and Economic Growth Feinstein Ed.
Lavoie, Don: 1981. A Critique of the Standard Account of the Socialist Calculation Debate Journal of Libertarian Studies N5 V1 pp. 41-87.
MacKenzie, D. W. 2006 "Oskar Lange and the Impossibility of Economic Calculation". Studia Economicze.
Mises L. E. 1912 The Theory of Money and Credit.
Mises L. E. 1920 Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, reprinted in Hayek (1935).
Mises L. E. 1922 [1936] Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis.
Mises 1933 Planned Economy and Socialism; reprinted in Selected Writings of Ludwig von Mises, The Liberty Fund (2002) Richard M Ebeling ed.
Mises L. E. 1944 Bureaucracy.
Mises L. E. 1944 Omnipotent Government.
Mises L. E. 1949 Human Action.
Mises L. E. 1957 Theory and History.
Roemer, John (1994). A Future for Socialism, Verso Press.
Rothbard, M. N. 1991. The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited. The Review of Austrian Economics.
Spufford, Francis. 2010 Red Plenty'', Faber & Faber.
Stiglitz, J: 1994. Whither Socialism? MIT Press.
Vaughn, Karen. 1980. Economic Calculation under Socialism: The Austrian Contribution. Economic Inquiry 18 pp. 535–554.
Yunker, James A. "Post-Lange Market Socialism" 1995, Journal of Economic Issues.
Austrian School
Comparative economic systems
Criticisms of economics
Economic planning
Economic problems
History of economic thought
Socialism
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Endocrinology (from endocrine + -ology) is a branch of biology and medicine dealing with the endocrine system, its diseases, and its specific secretions known as hormones. It is also concerned with the integration of developmental events proliferation, growth, and differentiation, and the psychological or behavioral activities of metabolism, growth and development, tissue function, sleep, digestion, respiration, excretion, mood, stress, lactation, movement, reproduction, and sensory perception caused by hormones. Specializations include behavioral endocrinology and comparative endocrinology.
The endocrine system consists of several glands, all in different parts of the body, that secrete hormones directly into the blood rather than into a duct system. Therefore, endocrine glands are regarded as ductless glands. Hormones have many different functions and modes of action; one hormone may have several effects on different target organs, and, conversely, one target organ may be affected by more than one hormone.
The endocrine system
Endocrinology is the study of the endocrine system in the human body. This is a system of glands which secrete hormones. Hormones are chemicals that affect the actions of different organ systems in the body. Examples include thyroid hormone, growth hormone, and insulin. The endocrine system involves a number of feedback mechanisms, so that often one hormone (such as thyroid stimulating hormone) will control the action or release of another secondary hormone (such as thyroid hormone). If there is too much of the secondary hormone, it may provide negative feedback to the primary hormone, maintaining homeostasis.
In the original 1902 definition by Bayliss and Starling (see below), they specified that, to be classified as a hormone, a chemical must be produced by an organ, be released (in small amounts) into the blood, and be transported by the blood to a distant organ to exert its specific function. This definition holds for most "classical" hormones, but there are also paracrine mechanisms (chemical communication between cells within a tissue or organ), autocrine signals (a chemical that acts on the same cell), and intracrine signals (a chemical that acts within the same cell). A neuroendocrine signal is a "classical" hormone that is released into the blood by a neurosecretory neuron (see article on neuroendocrinology).
Hormones
Griffin and Ojeda identify three different classes of hormones based on their chemical composition:
Amines
Amines, such as norepinephrine, epinephrine, and dopamine (catecholamines), are derived from single amino acids, in this case tyrosine. Thyroid hormones such as 3,5,3’-triiodothyronine (T3) and 3,5,3’,5’-tetraiodothyronine (thyroxine, T4) make up a subset of this class because they derive from the combination of two iodinated tyrosine amino acid residues.
Peptide and protein
Peptide hormones and protein hormones consist of three (in the case of thyrotropin-releasing hormone) to more than 200 (in the case of follicle-stimulating hormone) amino acid residues and can have a molecular mass as large as 31,000 grams per mole. All hormones secreted by the pituitary gland are peptide hormones, as are leptin from adipocytes, ghrelin from the stomach, and insulin from the pancreas.
Steroid
Steroid hormones are converted from their parent compound, cholesterol. Mammalian steroid hormones can be grouped into five groups by the receptors to which they bind: glucocorticoids, mineralocorticoids, androgens, estrogens, and progestogens. Some forms of vitamin D, such as calcitriol, are steroid-like and bind to homologous receptors, but lack the characteristic fused ring structure of true steroids.
As a profession
Although every organ system secretes and responds to hormones (including the brain, lungs, heart, intestine, skin, and the kidneys), the clinical specialty of endocrinology focuses primarily on the endocrine organs, meaning the organs whose primary function is hormone secretion. These organs include the pituitary, thyroid, adrenals, ovaries, testes, and pancreas.
An endocrinologist is a physician who specializes in treating disorders of the endocrine system, such as diabetes, hyperthyroidism, and many others (see list of diseases).
Work
The medical specialty of endocrinology involves the diagnostic evaluation of a wide variety of symptoms and variations and the long-term management of disorders of deficiency or excess of one or more hormones.
The diagnosis and treatment of endocrine diseases are guided by laboratory tests to a greater extent than for most specialties. Many diseases are investigated through excitation/stimulation or inhibition/suppression testing. This might involve injection with a stimulating agent to test the function of an endocrine organ. Blood is then sampled to assess the changes of the relevant hormones or metabolites. An endocrinologist needs extensive knowledge of clinical chemistry and biochemistry to understand the uses and limitations of the investigations.
A second important aspect of the practice of endocrinology is distinguishing human variation from disease. Atypical patterns of physical development and abnormal test results must be assessed as indicative of disease or not. Diagnostic imaging of endocrine organs may reveal incidental findings called incidentalomas, which may or may not represent disease.
Endocrinology involves caring for the person as well as the disease. Most endocrine disorders are chronic diseases that need lifelong care. Some of the most common endocrine diseases include diabetes mellitus, hypothyroidism and the metabolic syndrome. Care of diabetes, obesity and other chronic diseases necessitates understanding the patient at the personal and social level as well as the molecular, and the physician–patient relationship can be an important therapeutic process.
Apart from treating patients, many endocrinologists are involved in clinical science and medical research, teaching, and hospital management.
Training
Endocrinologists are specialists of internal medicine or pediatrics. Reproductive endocrinologists deal primarily with problems of fertility and menstrual function—often training first in obstetrics. Most qualify as an internist, pediatrician, or gynecologist for a few years before specializing, depending on the local training system. In the U.S. and Canada, training for board certification in internal medicine, pediatrics, or gynecology after medical school is called residency. Further formal training to subspecialize in adult, pediatric, or reproductive endocrinology is called a fellowship. Typical training for a North American endocrinologist involves 4 years of college, 4 years of medical school, 3 years of residency, and 2 years of fellowship. In the US, adult endocrinologists are board certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) or the American Osteopathic Board of Internal Medicine (AOBIM) in Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism.
Diseases and medicine
Diseases
See main article at Endocrine diseases
Endocrinology also involves the study of the diseases of the endocrine system. These diseases may relate to too little or too much secretion of a hormone, too little or too much action of a hormone, or problems with receiving the hormone.
Societies and organisations
Because endocrinology encompasses so many conditions and diseases, there are many organizations that provide education to patients and the public. The Hormone Foundation is the public education affiliate of The Endocrine Society and provides information on all endocrine-related conditions. Other educational organizations that focus on one or more endocrine-related conditions include the American Diabetes Association, Human Growth Foundation, American Menopause Foundation, Inc., and Thyroid Foundation of America.
In North America the principal professional organizations of endocrinologists include The Endocrine Society, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, the American Diabetes Association, the Lawson Wilkins Pediatric Endocrine Society, and the American Thyroid Association.
In Europe, the European Society of Endocrinology (ESE) and the European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology (ESPE) are the main organisations representing professionals in the fields of adult and paediatric endocrinology, respectively.
In the United Kingdom, the Society for Endocrinology and the British Society for Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes are the main professional organisations.
The European Society for Paediatric Endocrinology is the largest international professional association dedicated solely to paediatric endocrinology. There are numerous similar associations around the world.
History
The earliest study of endocrinology began in China. The Chinese were isolating sex and pituitary hormones from human urine and using them for medicinal purposes by 200 BC. They used many complex methods, such as sublimation of steroid hormones. Another method specified by Chinese texts—the earliest dating to 1110—specified the use of saponin (from the beans of Gleditsia sinensis) to extract hormones, but gypsum (containing calcium sulfate) was also known to have been used.
Although most of the relevant tissues and endocrine glands had been identified by early anatomists, a more humoral approach to understanding biological function and disease was favoured by the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers such as Aristotle, Hippocrates, Lucretius, Celsus, and Galen, according to Freeman et al., and these theories held sway until the advent of germ theory, physiology, and organ basis of pathology in the 19th century.
In 1849, Arnold Berthold noted that castrated cockerels did not develop combs and wattles or exhibit overtly male behaviour. He found that replacement of testes back into the abdominal cavity of the same bird or another castrated bird resulted in normal behavioural and morphological development, and he concluded (erroneously) that the testes secreted a substance that "conditioned" the blood that, in turn, acted on the body of the cockerel. In fact, one of two other things could have been true: that the testes modified or activated a constituent of the blood or that the testes removed an inhibitory factor from the blood. It was not proven that the testes released a substance that engenders male characteristics until it was shown that the extract of testes could replace their function in castrated animals. Pure, crystalline testosterone was isolated in 1935.
Graves' disease was named after Irish doctor Robert James Graves, who described a case of goiter with exophthalmos in 1835. The German Karl Adolph von Basedow also independently reported the same constellation of symptoms in 1840, while earlier reports of the disease were also published by the Italians Giuseppe Flajani and Antonio Giuseppe Testa, in 1802 and 1810 respectively, and by the English physician Caleb Hillier Parry (a friend of Edward Jenner) in the late 18th century. Thomas Addison was first to describe Addison's disease in 1849.
In 1902 William Bayliss and Ernest Starling performed an experiment in which they observed that acid instilled into the duodenum caused the pancreas to begin secretion, even after they had removed all nervous connections between the two. The same response could be produced by injecting extract of jejunum mucosa into the jugular vein, showing that some factor in the mucosa was responsible. They named this substance "secretin" and coined the term hormone for chemicals that act in this way.
Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski made the observation in 1889 that removing the pancreas surgically led to an increase in blood sugar, followed by a coma and eventual death—symptoms of diabetes mellitus. In 1922, Banting and Best realized that homogenizing the pancreas and injecting the derived extract reversed this condition.
Neurohormones were first identified by Otto Loewi in 1921. He incubated a frog's heart (innervated with its vagus nerve attached) in a saline bath, and left in the solution for some time. The solution was then used to bathe a non-innervated second heart. If the vagus nerve on the first heart was stimulated, negative inotropic (beat amplitude) and chronotropic (beat rate) activity were seen in both hearts. This did not occur in either heart if the vagus nerve was not stimulated. The vagus nerve was adding something to the saline solution. The effect could be blocked using atropine, a known inhibitor to heart vagal nerve stimulation. Clearly, something was being secreted by the vagus nerve and affecting the heart. The "vagusstuff" (as Loewi called it) causing the myotropic (muscle enhancing) effects was later identified to be acetylcholine and norepinephrine. Loewi won the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
Recent work in endocrinology focuses on the molecular mechanisms responsible for triggering the effects of hormones. The first example of such work being done was in 1962 by Earl Sutherland. Sutherland investigated whether hormones enter cells to evoke action, or stayed outside of cells. He studied norepinephrine, which acts on the liver to convert glycogen into glucose via the activation of the phosphorylase enzyme. He homogenized the liver into a membrane fraction and soluble fraction (phosphorylase is soluble), added norepinephrine to the membrane fraction, extracted its soluble products, and added them to the first soluble fraction. Phosphorylase activated, indicating that norepinephrine's target receptor was on the cell membrane, not located intracellularly. He later identified the compound as cyclic AMP (cAMP) and with his discovery created the concept of second-messenger-mediated pathways. He, like Loewi, won the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work in endocrinology.
See also
Comparative endocrinology
Endocrine disease
Hormone
Hormone replacement therapy
Neuroendocrinology
Pediatric endocrinology
Reproductive endocrinology and infertility
Wildlife endocrinology
References
Endocrine system
Hormones | [
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] |
Euphoria is an emotional and mental state defined as a sense of great happiness and well-being.
Euphoria may also refer to:
Biology
Euphoria (beetle), a genus of scarab beetles
Euphoria, a genus name previously used for the longan and other trees
Music
Groups
Euphoria (American band), a folk-rock/sunshine pop band from New York, or their eponymous 1969 album
Euphoria (Australian band), a 1990s Australian pop/dance trio
Euphoria (Canadian band), an active Canadian dance music project, or their eponymous 1999 album
Euphoria (Indian band), an active Indian rock group formed in 1989
Eu Phoria, a Japanese all-girl pop/rock band formed in 2002
Albums
Euphoria (CNBLUE album), 2016
Euphoria (Dead Man album) or the title song, 2008
Euphoria (Def Leppard album), 1999
Euphoria (Enrique Iglesias album), 2010
Euphoria (Leftover Salmon album) or the title song, 1997
Euphoria (Ruslana album), 2012
Euphoria (Vinnie Vincent album) or the title song, 1997
Euphoria (compilations), a dance-music series, 1999–2004
Euphoria, by Surfact, 2009
Euphoria (Original Score from the HBO Series), by Labrinth, 2019
Euforia (La Mafia album), 1998
Euforia – Helen Sjöholm sjunger Billy Joel, or the title song, by Helen Sjöholm, 2010
Songs
"Euphoria" (BTS song), 2018
"Euphoria" (Loreen song), Swedish entry and winner of Eurovision 2012
"Euphoria" (The Perry Twins song), 2018
"Euphoria" (Usher song), 2012
"Euphoria", by Collide from Some Kind of Strange, 2003
"Euphoria", by DJ Tiësto from Parade of the Athletes, 2004
"Euphoria", by Don Toliver from Heaven or Hell, 2020
"Euphoria", by Killing Joke from Pylon, 2015
"Euphoria", by Kyle Ward from the video game series In the Groove
"Euphoria", by Sarah Slean from The Baroness, 2008
"Euphoria", by Sirenia from An Elixir for Existence, 2004
"Euphoria", by W.A.S.P. from Unholy Terror, 2001
"Euphoria", by the Youngbloods from Earth Music, 1968
"Euphoria", by the Holy Modal Rounders from their self-titled first album, 1964
"Euphoria (Firefly)", by Delerium from Karma, 1997
"Euphoria" by Michael Jackson from Music & Me, 1973
Film and television
Euphoria (2006 film), a 2006 Russian dramatic film by Ivan Vyrypaev
Euphoria (2017 film), a 2017 film by Swedish director Lisa Langseth
Euphoria (2018 film), a 2018 Italian film
Euphoria (Israeli TV series), a 2012–2013 Israeli television series
Euphoria (American TV series), a 2019 American series based on the Israeli series
"Euphoria, Part 1" and "Euphoria, Part 2" (2006), a two-part episode of the American television series House Computing
Euphoria (software), a game animation engine software by NaturalMotion
Euphoria (programming language), an interpreted programming language
Sports
New York Euphoria (formerly "Team Euphoria"), a team in the Lingerie Football League
WWC Euphoria, an event of World Wrestling Council
Euforia (wrestler) (born 1974), Mexican professional wrestler
Others
4-Methylaminorex (commonly known as "Euphoria" or "U4EA"), a stimulant drug with effects comparable to methamphetamine
Euphoria, a 2014 novel by Lily King
See also
Euphoric (disambiguation)
Euphorbia, a plant genusUFOria, 1985 American comedy film
Uforia Audio Network, American radio network
Ufouria: The Saga'', 1991 video game | [
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] |
communications in Ecuador include telephone, radio, television, and the Internet.
Ecuador's state regulatory agency is the National Telecommunications Council (CONATEL), which is part of the Telecommunications Ministry (MINTEL).
Telephones
Fixed lines: 2.2 million lines, 56th in the world; 15 per 100 persons (2011).
Mobile cellular: 15.3 million subscribers, 55th in the world; 100 per 100 persons (2011).
International country code: 593.
Telephone system:
General assessment: elementary fixed-line service, but increasingly sophisticated mobile-cellular network.
Domestic: fixed-line services provided by multiple telecommunications operators; mobile-cellular use has surged.
International: landing points for the PAN-AM and South America-1 submarine cables that provide links to the west coast of South America, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, and extending onward to Aruba and the US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean; satellite earth station – 1 Intelsat (Atlantic Ocean) (2011).
There are three cell phone providers in Ecuador: Claro (Telcel), Movistar, and CNT. Mobile networks are diverse and include GSM 850 MHz (largest) as well as CDMA (Bell South's old network before being acquired by Telefónica Spain which rebranded Movistar), TDMA63. CNT is the state owned firm and uses CDMA.
Radio and television
Ecuador has multiple TV networks and many local channels, as well as more than 300 radio stations. Many TV and radio stations are privately owned. The government owns or controls 5 national TV stations and multiple radio stations. Radio and television broadcasters are required by law to give the government free air time to broadcast programs produced by the state (2007).
Radio
Radio broadcast stations: AM 279, FM 530 (plus 349 repeaters), shortwave 25 (2006).
Radios: 5 million (2001).
Television
Television broadcast stations: 323 (including repeaters) (2005).
Televisions: 2.5 million (2001).
Internet
Internet hosts: 170,538 (2012).
Internet users: 5.3 million, 56th in the world (2012); 35.1% of the population, 119th in the world.
Fixed broadband: 825,732 subscribers, 59th in the world; 5.4 of population, 102nd in the world (2012).
Mobile broadband: 3.4 million subscribers, 48th in the world; 22.2% of population, 67th in the world (2012).
Internet country code: .ec
The government has an ongoing campaign to increase Internet access across the country, with a goal of extending Internet connectivity to 50 percent of households by 2015. Public Internet access centers, known as Infocentros, have been installed in 377 (48 percent) of Ecuador's 810 rural parishes, with a projection of 100 percent by 2014. Internet cafes are also becoming increasingly common. During the February 2013 elections for president and National Assembly, the Internet provided a real-time forum for candidates to launch proposals, solicit votes, discuss issues, and increase the scope of their publicity campaigns.
Broadband (commonly used in urban zones) and satellite connections (often used in rural areas) are increasingly popular, eclipsing dial-up plans. According to industry estimates, between 33 and 66 percent of Internet users have broadband speeds between 2 and 3Mbit/s, at a cost of $20 to $25 per month. In May 2012, the Superintendent of Telecommunications indicated that the overall average speed of an Internet connection in Ecuador is 128kbit/s, although speeds are lower in rural areas.
Internet censorship and surveillance
In its Freedom on the Net 2013 report, Freedom House gives Ecuador a "freedom on the net status" of "partly free".
There is no widespread blocking or filtering of websites in Ecuador and access to blogs and social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is generally free and open. Diverse sources of national and international information are available via the Internet. Anonymous communication, encrypted communications, and the use of security tools is not prohibited.
There were no government restrictions on access to the Internet or credible reports that the government monitored e-mail or Internet chat rooms. However, on 11 July 2012 the government passed a new telecommunications regulation, requiring that Internet service providers fulfill all information requests from the superintendent of telecommunications, allowing access to client addresses and information without a judicial order.
Standard defamation laws apply to content posted online. Attempts to censor statements made in times of heightened political sensitivity have been reported, as have alleged instances of censorship via the overly broad application of copyright to content critical of the government. Lawsuits have been filed against digital news sites for comments critical of the government. To use the services provided by cybercafes, the national secretary of telecommunications, SENATEL, requires that users register with the following information: full name, phone number, passport number, voting certificate number, email address, and home address.
Self-censorship of comments critical of the government is encouraged. In January 2013, for example, President Correa called for the National Secretary of Intelligence (SENAIN) to investigate two Twitter users who had published disparaging comments about him, an announcement which sent a warning to others not to post comments critical of the president. After receiving criticism from the government, news site La Hora indefinitely suspended the reader comments section on its website. At the president's request, the comments section was shut down completely. Print and digital news outlet El Comercio faced similar pressure related to its readers' comments and the comments section was ultimately disabled after President Correa sent a letter of complaint. While there are no official constraints on organizing protests over the Internet, warnings from the president stating that the act of protesting will be interpreted as "an attempt to destabilize the government" have undoubtedly discouraged some from organizing and participating in protests.
Ecuador's new "Organic Law on Communications" was passed in June 2013. The law recognizes a right to communication. Media companies are required to collect and store user information. "Media lynching", which appears to extend to any accusation of corruption or investigation of a public official—even those that are supported with evidence, is prohibited. Websites bear "ultimate responsibility" for all content they host, including content authored by third parties. The law creates a new media regulator to prohibit the dissemination of "unbalanced" information and bans non-degreed journalists from publishing, effectively outlawing much investigative reporting and citizen journalism. Human rights organizations fear that the new law will stifle critical voices in the media, due to its vague wording, arbitrary sanctions, and the threat of civil and criminal penalties.
See also
ETAPA
Galápagos (radio show)
HCJB, "The Voice of the Andes" radio station
References
Ecuador
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The Egyptian Armed Forces () are the state military organisation responsible for the defense of the Arab Republic of Egypt. They consist of the Egyptian Army, Egyptian Navy, Egyptian Air Force and Egyptian Air Defense Forces.
The President of the Republic serves as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The Minister of Defense and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, the senior uniformed officer, is Colonel General Mohamed Zaki (since June 2018), and the Chief of Staff is Lieutenant General Osama Askar (since October 2021).
Senior members of the military can convene the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, such as during the course of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, when President Mubarak resigned and transferred power to this body on February 11, 2011.
The armament of the Egyptian armed forces varies between eastern and western sources through weapons deliveries by several countries, led by the United States, Russia, France, China, Italy, Ukraine and Britain. Many of the equipment is manufactured locally at Egyptian factories. The Egyptian armed forces celebrate their anniversary on October 6 each year to commemorate the Crossing of the Suez during the October War of 1973.
The modern Egyptian armed forces have been involved in numerous crises and wars since independence, from the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Egyptian Revolution of 1952, Suez Crisis, North Yemen Civil War, Six-Day War, Nigerian Civil War, War of Attrition, Yom Kippur War, Egyptian bread riots, 1986 Egyptian conscripts riot, Egyptian-Libyan War, Gulf War, War on Terror, Egyptian Crisis, Second Libyan Civil War, War on ISIL and the Sinai insurgency.
History
In the early 1950s, politics rather than military competence was the main criterion for promotion. The Egyptian commander, Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, was a purely political appointee who owed his position to his close friendship with Nasser. He would prove himself grossly incompetent as a general during the Suez Crisis. Rigid lines between officers and men in the Egyptian Army led to a mutual "mistrust and contempt" between officers and the men who served under them. Tsouras writes that the Israelis "seized and held the ..initiative throughout the campaign and quickly destroyed the Egyptian defenses." In a few instances, such as at the Mitla Pass and Abu Agelia, Egyptian defenses were well-organised and stubbornly held, but this did not make enough difference overall. Nasser ordered a retreat from the Sinai which allowed the Israelis to wreak havoc and drive on the Canal; on 5 November, British and French parachute landings began in the Canal Zone but by 7 November, U.S. pressure had forced an end to the fighting.
The Egyptian Armed Forces suffered a catastrophic defeat in their intervention in the North Yemen Civil War in what was dubbed as "Egypt's Vietnam" which contributed to their withering defeat in the Six-day war against Israel. At the peak of deployments, there were 70,000 Egyptian soldiers in Yemen. At the end of the war, Yemen remained a republic but at the cost of more than 10,000 Egyptian soldiers. As The New Republic explained in 1963:
"In this terrain, the slow-moving Nile peasant has proved a poor match for the barefoot, elusive tribesmen armed only with rifle and jambiya -- the vast, curved, razor-sharp dagger which every male Yemeni wears in his belt."
Before the June 1967 War, the army divided its personnel into four regional commands (Suez, Sinai, Nile Delta, and Nile Valley up to the Sudan). The remainder of Egypt's territory, over 75%, was the sole responsibility of the Frontier Corps.
In May 1967, President Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to passage of Israeli ships. Israel considered the closure of the straits grounds for war and prepared their armed forces to attack. On June 3, three battalions of Egyptian commandos were flown to Amman to take part in operations from Jordan. But U.S. historian Trevor N. Dupuy, writing in 1978, argues from King Hussein of Jordan's memoirs that Nasser did not intend to start an immediate war, but instead was happy with his rhetorical and political accomplishments of the past weeks. Nevertheless, Israel felt it needed to take action.
The Egyptian army, comprising two armored and five infantry divisions, were deployed in the Sinai. In the weeks before the Six-Day War began, Egypt made several significant changes to its military organisation; Field Marshal Amer created a new command interposed between the general staff and the Eastern Military District commander, Lieutenant General Salah ad-Din Muhsin. This new Sinai Front Command was placed under General Abdel Mohsin Murtagi, who had returned from Yemen in May 1967. Six of the seven divisions in the Sinai (with the exception of the 20th Infantry 'Palestinian' Division) had their commanders and chiefs of staff replaced. What fragmentary information is available suggests to authors such as Pollack that Amer was trying to improve the competence of the force, replacing political appointees with veterans of the Yemen war.
After the war began on 5 June 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, destroyed its air force on the ground, and occupied the Sinai Peninsula. The forward deployed Egyptian forces were shattered in three places by the attacking Israelis. Field Marshal Amer, overwhelmed by events, and ignoring previous plans, ordered a retreat by the Egyptian Army to the Suez Canal. This developed into a rout as the Israelis harried the retreating troops from the ground and from the air.
In July 1972, President Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet Armed Forces advisors from Egypt. The Soviet advisors had significant access and influence previously. When the Yom Kippur War began in October 1973, the Egyptians were initially successful in crossing the Suez Canal and establishing a bridgehead on the eastern bank. In the costly and brutal Battle of the Chinese Farm, the Israeli Defence Force shouldered aside portions of the Second Army on the eastern bank, then crossed the canal and rapidly advanced, destroying surface-to-air missile sites and then cutting off the Third Army. However, according to the Israeli general David Elazar, the Egyptian 2nd army completely stopped him in Ismailia, and pushed his forces away from Ismailia city. Even though the third army was encircled, it resisted harshly, and managed to advance in occupying a bigger land than he did before in the east. Peace was only imposed after the United States and Soviet Union stepped in.
When Sadat and the Israelis made peace in the Camp David Accords of September 1978, part of the quid pro quo for the Egyptians accepting peace was that the U.S. would provide substantial military assistance to Egypt. Today the U.S. provides annual military assistance often quoted at some nominal $1.3 billion to the Egyptian armed forces ($ billion in ). This level is second only to Israel.
Scholars such as Kenneth Pollack, DeAtkine, and Robert Springborg have identified a number of reasons why Arab (and Egyptian) armies performed so poorly against Israel from 1948 to the 1970s and afterwards; In battle against Israel from 1948, junior officers consistently demonstrated an unwillingness to manoeuvre, innovate, improvise, take initiative, or act independently. Ground forces units suffered from constant manipulation of information and an inattention to intelligence gathering and objective analysis. Units from the two divisions dispatched to Saudi Arabia in 1990–91, accompanied by U.S. personnel during the 1991 Gulf War, consistently reported fierce battles even though they actually encountered little or no resistance. This occurred whether or not they were accompanied by U.S. military personnel or journalists. Later researchers such as Springborg have confirmed that the tendencies identified in the 1980s and 1990s persist in the Armed Forces in the twenty-first century.
Egypt is a participant in NATO's Mediterranean Dialogue forum.
Twenty-first century
In the second decade of the 21st century, the Armed Forces enjoy considerable power and independence within the Egyptian state. They are also influential in business, engaging in road and housing construction, consumer goods, resort management, and own vast tracts of real estate. A significant amount of military information is not made publicly available, including budget information, the names of the general officers and the military's size (which is considered a state secret). According to journalist Joshua Hammer, "as much as 40% of the Egyptian economy" is controlled by the Egyptian armed forces, and other authoritative works such as Springborg reinforce this trend.
On 31 January 2011, during the Egyptian revolution of 2011, Israeli media reported that the 9th, 2nd, and 7th Divisions of the Army had been ordered into Cairo to help restore order.
On 3 July 2013, the Egyptian Armed Forces launched a coup d'état against the elected government of Mohamed Morsi following mass protests demanding his resignation. On 8 July 2013, clashes between the Republican Guard and pro-Morsi supporters left 61 protestors killed. On 14 August 2013, the Egyptian Army along with the police carried out the Rabaa massacre, killing 2,600 people. The total casualty count made 14 August the deadliest day in Egypt since the Egyptian revolution of 2011 which had toppled former President Hosni Mubarak. Several world leaders denounced the violence during the sit-in dispersals.
On March 25, 2020, it was reported that two army generals, Shafea Dawoud and Khaled Shaltout, had died from the COVID-19 pandemic in Egypt, and at least 550 officers and soldiers had been infected with the virus.
In March 2021, Human Rights Watch accused the EAF of violating international human rights law and committing war crimes by demolishing more than 12,300 residential and commercial buildings and 6,000 hectares of farmland since 2013 in North Sinai.
Structure
The Supreme Commander-in-Chief is the President of the Republic, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, a former Army officer (as have been most presidents of Egypt). All branches, forces, armies, regions, bodies, organs and departments of the Armed Forces are under the command of the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, who is at the same time the Minister of Defense.
The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCA) is composed of 23 members, chaired by the Commander-in-Chief and Minister of Defense, and is represented by the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. Commanders of military areas (central, northern, western, southern), heads of bodies (operations, armament, logistics, engineering, training, finance, military justice, Armed Forces Management and Administration), directors of many departments (officers and Military Intelligence and Reconnaissance), and assistant secretary of defense for constitutional and legal affairs. The Secretary of the Board is the Secretary General of the Ministry of Defense.
Army
Conscripts for the Egyptian Army and other service branches without a university degree serve three years as enlisted soldiers. Conscripts with a General Secondary School Degree serve two years as enlisted personnel. Conscripts with a university degree serve one year as enlisted personnel or three years as a reserve officer. Officers for the army are trained at the Egyptian Military Academy. The IISS estimated in 2020 that the Army numbered 90-120,000, with 190-220,000 conscripts, a total of 310,000.
Air Force
The Egyptian Air Force (EAF) is the aviation branch of the Egyptian Armed Forces. Currently, the backbone of the EAF is the General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon. The Mirage 2000 is the other modern interceptor used by the EAF. The Egyptian Air Force has 216 F-16s (plus 20 on order). It has about 579 combat aircraft and 149 armed helicopters as it continues to fly extensively upgraded MiG-21s, F-7 Skybolts, F-4 Phantoms, Dassault Mirage Vs, and the C-130 Hercules among other planes.
Egypt currently operates 24 Dassault Rafale, a French twin-engine fighter aircraft as of 2019.
Air Defense Forces
The Egyptian Air Defense Forces or ADF (Quwwat El Diffaa El Gawwi in Arabic) is Egypt's military command responsible for air defense. Egypt patterned its Air Defense Force (ADF) after the Soviet Air Defence Force, which integrated all its air defense capabilities – antiaircraft guns, rocket and missile units, interceptor planes, and radar and warning installations. It appears to comprise five subordinate divisions, 110 surface-to-air missile battalions, and 12 anti-aircraft artillery brigades. Personnel quality may be 'several notches below' that of the Air Force personnel. The IISS estimated in 2020 that personnel numbered 80,000 active and 70,000 reserve.
Its commander is Lieutenant General Abd El Aziz Seif-Eldeen.
Navy
The Egyptian Navy existed thousands of years ago, specifically during the Early Dynastic period in 2800 BC.
During the early modern era, in 1805, Muhammad Ali of Egypt became the Wali of the country forming his own autonomous rule over Egypt. To build the empire he always wished, he needed a strong military and so he managed to prepare that military starting with the army then the Navy. During his reign, the Navy already existed but it was only used for troop transportation. Its first engagement was during the Wahhabi War where it was used to transport troops from Egypt to Yanbu in Hejaz. Later in 1815, Muhammad Ali built Alexandria Shipyard to build warships not just transport ships. The Navy then participated in the Greek War of Independence where in 1827 it had over 100 warships and hundreds of transport ships. After the Second World War, some fleet units were stationed in the Red Sea, but the bulk of the force remained in the Mediterranean. Navy headquarters and the main operational and training base are located at Ras el Tin near Alexandria.
The Navy also controls the Egyptian Coast Guard. The Coast Guard is responsible for the onshore protection of public installations near the coast and the patrol of coastal waters to prevent smuggling. The IISS Military Balance 2017 listed the Coast Guard with 2,000 personnel, 14 fast patrol boats (PBF) and 65 patrol boats (including 15 Swiftships, 21 Timsah, three Type-89 and nine Peterson-class.
Other agencies
The Armed Forces Medical Service Department provides many military health services. The Armed Forces College of Medicine in Heliopolis, Cairo, provides medical training. As of February 2020, the AFCM commandant was Maj. Gen. Dr. Amr Hegab.
Egypt also maintains 397,000 paramilitary troops. The Central Security Forces comes under the control of the Ministry of Interior. As of 2017, the Egyptian Border Guard Corps falls under the control of the Ministry of Interior as well. Circa 2020, according to the IISS Military Balance 2020, they comprised an estimated 12,000, in 18 border regiments, with light weapons only (IISS 2020, p. 375). However, that listing of numbers has remained the same at least since the 2017 edition (p375).
Military equipment and industry
The inventory of the Egyptian armed forces includes equipment from the United States, France, Brazil, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. This wide range of sources can cause serviceability difficulties. Equipment from the Soviet Union is being progressively replaced by more modern U.S., French, and British equipment, a significant portion of which is built under license in Egypt, such as the M1A1 Abrams tank.
Egypt is one of the few countries in the Middle East, and the only Arab state, with a reconnaissance satellite and has launched another one, EgyptSat 1 in 2007.
The Arab Organization for Industrialization supervises nine military factories which produce civilian goods as well as military products. Initially, the owners of AOI were the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, before the latter governments gave their shares back to Egypt in 1993, valued at $1.8 billion. AOI is now entirely owned by the government of Egypt and has about 19,000 employees out of which 1250 are engineers. AOI fully owns 10 factories and shares in 2 joint ventures, plus the Arab Institute for Advanced Technology
Military schools
There is an undergraduate military school for each branch of the Egyptian Armed Forces, and they include:
Commanders and Staff College
Reserve Officer College supervised by General Gamal Elsabrouty
Nasser Higher Military Academy
Egyptian Military Academy
Egyptian Air Defence Academy
Egyptian Military Technical College
Lieutenant-Colonel Elhamy A. Elsebaey, supervising the Egyptian GIS counter strike school
Armed Forces Technical Institute
Armed Forces Institute for NCOs
Armed Forces Institute for Nursery
Thunderbolt School
Airborne School (Egypt)
See also
Flags of the Egyptian Armed Forces
References
Further reading
Hazem Kandil, 'Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt's Road to Revolt,' Verso, 2012
Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness 1948-91, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln and London, 2002, and Pollack's book reviewed in International Security, Vol. 28, No.2.
Norvell deAtkine, 'Why Arabs Lose Wars,' Middle East Quarterly, 6(4).
CMI Publications, "The Egyptian military in politics and the economy: Recent history and current transition status". www.cmi.no. Retrieved 2016-01-21.
Maj Gen Mohammed Fawzy, The Three-Years War (in Arabic)
H.Frisch, Guns and butter in the Egyptian Army, p. 6. Middle East Review of International Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Summer 2001).
Ebtisam Hussein; Claudia De Martino, March 1, 2019
Dr Mohammed al-Jawadi, In Between the Catastrophe: Memoirs of Egyptian Military Commanders from 1967 to 1972 (in Arabic)
Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, spies, and statesmen: Egypt's road to revolt. Verso Books, 2012.
Maj Gen Abed al-Menahim Khalil, Egyptian Wars in Modern History (in Arabic)
Andrew McGregor, A military history of modern Egypt: from the Ottoman Conquest to the Ramadan War, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006
"The Egyptian Armed Forces and the Remaking of an Economic Empire". Carnegie Middle East Center. Retrieved 2016-01-21.
Lt Gen Saad el-Shazly, The Crossing of the Suez
Witty, David M. "A regular Army in counterinsurgency operations: Egypt in North Yemen, 1962-1967." The Journal of Military History 65, no. 2 (2001).
Ferris, Jesse, Egypt, the Cold War, and the Civil War in Yemen, 1962–1966, Princeton University. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2008. 3332407.
External links
Egyptian Armed Forces
CIA World Factbook
FAS
GlobalSecurity
Department of State, Academics see the military in decline, but retaining strong influence, 23 September 2009 (US Embassy Cables, The Guardian, 2011)
Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, The New York Times, February 10, 2011
Egypt's military leadership, Aljazeera English, February 11, 2011
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] |
El Salvador is a member of the United Nations and several of its specialized agencies, the Organization of American States (OAS), the Central American Common Market (CACM), the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), and the Central American Integration System (SICA). It actively participates in the Central American Security Commission (CASC), which seeks to promote regional arms control.
In November, 1950 El Salvador helped the newly empowered 14th Dalai Lama by supporting his Tibetan Government cabinet minister's telegram requesting an appeal before the General Assembly of the United Nations to stop the Communist China's People's Liberation Army's invasion of Tibet.
El Salvador also is a member of the World Trade Organization and is pursuing regional free trade agreements. An active participant in the Summit of the Americas process, El Salvador chairs a working group on market access under the Free Trade Area of the Americas initiative.
El Salvador has joined its six Central American neighbors in signing the Alliance for Sustainable Development, known as the Conjunta Centroamerica-USA or CONCAUSA to promote sustainable economic development in the region.
Bilateral relations
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Oceania
See also
List of diplomatic missions in El Salvador
List of diplomatic missions of El Salvador
References | [
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2896,
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1110,
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1116,
102
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] |
The government's official policy is one of nonalignment. In its search for assistance to meet the goal of national reconstruction, the government of Equatorial Guinea has established diplomatic relations with numerous European and Third World countries. Having achieved independence under UN sponsorship, Equatorial Guinea feels a special kinship with that organization. It became the 126th UN member on November 12, 1968. Equatorial Guinea served as a non-permanent member on the United Nations Security Council from 2017 to 2019.
Bilateral relations
Africa
Americas
Asia
Europe
Oceania
See also
List of diplomatic missions in Equatorial Guinea
List of diplomatic missions of Equatorial Guinea
References
External links
Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Equatorial Guinea
Embassy of Equatorial Guinea in London, United Kingdom
United States Embassy in Malabo
Honorary Consul of Equatorial Guinea and Investment Opportunities in Bucharest, Romania (Spanish)
Curriculum Vitae of Equatorial Guinea Foreign Minister H.E. Don Pastor Micha Ondo Bile (Spanish) | [
101,
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112,
188,
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10584,
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Between 57.3 and 59.5 latitude and 21.5 and 28.1 longitude, Estonia lies on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea on the level northwestern part of the rising East European Platform. It borders the Gulf of Finland, between Latvia and Russia. Average elevation reaches .
The climate is maritime, wet, with moderate winters and cool summers. Oil shale and limestone deposits, along with forests which cover 47% of the land, play key economic roles in this generally resource-poor country. Estonia boasts over 1,500 lakes, numerous bogs, and 3,794 kilometers of coastline marked by numerous bays, straits, and inlets. Tallinn's Muuga port offers one of Europe's finest warm-water harbor facilities.
Estonia's strategic location has precipitated many wars that were fought on its territory between other rival powers at its expense. In 1944, under Soviet occupation, the Jaanilinn and Petseri regions were annexed to Russian SFSR territory. The legal status of these territories has not been fully settled.
Geographic features
Estonia is a flat country covering . Estonia has a long, shallow coastline () along the Baltic Sea, with 1,520 islands dotting the shore. The two largest islands are Saaremaa (literally, island land), at , and Hiiumaa, at . The two islands are favorite Estonian vacation spots. The country's highest point, Suur Munamägi (Egg Mountain), is in the hilly southeast and reaches above sea level. Estonia is covered by about of forest. Arable land amounts to about . Meadows cover about , and pastureland covers about . There are more than 1,400 natural and artificial lakes in Estonia. The largest of them, Lake Peipus (), forms much of the border between Estonia and Russia. Located in central Estonia, Võrtsjärv is the second-largest lake (). The Narva and Emajõgi are among the most important of the country's many rivers.
A small, recent cluster of meteorite craters, the largest of which is called Kaali are found near Saaremaa, Estonia. The impact may have been witnessed by the Iron Age inhabitants of the area.
Estonia has a temperate climate, with four seasons of near-equal length. Average temperatures range from on the Baltic islands to inland in July, the warmest month, and from on the Baltic islands to inland in February, the coldest month. Precipitation averages per year and is heaviest in late summer.
Estonia's land border with Latvia runs ; the Russian border runs . From 1920 to 1945, Estonia's border with Russia, set by the 1920 Tartu Peace Treaty, extended beyond the Narva River in the northeast and beyond the town of Petseri in the southeast. This territory, amounting to some , was incorporated into Russia by Joseph Stalin at the end of World War II.
Wildlife
There live 65 different species of mammals in the Estonian forests. There are an estimated 700 brown bears, over 150 wolves, 400 lynxes, 14,000–16,000 beavers, 3,400 wild boars, 10,000–11,000 moose and 120,000–130,000 deer. There are also red deer and other wild animals.
Environmental issues
One of the most burdensome legacies of the Soviet era is widespread environmental pollution. The worst offender in this regard was the Soviet army. Across military installations covering more than of Estonian territory, the army dumped hundreds of thousands of tons of jet fuel into the ground, improperly disposed of toxic chemicals, and discarded outdated explosives and weapons in coastal and inland waters. In the 1990s, during the army's withdrawal from Estonia, extensive damage was done to discarded buildings and equipment. In October 1993, the Estonian Ministry of Environment issued a preliminary report summing up part of the degradation it had surveyed thus far. The report described the worst damage as having been done to Estonia's topsoil and underground water supply by the systematic dumping of jet fuel at six Soviet army air bases. At the air base near Tapa, site of the worst damage, officials estimated that of land were covered by a layer of fuel; of underground water were said to be contaminated. The water in the surrounding area was undrinkable, and was sometimes set fire by locals to provide heat during the winter. With Danish help, Estonian crews began cleaning up the site, although they estimated the likely cost to be as much as 4 million EEK. The Ministry of Environment assigned a monetary cost of more than 10 billion EEK to the damage to the country's topsoil and water supply. However, the ministry was able to allocate only 5 million EEK in 1993 for cleanup operations.
In a 1992 government report to the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, Estonia detailed other major environmental concerns. For instance, for several consecutive years Estonia had led the world in the production of sulfur dioxide per capita. Nearly 75% of Estonia's air pollution was reported to come from two oil shale-based thermal power stations operating near Narva. The mining of oil shale in northeastern Estonia has also left large mounds of limestone tailings dotting the region. Near the town of Sillamäe, site of a former uranium enrichment plant, about 1,200 tons of uranium and about 750 tons of thorium had been dumped into a reservoir on the shore of the Gulf of Finland. This was said to have caused severe health problems among area residents. In the coastal town of Paldiski, the removal of waste left by Soviet army nuclear reactors was also a major concern. The combined cost of environmental cleanup at both towns was put at more than EEK3.5 billion.
Natural hazards: flooding occurs frequently in the spring in certain areas
Environment – current issues: air polluted with sulfur dioxide from oil-shale burning power plants in northeast; however, the amounts of pollutants emitted to the air have fallen dramatically and the pollution load of wastewater at purification plants has decreased substantially due to improved technology and environmental monitoring; Estonia has more than 1,400 natural and manmade lakes, the smaller of which in agricultural areas need to be monitored; coastal seawater is polluted in certain locations.
Environment – international agreements:
party to: Air Pollution, Air Pollution-Heavy Metals, Air Pollution-Nitrogen Oxides, Air Pollution-Persistent Organic Pollutants, Air Pollution-Sulphur 85, Air Pollution-Volatile Organic Compounds, Antarctic Treaty, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Climate Change-Paris Agreement, Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping-London Protocol, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 2006, Wetlands, Whaling
Area and boundaries
Area:
total:
land:
water:
note: includes 1,520 islands in the Baltic Sea
Land boundaries:
total:
border countries: Latvia , Russia
Coastline:
Maritime claims:
territorial sea:
exclusive economic zone: limits as agreed to by Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Sweden, and Russia
Elevation extremes:
lowest point: Baltic Sea 0 m
highest point: Suur Munamägi
Geographical (landscape) areas
Northern Estonia (mainly same as Põhja-Eesti maastikuvaldkond (:et), also Tallinn belongs there)
Southern Estonia
Western Estonia
Eastern Estonia
Sometimes is used term "Northeastern Estonia" (mainly same as Ida-Viru County) and "Central Estonia"
Resources and land use
Natural resources: oil shale (kukersite), peat, rare earth elements, phosphorite, clay, limestone, sand, dolomite, arable land, sea mud
Land use (2018 est.):
agricultural land: 22.2% (14% arable land, 0.1% permanent crops, 7.2% permanent pasture)
forest: 52.1%
other: 25.7%
Irrigated land:
Total renewable water resources: (2017 est.)
See also
Extreme points of Estonia
Climate of Estonia
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] |
Telecommunications in Ethiopia is a monopoly in the control of Ethio telecom, formerly the Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC). As of 2012, 20.524 million cellular phones and 797,500 main line phones were in use.
Overview
The telephone system in Ethiopia consists of open wire and microwave radio relay systems adequate for government use. Domestic systems are open wire; microwave radio relay; radio communication in the high frequency, very high frequency, and ultra high frequency; two domestic satellites provide the national trunk service. International systems are open wire to Djibouti and Sudan; microwave radio relay to Djibouti and Kenya; and satellite earth stations are 3 Intelsat (1 Atlantic Ocean and 2 Indian Ocean).
The Ethiopian dial plan changed on 17 September 2005. City codes (i.e., internal prefixes) changed from two digits to three (or, from outside Ethiopia, one digit to two). Phone numbers changed from six digits to seven.
In 2007, there were 89 internet hosts. There were 447,300 internet users in 2009. In 2010, just 0.75 percent of the population were using the Internet, one of the lowest rates in the world. The internet domain in Ethiopia is .et.
History
The first telegraph line in Ethiopia was constructed in the years 1897–1899 between the cities of Harar and the capital Addis Ababa. This was extended in 1904 by a line that ran from Addis Ababa through Tigray into Eritrea and to Massawa; and the next year by a line again from Addis Ababa to Gore in the province of Illubabor and Jimma in Kaffa.
The first telephones were brought by Ras Makonnen from Italy in 1890, and connected between the Palace and the Imperial treasury; the sound of disembodied voices frightened the local priests, who thought it was the work of demons. The Emperor Menelik II responded to their protests with disdain, and later used the telephone to give orders to his provincial governors. Emperor Haile Selassie had begun the process of introducing radio transmitters to the country for civilian and military use in the years before the Italian invasion.
Current status
According to the ETC, the average rural inhabitant of Ethiopia has to walk 30 kilometers to the nearest phone. The ETC announced 7 September 2006 a program to improve national coverage, and reduce the average distance to 5 kilometers.
Since 2008 CDMA2000 and WCDMA is available in certain areas.
Since 26 September 2017 until end of 2018 it was not possible to buy and use Ethio telecom SIM cards in mobile devices that have not been purchased in Ethiopia or registered with the authorities. Local advice suggests travellers should register their phone in the customs arrival hall at Bole Airport on arrival if they intend to use a local SIM card. For travellers, local prepaid SIMs are available at small shops, Ethio telecom kiosks and hotels. Satellite phones may require letter of permission from the ETC prior to bringing such phones through customs.
Use of voice over IP services such as Skype and Google Talk was prohibited by telecommunications legislation in 2002. Personal use of these services was legalised by the Proclamation on Telecom Fraud Offences of 2012.
Since the changes and upgrade of equipment in the mid-2000 the telecommunication network is frequently out of work or overloaded, callers using both the landlines and mobile network are unable to connect, the situation is made worse by inclement weather. The ETC has not addressed this issue publicly nor admitted that the coverage and service is below par.
Ethio telecom has launched the Fourth Generation (4G) Long-Term Evolution (LTE) service on 21 March 2015 in line with the help of the Chinese company HUAWEI.
Ethio telecom Corporate Compunction Officer, Abdurahim Mohammed, stated that the rural telecom access within 5 km radius service has currently reached 96 per cent. As part of the efforts to expand its service and improve network quality, Ethio telecom had built 725 stations in Addis Ababa alone during the past 20 years. Damages on fiber optic cables and power interruptions are among the challenges the service provider faced in its expansion and network quality improvement efforts.
See also
Internet in Ethiopia
Ethiopian Telecommunication Agency
Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation
Global Partnership for Ethiopia
Terrestrial fibre optic cable projects in Ethiopia
EBC
Media in Ethiopia
Communications in Ethiopia
Telephone numbers in Ethiopia
Notes
External links
PanAfriL10n page on Ethiopia
"The Internet in Ethiopia" (2001 article)
"Internet in Ethiopia Revisited – A Mixed Bag of Progress and Opportunities on-Hold" (2002 update of previous article)
"Ethiopia's digital dream" (2005 Guardian UK article) | [
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] |
European route E4 passes from north to south through Sweden from the border with Finland, with a total length of . The Finnish part lies entirely within Tornio in northern Finland, and is only long. The Swedish part traverses most of Sweden except the extreme north and the west coast region, and is commonly considered the highway backbone of Sweden, since it passes in the vicinity of many of its largest cities and through the capital Stockholm. In particular, it is the mainline road used by most vehicle traffic, both cars and lorries, between the north (Norrland) and south of Sweden or beyond.
From Haparanda on the Finnish border, it stretches south along the Gulf of Bothnia to Gävle, then on a more inland route southwards. It ends in Helsingborg in Sweden, at the port for the ferry to Helsingør in Denmark. The route intersects with European route E6 just outside Helsingborg, which continues to Trelleborg on the southern coast of Sweden.
History and naming
Under the new system of European routes it was planned to have been a part of E55, but it remains in the pre-1992 designation (E4) within Sweden, because the expenses connected with re-signing this long road portion would be too great. Besides the signs along the road, there are thousands of signs, especially in cities, showing how to reach the E4 road. The road is now fully authorised as E4 by the relevant authority, not as E55.
Route
North of Gävle the road is of mixed standard. Depending on the fashion at the time of construction it is either a single standard carriageway road, usually wide, or a 2+1 road, a wide road with two lanes in one direction and one in the other with a steel wire barrier in between, or sometimes a motorway with two lanes in each direction. North of Sundsvall, the road passes through several of the larger cities as city streets.
South of Gävle, the road becomes an almost continuous motorway, with the only non-motorway part being a long section past Ljungby, currently a 2+1 limited-access road. Upgrade to motorway standard will start in 2018. With the exception of the Ljungby bypass, the final stretch of the motorway to be opened was the road between Uppsala and Mehedeby, which was inaugurated on 17 October 2007. South of Gävle, the speed limit is on 60% and on 30% of the road. North of Gävle there are varying speed limits, with , and as the most common. The speed limits on the main roads in Sweden were changed on many stretches in October 2008, which saw the introduction of the 120 km/h limit.
The E4 is the fastest road to go from Germany/Denmark to areas north of the Arctic Circle, including places in Norway such as Tromsø or the North Cape.
The route passes through or nearby the cities
Tornio,
Haparanda,
Luleå,
Piteå,
Skellefteå,
Umeå,
Örnsköldsvik,
Härnösand,
Sundsvall,
Hudiksvall,
Söderhamn,
Gävle,
Uppsala,
Stockholm,
Södertälje,
Nyköping,
Norrköping,
Linköping,
Jönköping,
Värnamo,
Ljungby,
and Helsingborg.
Detailed route
References
External links
UN Economic Commission for Europe: Overall Map of E-road Network (2007)
04
E0004
E0004
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An electrical telegraph was a point-to-point text messaging system, used from the 1840s until the late 20th century when it was slowly replaced by other telecommunication systems. At the sending station switches connected a source of current to the telegraph wires. At the receiving station the current activated electromagnets which moved indicators, providing either a visual or audible indication of the text. It was the first electrical telecommunications system and the most widely used of a number of early messaging systems called telegraphs, that were devised to communicate text messages more rapidly than by physical transportation. Prior to the electric telegraph, semaphore systems were used, including beacons, smoke signals, flag semaphore, and optical telegraphs for visual signals to communicate over distances of land.
Electrical telegraphy can be considered to be the first example of electrical engineering, and was used by the emerging railway companies to develop train control systems that minimised the chances of trains colliding with each other. This was built around the signalling block system with signal boxes along the line communicating with their neighbouring boxes by telegraphic sounding of single-stroke bells and three-position needle telegraph instruments.
Text telegraphy consisted of two or more geographically separated stations (often called telegraph offices) connected by wires, usually supported overhead on utility poles (originally called telegraph poles). There were many different electrical telegraph systems invented, but the ones that became widespread fit into two broad categories.
The first category consists of needle telegraphs in which a needle pointer is made to move electromagnetically with an electric current from a battery or dynamo passing down the telegraph line. Early systems used multiple needles requiring multiple wires. The first commercial system, and the most widely used needle telegraph, was the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, invented in 1837. Early equipment sets used five needles to point to the letter being transmitted, but the cost of installing wires was more economically significant than the cost of training operators so a single-needle system with a code that had to be learned became the norm.
The second category consists of armature systems in which the current activates a telegraph sounder which makes a click. The archetype of this category was the Morse system, invented by Samuel Morse in 1838, using a single wire. At the sending station, an operator would tap on a switch called a telegraph key, spelling out text messages in Morse code. Originally, the armature was intended to make marks on paper tape, but operators learned to interpret the clicks and it was more efficient to write down the message directly. In 1865, the Morse system became the standard for international communication with a modified code developed for German railways. However, some countries continued to use established national systems internally for some time afterwards.
In the 1840s, the electrical telegraph superseded optical telegraph systems (except in France), becoming the standard way to send urgent messages. By the latter half of the century, most developed nations had created commercial telegraph networks with local telegraph offices in most cities and towns, allowing the public to send messages called telegrams addressed to any person in the country, for a fee. Beginning in 1854, submarine telegraph cables allowed for the first rapid communication between continents. Electrical telegraph networks permitted people and commerce to transmit messages across both continents and oceans almost instantly, with widespread social and economic impacts. In the early 20th century the telegraph was slowly replaced by teletype networks.
History
Early work
From early studies of electricity, electrical phenomena were known to travel with great speed, and many experimenters worked on the application of electricity to communications at a distance. All the known effects of electricity—such as sparks, electrostatic attraction, chemical changes, electric shocks, and later electromagnetism—were applied to the problems of detecting controlled transmissions of electricity at various distances.
In 1753, an anonymous writer in the Scots Magazine suggested an electrostatic telegraph. Using one wire for each letter of the alphabet, a message could be transmitted by connecting the wire terminals in turn to an electrostatic machine, and observing the deflection of pith balls at the far end. The writer has never been positively identified, but the letter was signed C.M. and posted from Renfrew leading to a Charles Marshall of Renfrew being suggested. Telegraphs employing electrostatic attraction were the basis of early experiments in electrical telegraphy in Europe, but were abandoned as being impractical and were never developed into a useful communication system.
In 1774, Georges-Louis Le Sage realised an early electric telegraph. The telegraph had a separate wire for each of the 26 letters of the alphabet and its range was only between two rooms of his home.
In 1800, Alessandro Volta invented the voltaic pile, providing a continuous current of electricity for experimentation. This became a source of a low-voltage current that could be used to produce more distinct effects, and which was far less limited than the momentary discharge of an electrostatic machine, which with Leyden jars were the only previously known man-made sources of electricity.
Another very early experiment in electrical telegraphy was an "electrochemical telegraph" created by the German physician, anatomist and inventor Samuel Thomas von Sömmering in 1809, based on an earlier, less robust design of 1804 by Spanish polymath and scientist Francisco Salva Campillo. Both their designs employed multiple wires (up to 35) to represent almost all Latin letters and numerals. Thus, messages could be conveyed electrically up to a few kilometers (in von Sömmering's design), with each of the telegraph receiver's wires immersed in a separate glass tube of acid. An electric current was sequentially applied by the sender through the various wires representing each letter of a message; at the recipient's end, the currents electrolysed the acid in the tubes in sequence, releasing streams of hydrogen bubbles next to each associated letter or numeral. The telegraph receiver's operator would watch the bubbles and could then record the transmitted message. This is in contrast to later telegraphs that used a single wire (with ground return).
Hans Christian Ørsted discovered in 1820 that an electric current produces a magnetic field that will deflect a compass needle. In the same year Johann Schweigger invented the galvanometer, with a coil of wire around a compass, that could be used as a sensitive indicator for an electric current. Also that year, André-Marie Ampère suggested that telegraphy could be achieved by placing small magnets under the ends of a set of wires, one pair of wires for each letter of the alphabet. He was apparently unaware of Schweigger's invention at the time, which would have made his system much more sensitive. In 1825, Peter Barlow tried Ampère's idea but only got it to work over and declared it impractical. In 1830 William Ritchie improved on Ampère's design by placing the magnetic needles inside a coil of wire connected to each pair of conductors. He successfully demonstrated it, showing the feasibility of the electromagnetic telegraph, but only within a lecture hall.
In 1825, William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet, with a single winding of uninsulated wire on a piece of varnished iron, which increased the magnetic force produced by electric current. Joseph Henry improved it in 1828 by placing several windings of insulated wire around the bar, creating a much more powerful electromagnet which could operate a telegraph through the high resistance of long telegraph wires. During his tenure at The Albany Academy from 1826 to 1832, Henry first demonstrated the theory of the 'magnetic telegraph' by ringing a bell through of wire strung around the room in 1831.
In 1835, Joseph Henry and Edward Davy independently invented the mercury dipping electrical relay, in which a magnetic needle is dipped into a pot of mercury when an electric current passes through the surrounding coil. In 1837, Davy invented the much more practical metallic make-and-break relay which became the relay of choice in telegraph systems and a key component for periodically renewing weak signals. Davy demonstrated his telegraph system in Regent's Park in 1837 and was granted a patent on 4 July 1838. Davy also invented a printing telegraph which used the electric current from the telegraph signal to mark a ribbon of calico infused with potassium iodide and calcium hypochlorite.
First working systems
The first working telegraph was built by the English inventor Francis Ronalds in 1816 and used static electricity. At the family home on Hammersmith Mall, he set up a complete subterranean system in a long trench as well as an long overhead telegraph. The lines were connected at both ends to revolving dials marked with the letters of the alphabet and electrical impulses sent along the wire were used to transmit messages. Offering his invention to the Admiralty in July 1816, it was rejected as "wholly unnecessary". His account of the scheme and the possibilities of rapid global communication in Descriptions of an Electrical Telegraph and of some other Electrical Apparatus was the first published work on electric telegraphy and even described the risk of signal retardation due to induction. Elements of Ronalds' design were utilised in the subsequent commercialisation of the telegraph over 20 years later.
The Schilling telegraph, invented by Baron Schilling von Canstatt in 1832, was an early needle telegraph. It had a transmitting device that consisted of a keyboard with 16 black-and-white keys. These served for switching the electric current. The receiving instrument consisted of six galvanometers with magnetic needles, suspended from silk threads. The two stations of Schilling's telegraph were connected by eight wires; six were connected with the galvanometers, one served for the return current and one for a signal bell. When at the starting station the operator pressed a key, the corresponding pointer was deflected at the receiving station. Different positions of black and white flags on different disks gave combinations which corresponded to the letters or numbers. Pavel Schilling subsequently improved its apparatus by reducing the number of connecting wires from eight to two.
On 21 October 1832, Schilling managed a short-distance transmission of signals between two telegraphs in different rooms of his apartment. In 1836, the British government attempted to buy the design but Schilling instead accepted overtures from Nicholas I of Russia. Schilling's telegraph was tested on a experimental underground and underwater cable, laid around the building of the main Admiralty in Saint Petersburg and was approved for a telegraph between the imperial palace at Peterhof and the naval base at Kronstadt. However, the project was cancelled following Schilling's death in 1837. Schilling was also one of the first to put into practice the idea of the binary system of signal transmission. His work was taken over and developed by Moritz von Jacobi who invented telegraph equipment that was used by Tsar Alexander III to connect the Imperial palace at Tsarskoye Selo and Kronstadt Naval Base.
In 1833, Carl Friedrich Gauss, together with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber in Göttingen installed a wire above the town's roofs. Gauss combined the Poggendorff-Schweigger multiplicator with his magnetometer to build a more sensitive device, the galvanometer. To change the direction of the electric current, he constructed a commutator of his own. As a result, he was able to make the distant needle move in the direction set by the commutator on the other end of the line.
At first, Gauss and Weber used the telegraph to coordinate time, but soon they developed other signals and finally, their own alphabet. The alphabet was encoded in a binary code that was transmitted by positive or negative voltage pulses which were generated by means of moving an induction coil up and down over a permanent magnet and connecting the coil with the transmission wires by means of the commutator. The page of Gauss' laboratory notebook containing both his code and the first message transmitted, as well as a replica of the telegraph made in the 1850s under the instructions of Weber are kept in the faculty of physics at the University of Göttingen, in Germany.
Gauss was convinced that this communication would be a help to his kingdom's towns. Later in the same year, instead of a Voltaic pile, Gauss used an induction pulse, enabling him to transmit seven letters a minute instead of two. The inventors and university did not have the funds to develop the telegraph on their own, but they received funding from Alexander von Humboldt. Carl August Steinheil in Munich was able to build a telegraph network within the city in 1835–1836. He installed a telegraph line along the first German railroad in 1835. Steinheil built a telegraph along the Nuremberg - Fürth railway line in 1838, the first earth-return telegraph put into service.
By 1837, William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone had co-developed a telegraph system which used a number of needles on a board that could be moved to point to letters of the alphabet. Any number of needles could be used, depending on the number of characters it was required to code. In May 1837 they patented their system. The patent recommended five needles, which coded twenty of the alphabet's 26 letters.
Samuel Morse independently developed and patented a recording electric telegraph in 1837. Morse's assistant Alfred Vail developed an instrument that was called the register for recording the received messages. It embossed dots and dashes on a moving paper tape by a stylus which was operated by an electromagnet. Morse and Vail developed the Morse code signalling alphabet. The first telegram in the United States was sent by Morse on 11 January 1838, across of wire at Speedwell Ironworks near Morristown, New Jersey, although it was only later, in 1844, that he sent the message "WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT" over the from the Capitol in Washington to the old Mt. Clare Depot in Baltimore.
Commercial telegraphy
Cooke and Wheatstone system
The first commercial electrical telegraph was the Cooke and Wheatstone system. A demonstration four-needle system was installed on the Euston to Camden Town section of Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham Railway in 1837 for signalling rope-hauling of locomotives. It was rejected in favour of pneumatic whistles. Cooke and Wheatstone had their first commercial success with a system installed on the Great Western Railway over the from Paddington station to West Drayton in 1838. This was a five-needle, six-wire system. This system suffered from failing insulation on the underground cables. When the line was extended to Slough in 1843, the telegraph was converted to a one-needle, two-wire system with uninsulated wires on poles. The one-needle telegraph proved highly successful on British railways, and 15,000 sets were still in use at the end of the nineteenth century. Some remained in service in the 1930s. The Electric Telegraph Company, the world's first public telegraphy company was formed in 1845 by financier John Lewis Ricardo and Cooke.
Wheatstone ABC telegraph
Wheatstone developed a practical alphabetical system in 1840 called the A.B.C. System, used mostly on private wires. This consisted of a "communicator" at the sending end and an "indicator" at the receiving end. The communicator consisted of a circular dial with a pointer and the 26 letters of the alphabet (and four punctuation marks) around its circumference. Against each letter was a key that could be pressed. A transmission would begin with the pointers on the dials at both ends set to the start position. The transmitting operator would then press down the key corresponding to the letter to be transmitted. In the base of the communicator was a magneto actuated by a handle on the front. This would be turned to apply an alternating voltage to the line. Each half cycle of the current would move the pointers at both ends on by one position. When the pointer reached the position of the depressed key, it would stop and the magneto would be disconnected from the line. The communicator's pointer was geared to the magneto mechanism. The indicator's pointer was moved by a polarised electromagnet whose armature was coupled to it through an escapement. Thus the alternating line voltage moved the indicator's pointer on to the position of the depressed key on the communicator. Pressing another key would then release the pointer and the previous key, and re-connect the magneto to the line. These machines were very robust and simple to operate, and they stayed in use in Britain until well into the 20th century.
Morse system
In 1851, a conference in Vienna of countries in the German-Austrian Telegraph Union (which included many central European countries) adopted the Morse telegraph as the system for international communications. The international Morse code adopted was considerably modified from the original American Morse code, and was based on a code used on Hamburg railways (Gerke, 1848). A common code was a necessary step to allow direct telegraph connection between countries. With different codes, additional operators were required to translate and retransmit the message. In 1865, a conference in Paris adopted Gerke's code as the International Morse code and was henceforth the international standard. The US, however, continued to use American Morse code internally for some time, hence international messages required retransmission in both directions.
In the United States, the Morse/Vail telegraph was quickly deployed in the two decades following the first demonstration in 1844. The overland telegraph connected the west coast of the continent to the east coast by 24 October 1861, bringing an end to the Pony Express.
Foy–Breguet system
France was slow to adopt the electrical telegraph, because of the extensive optical telegraph system built during the Napoleonic era. There was also serious concern that an electrical telegraph could be quickly put out of action by enemy saboteurs, something that was much more difficult to do with optical telegraphs which had no exposed hardware between stations. The Foy-Breguet telegraph was eventually adopted. This was a two-needle system using two signal wires but displayed in a uniquely different way to other needle telegraphs. The needles made symbols similar to the Chappe optical system symbols, making it more familiar to the telegraph operators. The optical system was decommissioned starting in 1846, but not completely until 1855. In that year the Foy-Breguet system was replaced with the Morse system.
Expansion
As well as the rapid expansion of the use of the telegraphs along the railways, they soon spread into the field of mass communication with the instruments being installed in post offices. The era of mass personal communication had begun. Telegraph networks were expensive to build, but financing was readily available, especially from London bankers. By 1852, National systems were in operation in major countries:
The New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company, for example, was created in 1852 in Rochester, New York and eventually became the Western Union Telegraph Company. Although many countries had telegraph networks, there was no worldwide interconnection. Message by post was still the primary means of communication to countries outside Europe.
Telegraphic improvements
A continuing goal in telegraphy was to reduce the cost per message by reducing hand-work, or increasing the sending rate. There were many experiments with moving pointers, and various electrical encodings. However, most systems were too complicated and unreliable. A successful expedient to reduce the cost per message was the development of telegraphese.
The first system that did not require skilled technicians to operate was Charles Wheatstone's ABC system in 1840 in which the letters of the alphabet were arranged around a clock-face, and the signal caused a needle to indicate the letter. This early system required the receiver to be present in real time to record the message and it reached speeds of up to 15 words a minute.
In 1846, Alexander Bain patented a chemical telegraph in Edinburgh. The signal current moved an iron pen across a moving paper tape soaked in a mixture of ammonium nitrate and potassium ferrocyanide, decomposing the chemical and producing readable blue marks in Morse code. The speed of the printing telegraph was 16 and a half words per minute, but messages still required translation into English by live copyists. Chemical telegraphy came to an end in the US in 1851, when the Morse group defeated the Bain patent in the US District Court.
For a brief period, starting with the New York–Boston line in 1848, some telegraph networks began to employ sound operators, who were trained to understand Morse code aurally. Gradually, the use of sound operators eliminated the need for telegraph receivers to include register and tape. Instead, the receiving instrument was developed into a "sounder", an electromagnet that was energized by a current and attracted a small iron lever. When the sounding key was opened or closed, the sounder lever struck an anvil. The Morse operator distinguished a dot and a dash by the short or long interval between the two clicks. The message was then written out in long-hand.
Royal Earl House developed and patented a letter-printing telegraph system in 1846 which employed an alphabetic keyboard for the transmitter and automatically printed the letters on paper at the receiver, and followed this up with a steam-powered version in 1852. Advocates of printing telegraphy said it would eliminate Morse operators' errors. The House machine was used on four main American telegraph lines by 1852. The speed of the House machine was announced as 2600 words an hour.
David Edward Hughes invented the printing telegraph in 1855; it used a keyboard of 26 keys for the alphabet and a spinning type wheel that determined the letter being transmitted by the length of time that had elapsed since the previous transmission. The system allowed for automatic recording on the receiving end. The system was very stable and accurate and became accepted around the world.
The next improvement was the Baudot code of 1874. French engineer Émile Baudot patented a printing telegraph in which the signals were translated automatically into typographic characters. Each character was assigned a five-bit code, mechanically interpreted from the state of five on/off switches. Operators had to maintain a steady rhythm, and the usual speed of operation was 30 words per minute.
By this point, reception had been automated, but the speed and accuracy of the transmission were still limited to the skill of the human operator. The first practical automated system was patented by Charles Wheatstone. The message (in Morse code) was typed onto a piece of perforated tape using a keyboard-like device called the 'Stick Punch'. The transmitter automatically ran the tape through and transmitted the message at the then exceptionally high speed of 70 words per minute.
Teleprinters
An early successful teleprinter was invented by Frederick G. Creed. In Glasgow he created his first keyboard perforator, which used compressed air to punch the holes. He also created a reperforator (receiving perforator) and a printer. The reperforator punched incoming Morse signals onto paper tape and the printer decoded this tape to produce alphanumeric characters on plain paper. This was the origin of the Creed High Speed Automatic Printing System, which could run at an unprecedented 200 words per minute. His system was adopted by the Daily Mail for daily transmission of the newspaper contents.
With the invention of the teletypewriter, telegraphic encoding became fully automated. Early teletypewriters used the ITA-1 Baudot code, a five-bit code. This yielded only thirty-two codes, so it was over-defined into two "shifts", "letters" and "figures". An explicit, unshared shift code prefaced each set of letters and figures. In 1901, Baudot's code was modified by Donald Murray.
In the 1930s, teleprinters were produced by Teletype in the US, Creed in Britain and Siemens in Germany.
By 1935, message routing was the last great barrier to full automation. Large telegraphy providers began to develop systems that used telephone-like rotary dialling to connect teletypewriters. These resulting systems were called "Telex" (TELegraph EXchange). Telex machines first performed rotary-telephone-style pulse dialling for circuit switching, and then sent data by ITA2. This "type A" Telex routing functionally automated message routing.
The first wide-coverage Telex network was implemented in Germany during the 1930s as a network used to communicate within the government.
At the rate of 45.45 (±0.5%) baud – considered speedy at the time – up to 25 telex channels could share a single long-distance telephone channel by using voice frequency telegraphy multiplexing, making telex the least expensive method of reliable long-distance communication.
Automatic teleprinter exchange service was introduced into Canada by CPR Telegraphs and CN Telegraph in July 1957 and in 1958, Western Union started to build a Telex network in the United States.
The harmonic telegraph
The most expensive aspect of a telegraph system was the installation – the laying of the wire, which was often very long. The costs would be better covered by finding a way to send more than one message at a time through the single wire, thus increasing revenue per wire. Early devices included the duplex and the quadruplex which allowed, respectively, one or two telegraph transmissions in each direction. However, an even greater number of channels was desired on the busiest lines. In the latter half of the 1800s, several inventors worked towards creating a method for doing just that, including Charles Bourseul, Thomas Edison, Elisha Gray, and Alexander Graham Bell.
One approach was to have resonators of several different frequencies act as carriers of a modulated on-off signal. This was the harmonic telegraph, a form of frequency-division multiplexing. These various frequencies, referred to as harmonics, could then be combined into one complex signal and sent down the single wire. On the receiving end, the frequencies would be separated with a matching set of resonators.
With a set of frequencies being carried down a single wire, it was realized that the human voice itself could be transmitted electrically through the wire. This effort led to the invention of the telephone. (While the work toward packing multiple telegraph signals onto one wire led to telephony, later advances would pack multiple voice signals onto one wire by increasing the bandwidth by modulating frequencies much higher than human hearing. Eventually, the bandwidth was widened much further by using laser light signals sent through fiber optic cables. Fiber optic transmission can carry 25,000 telephone signals simultaneously down a single fiber.)
Oceanic telegraph cables
Soon after the first successful telegraph systems were operational, the possibility of transmitting messages across the sea by way of submarine communications cables was first proposed. One of the primary technical challenges was to sufficiently insulate the submarine cable to prevent the electric current from leaking out into the water. In 1842, a Scottish surgeon William Montgomerie introduced gutta-percha, the adhesive juice of the Palaquium gutta tree, to Europe. Michael Faraday and Wheatstone soon discovered the merits of gutta-percha as an insulator, and in 1845, the latter suggested that it should be employed to cover the wire which was proposed to be laid from Dover to Calais. Gutta-percha was used as insulation on a wire laid across the Rhine between Deutz and Cologne. In 1849, C. V. Walker, electrician to the South Eastern Railway, submerged a wire coated with gutta-percha off the coast from Folkestone, which was tested successfully.
John Watkins Brett, an engineer from Bristol, sought and obtained permission from Louis-Philippe in 1847 to establish telegraphic communication between France and England. The first undersea cable was laid in 1850, connecting the two countries and was followed by connections to Ireland and the Low Countries.
The Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed in London in 1856 to undertake to construct a commercial telegraph cable across the Atlantic Ocean. It was successfully completed on 18 July 1866 by the ship SS Great Eastern, captained by Sir James Anderson, after many mishaps along the away. John Pender, one of the men on the Great Eastern, later founded several telecommunications companies primarily laying cables between Britain and Southeast Asia. Earlier transatlantic submarine cables installations were attempted in 1857, 1858 and 1865. The 1857 cable only operated intermittently for a few days or weeks before it failed. The study of underwater telegraph cables accelerated interest in mathematical analysis of very long transmission lines. The telegraph lines from Britain to India were connected in 1870. (Those several companies combined to form the Eastern Telegraph Company in 1872.) The HMS Challenger expedition in 1873–1876 mapped the ocean floor for future underwater telegraph cables.
Australia was first linked to the rest of the world in October 1872 by a submarine telegraph cable at Darwin. This brought news reports from the rest of the world. The telegraph across the Pacific was completed in 1902, finally encircling the world.
From the 1850s until well into the 20th century, British submarine cable systems dominated the world system. This was set out as a formal strategic goal, which became known as the All Red Line. In 1896, there were thirty cable laying ships in the world and twenty-four of them were owned by British companies. In 1892, British companies owned and operated two-thirds of the world's cables and by 1923, their share was still 42.7 percent.
Cable and Wireless Company
Cable & Wireless was a British telecommunications company that traced its origins back to the 1860s, with Sir John Pender as the founder, although the name was only adopted in 1934. It was formed from successive mergers including:
The Falmouth, Malta, Gibraltar Telegraph Company
The British Indian Submarine Telegraph Company
The Marseilles, Algiers and Malta Telegraph Company
The Eastern Telegraph Company
The Eastern Extension Australasia and China Telegraph Company
The Eastern and Associated Telegraph Companies
Telegraphy and longitude
Main article § Section: .
The telegraph was very important for sending time signals to determine longitude, providing greater accuracy than previously available. Longitude was measured by comparing local time (for example local noon occurs when the sun is at its highest above the horizon) with absolute time (a time that is the same for an observer anywhere on earth). If the local times of two places differ by one hour, the difference in longitude between them is 15° (360°/24h). Before telegraphy, absolute time could be obtained from astronomical events, such as eclipses, occultations or lunar distances, or by transporting an accurate clock (a chronometer) from one location to the other.
The idea of using the telegraph to transmit a time signal for longitude determination was suggested by François Arago to Samuel Morse in 1837, and the first test of this idea was made by Capt. Wilkes of the U.S. Navy in 1844, over Morse's line between Washington and Baltimore. The method was soon in practical use for longitude determination, in particular by the U.S. Coast Survey, and over longer and longer distances as the telegraph network spread across North America and the world, and as technical developments improved accuracy and productivity
The "telegraphic longitude net" soon became worldwide. Transatlantic links between Europe and North America were established in 1866 and 1870. The US Navy extended observations into the West Indies and Central and South America with an additional transatlantic link from South America to Lisbon between 1874 and 1890. British, Russian and US observations created a chain from Europe through Suez, Aden, Madras, Singapore, China and Japan, to Vladivostok, thence to Saint Petersburg and back to Western Europe.
Australia was linked to Singapore via Java in 1871 and the web circled the globe in 1902 with the connection of Australia and New Zealand to Canada via the All Red Line. The double determination of longitudes from east to west and from west to east agreed within one second of arc ( second of time – less than 30 metres).
Telegraphy in war
The ability to send telegrams brought obvious advantages to those conducting war. Secret messages were encoded, so interception alone would not be sufficient for the opposing side to gain an advantage. There were also geographical constraints on intercepting the telegraph cables that improved security, however once radio telegraphy was developed interception became far more widespread.
Crimean War
The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts to use telegraphs and was one of the first to be documented extensively. In 1854, the government in London created a military Telegraph Detachment for the Army commanded by an officer of the Royal Engineers. It was to comprise twenty-five men from the Royal Corps of Sappers & Miners trained by the Electric Telegraph Company to construct and work the first field electric telegraph.
Journalistic recording of the war was provided by William Howard Russell (writing for The Times newspaper) with photographs by Roger Fenton. News from war correspondents kept the public of the nations involved in the war informed of the day-to-day events in a way that had not been possible in any previous war. After the French extended the telegraph to the coast of the Black Sea in late 1854, the news reached London in two days. When the British laid an underwater cable to the Crimean peninsula in April 1855, news reached London in a few hours. The daily news reports energised public opinion, which brought down the government and led to Lord Palmerston becoming prime minister.
American Civil War
During the American Civil War the telegraph proved its value as a tactical, operational, and strategic communication medium and an important contributor to Union victory. By contrast the Confederacy failed to make effective use of the South's much smaller telegraph network. Prior to the War the telegraph systems were primarily used in the commercial sector. Government buildings were not inter-connected with telegraph lines, but relied on runners to carry messages back and forth. Before the war the Government saw no need to connect lines within city limits, however, they did see the use in connections between cities. Washington D.C. being the hub of government, it had the most connections, but there were only a few lines running north and south out of the city. It wasn't until the Civil War that the government saw the true potential of the telegraph system. Soon after the shelling of Fort Sumter, the South cut telegraph lines running into D.C., which put the city in a state of panic because they feared an immediate Southern invasion.
Within 6 months of the start of the war, the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps (USMT) had laid approximately of line. By war's end they had laid approximately of line, 8,000 for military and 5,000 for commercial use, and had handled approximately 6.5 million messages. The telegraph was not only important for communication within the armed forces, but also in the civilian sector, helping political leaders to maintain control over their districts.
Even before the war, the American Telegraph Company censored suspect messages informally to block aid to the secession movement. During the war, Secretary of War Simon Cameron, and later Edwin Stanton, wanted control over the telegraph lines to maintain the flow of information. Early in the war, one of Stanton's first acts as Secretary of War was to move telegraph lines from ending at McClellan's headquarters to terminating at the War Department. Stanton himself said "[telegraphy] is my right arm". Telegraphy assisted Northern victories, including the Battle of Antietam (1862), the Battle of Chickamauga (1863), and Sherman's March to the Sea (1864).
The telegraph system still had its flaws. The USMT, while the main source of telegraphers and cable, was still a civilian agency. Most operators were first hired by the telegraph companies and then contracted out to the War Department. This created tension between Generals and their operators. One source of irritation was that USMT operators did not have to follow military authority. Usually they performed without hesitation, but they were not required to, so Albert Myer created a U.S. Army Signal Corps in February 1863. As the new head of the Signal Corps, Myer tried to get all telegraph and flag signaling under his command, and therefore subject to military discipline. After creating the Signal Corps, Myer pushed to further develop new telegraph systems. While the USMT relied primarily on civilian lines and operators, the Signal Corp's new field telegraph could be deployed and dismantled faster than USMT's system.
First World War
During World War I, Britain's telegraph communications were almost completely uninterrupted, while it was able to quickly cut Germany's cables worldwide. The British government censored telegraph cable companies in an effort to root out espionage and restrict financial transactions with Central Powers nations. British access to transatlantic cables and its codebreaking expertise led to the Zimmermann Telegram incident that contributed to the US joining the war. Despite British acquisition of German colonies and expansion into the Middle East, debt from the war led to Britain's control over telegraph cables to weaken while US control grew.
Second World War
World War II revived the 'cable war' of 1914–1918. In 1939, German-owned cables across the Atlantic were cut once again, and, in 1940, Italian cables to South America and Spain were cut in retaliation for Italian action against two of the five British cables linking Gibraltar and Malta. Electra House, Cable & Wireless's head office and central cable station, was damaged by German bombing in 1941.
Resistance movements in occupied Europe sabotaged communications facilities such as telegraph lines, forcing the Germans to use wireless telegraphy, which could then be intercepted by Britain.
The Germans developed a highly complex teleprinter attachment (German: Schlüssel-Zusatz, "cipher attachment") that was used for enciphering telegrams, using the Lorenz cipher, between German High Command (OKW) and the army groups in the field. These contained situation reports, battle plans, and discussions of strategy and tactics. Britain intercepted these signals, diagnosed how the encrypting machine worked, and decrypted a large amount of teleprinter traffic.
End of the telegraph era
In America, the end of the telegraph era can be associated with the fall of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Western Union was the leading telegraph provider for America and was seen as the best competition for the National Bell Telephone Company. Western Union and Bell were both invested in telegraphy and telephone technology. Western Union's decision to allow Bell to gain the advantage in telephone technology was the result of Western Union's upper management's failure to foresee the surpassing of the telephone over the, at the time, dominant telegraph system. Western Union soon lost the legal battle for the rights to their telephone copyrights. This led to Western Union agreeing to a lesser position in the telephone competition, which in turn led to the lessening of the telegraph.
While the telegraph was not the focus of the legal battles that occurred around 1878, the companies that were affected by the effects of the battle were the main powers of telegraphy at the time. Western Union thought that the agreement of 1878 would solidify telegraphy as the long-range communication of choice. However, due to the underestimates of telegraph's future and poor contracts, Western Union found itself declining. AT&T acquired working control of Western Union in 1909 but relinquished it in 1914 under threat of antitrust action. AT&T bought Western Union's electronic mail and Telex businesses in 1990.
Although commercial "telegraph" services are still available in many countries, transmission is usually done via a computer network rather than a dedicated wired connection.
See also
92 Code
Aurora (astronomy)
American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T)
Bell Canada
Geomagnetically induced current
Great Northern Telegraph Company
Harrison Gray Dyar, who supposedly erected the first telegraph line and dispatched the first telegram
Neutral direct-current telegraph system
Western Electric Company
References
Bibliography
Bowers, Brian, Sir Charles Wheatstone: 1802–1875, IET, 2001 .
Holzmann, Gerard J.; Pehrson, Björn, The Early History of Data Networks, Wiley, 1995 .
Attributed to
.
Mercer, David, The Telephone: The Life Story of a Technology, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006 .
Further reading
Cooke, W.F., The Electric Telegraph, Was it invented by Prof. Wheatstone?, London 1856.
Gauß, C. F., Works, Göttingen 1863–1933.
Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, Oxford University Press, 2007 .
Peterson, M.J. Roots of Interconnection: Communications, Transportation and Phases of the Industrial Revolution, International Dimensions of Ethics Education in Science and Engineering Background Reading, Version 1; February 2008.
Steinheil, C.A., Ueber Telegraphie, München 1838.
Yates, JoAnne. The Telegraph's Effect on Nineteenth Century Markets and Firms, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 149–163.
External links
Morse Telegraph Club, Inc. (The Morse Telegraph Club is an international non-profit organization dedicated to the perpetuation of the knowledge and traditions of telegraphy.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20050829153213/http://collections.ic.gc.ca/canso/index.htm
Shilling's telegraph, an exhibit of the A.S. Popov Central Museum of Communications
History of electromagnetic telegraph
The first electric telegraphs
The Dawn of Telegraphy
Pavel Shilling and his telegraph- article in PCWeek, Russian edition.
Distant Writing – The History of the Telegraph Companies in Britain between 1838 and 1868
NASA – Carrington Super Flare NASA 6 May 2008
How Cables Unite The World – a 1902 article about telegraph networks and technology from the magazine The World's Work
Indiana telegraph and telephone collection, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Indiana State Library
Wonders of electricity and the elements, being a popular account of modern electrical and magnetic discoveries, magnetism and electric machines, the electric telegraph and the electric light, and the metal bases, salt, and acids from Science History Institute Digital Collections
The electro magnetic telegraph: with an historical account of its rise, progress, and present condition from Science History Institute Digital Collections
Telegraphy
Russian inventions
19th-century inventions
Telegraph
sl:Telegraf
fi:Lennätin
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The euro (symbol: €; code: EUR) is the official currency of 19 of the member states of the European Union. This group of states is known as the eurozone or, officially, the euro area, and includes about 343 million citizens . The euro, which is divided into 100 cents, is the second-largest and second-most traded currency in the international markets for the related different types of transactions after the United States dollar.
The currency is also used officially by the institutions of the European Union, by four European microstates that are not EU members, the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, as well as unilaterally by Montenegro and Kosovo. Outside Europe, a number of special territories of EU members also use the euro as their currency. Additionally, over 200 million people worldwide use currencies pegged to the euro.
The euro is the second-largest reserve currency as well as the second-most traded currency in the world after the United States dollar.
, with more than €1.3 trillion in circulation, the euro has one of the highest combined values of banknotes and coins in circulation in the world.
The name euro was officially adopted on 16 December 1995 in Madrid. The euro was introduced to world financial markets as an accounting currency on 1 January 1999, replacing the former European Currency Unit (ECU) at a ratio of 1:1 (US$1.1743). Physical euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation on 1 January 2002, making it the day-to-day operating currency of its original members, and by March 2002 it had completely replaced the former currencies. While the euro dropped to US$0.83 within two years (26 October 2000), it has traded above the U.S. dollar since the end of 2002, peaking at US$1.60 on 18 July 2008 and since then returning near to its original issue rate. In late 2009, the euro became immersed in the European sovereign-debt crisis, which led to the creation of the European Financial Stability Facility as well as other reforms aimed at stabilising and strengthening the currency.
Administration
The euro is managed and administered by the Frankfurt-based European Central Bank (ECB) and the Eurosystem (composed of the central banks of the eurozone countries). As an independent central bank, the ECB has sole authority to set monetary policy. The Eurosystem participates in the printing, minting and distribution of notes and coins in all member states, and the operation of the eurozone payment systems.
The 1992 Maastricht Treaty obliges most EU member states to adopt the euro upon meeting certain monetary and budgetary convergence criteria, although not all states have done so. Denmark has negotiated exemptions, while Sweden (which joined the EU in 1995, after the Maastricht Treaty was signed) turned down the euro in a non-binding referendum in 2003, and has circumvented the obligation to adopt the euro by not meeting the monetary and budgetary requirements. All nations that have joined the EU since 1993 have pledged to adopt the euro in due course. The Maastricht Treaty was later amended by the Treaty of Nice, which closed the gaps and loopholes in the Maastricht and Rome Treaties.
Issuing modalities for banknotes
Since 1 January 2002, the national central banks (NCBs) and the ECB have issued euro banknotes on a joint basis. Eurosystem NCBs are required to accept euro banknotes put into circulation by other Eurosystem members and these banknotes are not repatriated. The ECB issues 8% of the total value of banknotes issued by the Eurosystem. In practice, the ECB's banknotes are put into circulation by the NCBs, thereby incurring matching liabilities vis-à-vis the ECB. These liabilities carry interest at the main refinancing rate of the ECB. The other 92% of euro banknotes are issued by the NCBs in proportion to their respective shares of the ECB capital key, calculated using national share of European Union (EU) population and national share of EU GDP, equally weighted.
Characteristics
Coins and banknotes
The euro is divided into 100 cents (also referred to as euro cents, especially when distinguishing them from other currencies, and referred to as such on the common side of all cent coins). In Community legislative acts the plural forms of euro and cent are spelled without the s, notwithstanding normal English usage. Otherwise, normal English plurals are used, with many local variations such as centime in France.
All circulating coins have a common side showing the denomination or value, and a map in the background. Due to the linguistic plurality in the European Union, the Latin alphabet version of euro is used (as opposed to the less common Greek or Cyrillic) and Arabic numerals (other text is used on national sides in national languages, but other text on the common side is avoided). For the denominations except the 1-, 2- and 5-cent coins, the map only showed the 15 member states which were members when the euro was introduced. Beginning in 2007 or 2008 (depending on the country), the old map was replaced by a map of Europe also showing countries outside the EU like Norway, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Turkey. The 1-, 2- and 5-cent coins, however, keep their old design, showing a geographical map of Europe with the 15 member states of 2002 raised somewhat above the rest of the map. All common sides were designed by Luc Luycx. The coins also have a national side showing an image specifically chosen by the country that issued the coin. Euro coins from any member state may be freely used in any nation that has adopted the euro.
The coins are issued in denominations of €2, €1, 50c, 20c, 10c, 5c, 2c, and 1c. To avoid the use of the two smallest coins, some cash transactions are rounded to the nearest five cents in the Netherlands and Ireland (by voluntary agreement) and in Finland and Italy (by law). This practice is discouraged by the commission, as is the practice of certain shops of refusing to accept high-value euro notes.
Commemorative coins with €2 face value have been issued with changes to the design of the national side of the coin. These include both commonly issued coins, such as the €2 commemorative coin for the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, and nationally issued coins, such as the coin to commemorate the 2004 Summer Olympics issued by Greece. These coins are legal tender throughout the eurozone. Collector coins with various other denominations have been issued as well, but these are not intended for general circulation, and they are legal tender only in the member state that issued them.
The design for the euro banknotes has common designs on both sides. The design was created by the Austrian designer Robert Kalina. Notes are issued in €500, €200, €100, €50, €20, €10, €5. Each banknote has its own colour and is dedicated to an artistic period of European architecture. The front of the note features windows or gateways while the back has bridges, symbolising links between states in the union and with the future. While the designs are supposed to be devoid of any identifiable characteristics, the initial designs by Robert Kalina were of specific bridges, including the Rialto and the Pont de Neuilly, and were subsequently rendered more generic; the final designs still bear very close similarities to their specific prototypes; thus they are not truly generic. The monuments looked similar enough to different national monuments to please everyone.
The Europa series, or second series, consists of six denominations and no longer includes the €500 with issuance discontinued as of 27 April 2019. However, both the first and the second series of euro banknotes, including the €500, remain legal tender throughout the euro area.
In December 2021, the ECB announced it plans to redesign euro banknotes by 2024. A theme advisory group, made up of one member from each euro area country, was selected to submit theme proposals to the ECB. The proposals will be voted on by the public; a design competition will also be held.
Payments clearing, electronic funds transfer
Capital within the EU may be transferred in any amount from one state to another. All intra-Union transfers in euro are treated as domestic transactions and bear the corresponding domestic transfer costs. This includes all member states of the EU, even those outside the eurozone providing the transactions are carried out in euro. Credit/debit card charging and ATM withdrawals within the eurozone are also treated as domestic transactions; however paper-based payment orders, like cheques, have not been standardised so these are still domestic-based. The ECB has also set up a clearing system, TARGET, for large euro transactions.
Currency sign
A special euro currency sign (€) was designed after a public survey had narrowed the original ten proposals down to two. The European Commission then chose the design created by the Belgian Alain Billiet. Of the symbol, the Commission stated
The European Commission also specified a euro logo with exact proportions and foreground and background colour tones. Placement of the currency sign relative to the numeric amount varies from state to state, but for texts in English the symbol (or the ISO-standard "EUR") should precede the amount.
History
Introduction
The euro was established by the provisions in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. To participate in the currency, member states are meant to meet strict criteria, such as a budget deficit of less than 3% of their GDP, a debt ratio of less than 60% of GDP (both of which were ultimately widely flouted after introduction), low inflation, and interest rates close to the EU average. In the Maastricht Treaty, the United Kingdom and Denmark were granted exemptions per their request from moving to the stage of monetary union which resulted in the introduction of the euro.
The name "euro" was officially adopted in Madrid on 16 December 1995. Belgian Esperantist Germain Pirlot, a former teacher of French and history is credited with naming the new currency by sending a letter to then President of the European Commission, Jacques Santer, suggesting the name "euro" on 4 August 1995.
Due to differences in national conventions for rounding and significant digits, all conversion between the national currencies had to be carried out using the process of triangulation via the euro. The definitive values of one euro in terms of the exchange rates at which the currency entered the euro are shown on the right.
The rates were determined by the Council of the European Union, based on a recommendation from the European Commission based on the market rates on 31 December 1998. They were set so that one European Currency Unit (ECU) would equal one euro. The European Currency Unit was an accounting unit used by the EU, based on the currencies of the member states; it was not a currency in its own right. They could not be set earlier, because the ECU depended on the closing exchange rate of the non-euro currencies (principally the pound sterling) that day.
The procedure used to fix the conversion rate between the Greek drachma and the euro was different since the euro by then was already two years old. While the conversion rates for the initial eleven currencies were determined only hours before the euro was introduced, the conversion rate for the Greek drachma was fixed several months beforehand.
The currency was introduced in non-physical form (traveller's cheques, electronic transfers, banking, etc.) at midnight on 1 January 1999, when the national currencies of participating countries (the eurozone) ceased to exist independently. Their exchange rates were locked at fixed rates against each other. The euro thus became the successor to the European Currency Unit (ECU). The notes and coins for the old currencies, however, continued to be used as legal tender until new euro notes and coins were introduced on 1 January 2002.
The changeover period during which the former currencies' notes and coins were exchanged for those of the euro lasted about two months, until 28 February 2002. The official date on which the national currencies ceased to be legal tender varied from member state to member state. The earliest date was in Germany, where the mark officially ceased to be legal tender on 31 December 2001, though the exchange period lasted for two months more. Even after the old currencies ceased to be legal tender, they continued to be accepted by national central banks for periods ranging from several years to indefinitely (the latter for Austria, Germany, Ireland, Estonia and Latvia in banknotes and coins, and for Belgium, Luxembourg, Slovenia and Slovakia in banknotes only). The earliest coins to become non-convertible were the Portuguese escudos, which ceased to have monetary value after 31 December 2002, although banknotes remain exchangeable until 2022.
Eurozone crisis
Following the U.S. financial crisis in 2008, fears of a sovereign debt crisis developed in 2009 among investors concerning some European states, with the situation becoming particularly tense in early 2010. Greece was most acutely affected, but fellow Eurozone members Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain were also significantly affected. All these countries utilized EU funds except Italy, which is a major donor to the EFSF. To be included in the eurozone, countries had to fulfil certain convergence criteria, but the meaningfulness of such criteria was diminished by the fact it was not enforced with the same level of strictness among countries.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2011, "[I]f the [euro area] is treated as a single entity, its [economic and fiscal] position looks no worse and in some respects, rather better than that of the US or the UK" and the budget deficit for the euro area as a whole is much lower and the euro area's government debt/GDP ratio of 86% in 2010 was about the same level as that of the United States. "Moreover", they write, "private-sector indebtedness across the euro area as a whole is markedly lower than in the highly leveraged Anglo-Saxon economies". The authors conclude that the crisis "is as much political as economic" and the result of the fact that the euro area lacks the support of "institutional paraphernalia (and mutual bonds of solidarity) of a state".
The crisis continued with S&P downgrading the credit rating of nine euro-area countries, including France, then downgrading the entire European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) fund.
A historical parallel – to 1931 when Germany was burdened with debt, unemployment and austerity while France and the United States were relatively strong creditors – gained attention in summer 2012 even as Germany received a debt-rating warning of its own. In the enduring of this scenario the euro serves as a mean of quantitative primitive accumulation.
Direct and indirect usage
Direct usage
The euro is the sole currency of 19 EU member states: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Spain. These countries constitute the "eurozone", some 343 million people in total .
With all but one (Denmark) EU members obliged to join when economic conditions permit, together with future members of the EU, the enlargement of the eurozone is set to continue. Outside the EU, the euro is also the sole currency of Montenegro and Kosovo and several European microstates (Andorra, Monaco, San Marino and the Vatican City) as well as in three overseas territories of France that are not themselves part of the EU, namely Saint Barthélemy, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. Together this direct usage of the euro outside the EU affects nearly 3 million people.
The euro has been used as a trading currency in Cuba since 1998, Syria since 2006, and Venezuela since 2018. There are also various currencies pegged to the euro (see below). In 2009, Zimbabwe abandoned its local currency and used major currencies instead, including the euro and the United States dollar.
Use as reserve currency
Since its introduction, the euro has been the second most widely held international reserve currency after the U.S. dollar. The share of the euro as a reserve currency increased from 18% in 1999 to 27% in 2008. Over this period, the share held in U.S. dollar fell from 71% to 64% and that held in RMB fell from 6.4% to 3.3%. The euro inherited and built on the status of the Deutsche Mark as the second most important reserve currency. The euro remains underweight as a reserve currency in advanced economies while overweight in emerging and developing economies: according to the International Monetary Fund the total of euro held as a reserve in the world at the end of 2008 was equal to $1.1 trillion or €850 billion, with a share of 22% of all currency reserves in advanced economies, but a total of 31% of all currency reserves in emerging and developing economies.
The possibility of the euro becoming the first international reserve currency has been debated among economists. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan gave his opinion in September 2007 that it was "absolutely conceivable that the euro will replace the US dollar as reserve currency, or will be traded as an equally important reserve currency". In contrast to Greenspan's 2007 assessment, the euro's increase in the share of the worldwide currency reserve basket has slowed considerably since 2007 and since the beginning of the worldwide credit crunch related recession and European sovereign-debt crisis.
Currencies pegged to the euro
Outside the eurozone, a total of 22 countries and territories that do not belong to the EU have currencies that are directly pegged to the euro including 14 countries in mainland Africa (CFA franc), two African island countries (Comorian franc and Cape Verdean escudo), three French Pacific territories (CFP franc) and three Balkan countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosnia and Herzegovina convertible mark), Bulgaria (Bulgarian lev) and North Macedonia (Macedonian denar). On 28 July 2009, São Tomé and Príncipe signed an agreement with Portugal which will eventually tie its currency to the euro. Additionally, the Moroccan dirham is tied to a basket of currencies, including the euro and the US dollar, with the euro given the highest weighting.
With the exception of Bosnia, Bulgaria, North Macedonia (which had pegged their currencies against the Deutsche Mark) and Cape Verde (formerly pegged to the Portuguese escudo), all of these non-EU countries had a currency peg to the French Franc before pegging their currencies to the euro. Pegging a country's currency to a major currency is regarded as a safety measure, especially for currencies of areas with weak economies, as the euro is seen as a stable currency, prevents runaway inflation and encourages foreign investment due to its stability.
Within the EU several currencies are pegged to the euro, mostly as a precondition to joining the eurozone. The Danish krone, Croatian kuna and Bulgarian lev are pegged due to their participation in the ERM II.
In total, , 182 million people in Africa use a currency pegged to the euro, 27 million people outside the eurozone in Europe, and another 545,000 people on Pacific islands.
Since 2005, stamps issued by the Sovereign Military Order of Malta have been denominated in euro, although the Order's official currency remains the Maltese scudo. The Maltese scudo itself is pegged to the euro and is only recognised as legal tender within the Order.
Economics
Optimal currency area
In economics, an optimum currency area, or region (OCA or OCR), is a geographical region in which it would maximise economic efficiency to have the entire region share a single currency. There are two models, both proposed by Robert Mundell: the stationary expectations model and the international risk sharing model. Mundell himself advocates the international risk sharing model and thus concludes in favour of the euro. However, even before the creation of the single currency, there were concerns over diverging economies. Before the late-2000s recession it was considered unlikely that a state would leave the euro or the whole zone would collapse. However the Greek government-debt crisis led to former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw claiming the eurozone could not last in its current form. Part of the problem seems to be the rules that were created when the euro was set up. John Lanchester, writing for The New Yorker, explains it:
Transaction costs and risks
The most obvious benefit of adopting a single currency is to remove the cost of exchanging currency, theoretically allowing businesses and individuals to consummate previously unprofitable trades. For consumers, banks in the eurozone must charge the same for intra-member cross-border transactions as purely domestic transactions for electronic payments (e.g., credit cards, debit cards and cash machine withdrawals).
Financial markets on the continent are expected to be far more liquid and flexible than they were in the past. The reduction in cross-border transaction costs will allow larger banking firms to provide a wider array of banking services that can compete across and beyond the eurozone. However, although transaction costs were reduced, some studies have shown that risk aversion has increased during the last 40 years in the Eurozone.
Price parity
Another effect of the common European currency is that differences in prices—in particular in price levels—should decrease because of the law of one price. Differences in prices can trigger arbitrage, i.e., speculative trade in a commodity across borders purely to exploit the price differential. Therefore, prices on commonly traded goods are likely to converge, causing inflation in some regions and deflation in others during the transition. Some evidence of this has been observed in specific eurozone markets.
Macroeconomic stability
Before the introduction of the euro, some countries had successfully contained inflation, which was then seen as a major economic problem, by establishing largely independent central banks. One such bank was the Bundesbank in Germany; the European Central Bank was modelled on the Bundesbank.
The euro has come under criticism due to its regulation, lack of flexibility and rigidity towards sharing member States on issues such as nominal interest rates.
Many national and corporate bonds denominated in euro are significantly more liquid and have lower interest rates than was historically the case when denominated in national currencies. While increased liquidity may lower the nominal interest rate on the bond, denominating the bond in a currency with low levels of inflation arguably plays a much larger role. A credible commitment to low levels of inflation and a stable debt reduces the risk that the value of the debt will be eroded by higher levels of inflation or default in the future, allowing debt to be issued at a lower nominal interest rate.
Unfortunately, there is also a cost in structurally keeping inflation lower than in the United States, UK, and China. The result is that seen from those countries, the euro has become expensive, making European products increasingly expensive for its largest importers; hence export from the eurozone becomes more difficult.
In general, those in Europe who own large amounts of euro are served by high stability and low inflation.
A monetary union means states in that union lose the main mechanism of recovery of their international competitiveness by weakening (depreciating) their currency. When wages become too high compared to productivity in exports sector then these exports become more expensive and they are crowded out from the market within a country and abroad. This drives fall of employment and output in the exports sector and fall of trade and current account balances. Fall of output and employment in tradable goods sector may be offset by the growth of non-exports sectors, especially in construction and services. Increased purchases abroad and negative current account balance can be financed without a problem as long as credit is cheap. The need to finance trade deficit weakens currency making exports automatically more attractive in a country and abroad. A state in a monetary union cannot use weakening of currency to recover its international competitiveness. To achieve this a state has to reduce prices, including wages (deflation). This could result in high unemployment and lower incomes as it was during European sovereign-debt crisis.
Trade
The euro increased price transparency and stimulated cross-border trade. A 2009 consensus from the studies of the introduction of the euro concluded that it has increased trade within the eurozone by 5% to 10%, although one study suggested an increase of only 3% while another estimated 9 to 14%. However, a meta-analysis of all available studies suggests that the prevalence of positive estimates is caused by publication bias and that the underlying effect may be negligible. Although a more recent meta-analysis shows that publication bias decreases over time and that there are positive trade effects from the introduction of the euro, as long as results from before 2010 are taken into account. This may be because of the inclusion of the Financial crisis of 2007–2008 and ongoing integration within the EU. Furthermore, older studies accounting for time trend reflecting general cohesion policies in Europe that started before, and continue after implementing the common currency find no effect on trade. These results suggest that other policies aimed at European integration might be the source of observed increase in trade. According to Barry Eichengreen, studies disagree on the magnitude of the effect of the euro on trade, but they agree that it did have an effect.
Investment
Physical investment seems to have increased by 5% in the eurozone due to the introduction. Regarding foreign direct investment, a study found that the intra-eurozone FDI stocks have increased by about 20% during the first four years of the EMU. Concerning the effect on corporate investment, there is evidence that the introduction of the euro has resulted in an increase in investment rates and that it has made it easier for firms to access financing in Europe. The euro has most specifically stimulated investment in companies that come from countries that previously had weak currencies. A study found that the introduction of the euro accounts for 22% of the investment rate after 1998 in countries that previously had a weak currency.
Inflation
The introduction of the euro has led to extensive discussion about its possible effect on inflation. In the short term, there was a widespread impression in the population of the eurozone that the introduction of the euro had led to an increase in prices, but this impression was not confirmed by general indices of inflation and other studies. A study of this paradox found that this was due to an asymmetric effect of the introduction of the euro on prices: while it had no effect on most goods, it had an effect on cheap goods which have seen their price round up after the introduction of the euro. The study found that consumers based their beliefs on inflation of those cheap goods which are frequently purchased. It has also been suggested that the jump in small prices may be because prior to the introduction, retailers made fewer upward adjustments and waited for the introduction of the euro to do so.
Exchange rate risk
One of the advantages of the adoption of a common currency is the reduction of the risk associated with changes in currency exchange rates. It has been found that the introduction of the euro created "significant reductions in market risk exposures for nonfinancial firms both in and outside Europe". These reductions in market risk "were concentrated in firms domiciled in the eurozone and in non-euro firms with a high fraction of foreign sales or assets in Europe".
Financial integration
The introduction of the euro increased European financial integration, which helped stimulate growth of a European securities market (bond markets are characterized by economies of scale dynamics). According to a study on this question, it has "significantly reshaped the European financial system, especially with respect to the securities markets [...] However, the real and policy barriers to integration in the retail and corporate banking sectors remain significant, even if the wholesale end of banking has been largely integrated." Specifically, the euro has significantly decreased the cost of trade in bonds, equity, and banking assets within the eurozone. On a global level, there is evidence that the introduction of the euro has led to an integration in terms of investment in bond portfolios, with eurozone countries lending and borrowing more between each other than with other countries. Financial integration made it cheaper for European companies to borrow. Banks, firms and households could also invest more easily outside of their own country, thus creating greater international risk-sharing.
Effect on interest rates
As of January 2014, and since the introduction of the euro, interest rates of most member countries (particularly those with a weak currency) have decreased. Some of these countries had the most serious sovereign financing problems.
The effect of declining interest rates, combined with excess liquidity continually provided by the ECB, made it easier for banks within the countries in which interest rates fell the most, and their linked sovereigns, to borrow significant amounts (above the 3% of GDP budget deficit imposed on the eurozone initially) and significantly inflate their public and private debt levels. Following the financial crisis of 2007–2008, governments in these countries found it necessary to bail out or nationalise their privately held banks to prevent systemic failure of the banking system when underlying hard or financial asset values were found to be grossly inflated and sometimes so near worthless there was no liquid market for them. This further increased the already high levels of public debt to a level the markets began to consider unsustainable, via increasing government bond interest rates, producing the ongoing European sovereign-debt crisis.
Price convergence
The evidence on the convergence of prices in the eurozone with the introduction of the euro is mixed. Several studies failed to find any evidence of convergence following the introduction of the euro after a phase of convergence in the early 1990s. Other studies have found evidence of price convergence, in particular for cars. A possible reason for the divergence between the different studies is that the processes of convergence may not have been linear, slowing down substantially between 2000 and 2003, and resurfacing after 2003 as suggested by a recent study (2009).
Tourism
A study suggests that the introduction of the euro has had a positive effect on the amount of tourist travel within the EMU, with an increase of 6.5%.
Exchange rates
Flexible exchange rates
The ECB targets interest rates rather than exchange rates and in general, does not intervene on the foreign exchange rate markets. This is because of the implications of the Mundell–Fleming model, which implies a central bank cannot (without capital controls) maintain interest rate and exchange rate targets simultaneously, because increasing the money supply results in a depreciation of the currency. In the years following the Single European Act, the EU has liberalised its capital markets and, as the ECB has inflation targeting as its monetary policy, the exchange-rate regime of the euro is floating.
Against other major currencies
The euro is the second-most widely held reserve currency after the U.S. dollar. After its introduction on 4 January 1999 its exchange rate against the other major currencies fell reaching its lowest exchange rates in 2000 (3 May vs Pound sterling, 25 October vs the U.S. dollar, 26 October vs Japanese yen). Afterwards it regained and its exchange rate reached its historical highest point in 2008 (15 July vs U.S. dollar, 23 July vs Japanese yen, 29 December vs Pound sterling). With the advent of the global financial crisis the euro initially fell, to regain later. Despite pressure due to the European sovereign-debt crisis the euro remained stable. In November 2011 the euro's exchange rate index – measured against currencies of the bloc's major trading partners – was trading almost two percent higher on the year, approximately at the same level as it was before the crisis kicked off in 2007.
Current and historical exchange rates against 32 other currencies (European Central Bank): link
Political considerations
Besides the economic motivations to the introduction of the euro, its creation was also partly justified as a way to foster a closer sense of joint identity between European citizens. Statements about this goal were for instance made by Wim Duisenberg, European Central Bank Governor, in 1998, Laurent Fabius, French Finance Minister, in 2000, and Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission, in 2002. However, 15 years after the introduction of the euro, a study found no evidence that it has had a positive influence on a shared sense of European identity (and no evidence that it had a negative effect either).
Linguistic issues
The formal titles of the currency are euro for the major unit and cent for the minor (one-hundredth) unit and for official use in most eurozone languages; according to the ECB, all languages should use the same spelling for the nominative singular. This may contradict normal rules for word formation in some languages, e.g., those in which there is no eu diphthong. Bulgaria has negotiated an exception; euro in the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet is spelled as eвро (evro) and not eуро (euro) in all official documents. In the Greek script the term ευρώ (evró) is used; the Greek "cent" coins are denominated in λεπτό/ά (leptó/á). Official practice for English-language EU legislation is to use the words euro and cent as both singular and plural, although the European Commission's Directorate-General for Translation states that the plural forms euros and cents should be used in English.
The word 'euro' is pronounced differently according to pronunciation rules in the individual languages applied; in Danish ['öwro], in German [ˈɔɪ̯ro], in English ['juərəu], in French [ø'ro], etc.
See also
Captain Euro
Currency union
Digital euro
List of currencies in Europe
List of currencies replaced by the euro
Notes
References
Further reading
External links
European Union – Euro
European Commission – Euro Area
European Central Bank – Euro
European Central Bank – Euro Exchange Rates
1999 in economics
Currencies introduced in 1999
Currencies introduced in 2002
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Currencies of South America
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Currencies of Zimbabwe
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] |
This is a list of international environmental agreements.
Most of the following agreements are legally binding for countries that have formally ratified them. Some, such as the Kyoto Protocol, differentiate between types of countries and each nation's respective responsibilities under the agreement. Several hundred international environmental agreements exist but most link only a limited number of countries. These bilateral or sometimes trilateral agreements are only binding for the countries that have ratified them but are nevertheless essential in the international environmental regime. Including the major conventions listed below, more than 3,000 international environmental instruments have been identified by the IEA Database Project.
Alphabetical order
Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, Aarhus, 1998
Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds
Alpine Convention together with its nine protocols
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) (ABMT)
ASEAN Agreement on Transboundary Haze Pollution
Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate
Barcelona Convention for Protection against Pollution in the Mediterranean Sea, 1976
Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, Basel, 1989
Biological Weapons Convention (Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological [Biological] and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction) (BWC)
Bonn Agreement
Carpathian Convention Framework Convention on the Protection and Sustainable Development of the Carpathians
Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety 2000
Chemical Weapons Convention
China Australia Migratory Bird Agreement
Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), 1996
Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), Canberra, 1980
Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora
Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources
Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals
Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty
Convention for Co-operation in the Protection and Development of the Marine and Coastal Environment of the West and Central African Region, Abidjan, 198
Coastal Marine and Island Biodiversity Conservation Project
Convention for the Protection and Development of the Marine Environment of the Wider Caribbean Region, Cartagena de Indias, 1983
Convention of the Protection, Management and Development of the Marine and Coastal Environment of the Eastern African Region, Nairobi, 1985
Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment and Coastal Area of the South-east Pacific, Lima, 1981
Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-east Atlantic (OSPAR Convention), Paris, 1992
Convention for the Protection of the Natural Resources and Environment of the South Pacific Region, Nouméa, 1986
Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency (Assistance Convention), Vienna, 1986
Convention on the Ban of the Import into Africa and the Control of Transboundary Movements and Management of Hazardous Wastes within Africa, Bamako, 1991
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Nairobi, 1992
Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons
Convention on Civil Liability for Damage Caused during Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road, Rail, and Inland Navigation Vessels (CRTD), Geneva, 1989
Convention on Cluster Munitions
Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats
Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), Bonn, 1979
Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident (Notification Convention), Vienna, 1986
Convention on Fishing and Conservation of Living Resources of the High Seas
Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), Washington, DC, 1973
Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution
Convention on Nature Protection and Wild Life Preservation in the Western Hemisphere, Washington, DC, 1940
Convention on Nuclear Safety, Vienna, 1994
EMEP Protocol
Heavy Metals Protocol
Multi-effect Protocol (Gothenburg protocol)
Nitrogen Oxide Protocol
POP Air Pollution Protocol
Sulphur Emissions Reduction Protocols 1985 and 1994
Volatile Organic Compounds Protocol
Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping Wastes and Other Matter
Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques
Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (ECE Water Convention), Helsinki, 1992
Convention on the Protection of the Black Sea against Pollution, Bucharest, 1992
Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area 1992 Helsinki Convention, Helsinki, 1992
Convention on the Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents, Helsinki, 1992
Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially As Waterfowl Habitat (notably not a Multilateral Environmental Agreement)
Convention to Ban the Importation into Forum Island Countries of Hazardous and Radioactive Wastes and to Control the Transboundary Movement and Management of Hazardous Wastes within the South Pacific Region, Waigani, 1995
Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD), Paris, 1994
Conventions within the UNEP Regional Seas Programme
Directive on the legal protection of biotechnological inventions
Energy Community (Energy Community South East Europe Treaty) (ECSEE)
Espoo Convention Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context, Espoo, 1991
European Agreement Concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Inland Waterways (AND), Geneva, 2000
European Agreement Concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road (ADR), Geneva, 1957
FAO International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides, Rome, 1985
FAO International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources, Rome, 1983
Framework Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), New York, 1992
Geneva Protocol (Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare)
International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), Rio de Janeiro, 1966
International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships
International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution of the Sea by Oil, London, 1954, 1962, 1969
International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), Washington, 1946
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture
International Tropical Timber Agreement (expired), 1983
International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA), Geneva, 1994
Kuwait Regional Convention for Co-operation on the Protection of the Marine Environment from Pollution, Kuwait, 1978
Kyoto Protocol - greenhouse gas emission reductions
Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918
Minamata Convention on Mercury, 2013
Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, Montreal, 1989
Nagoya Protocol on Access and benefit sharing 2010, Japan
North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation
Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty
Putrajaya Declaration of Regional Cooperation for the Sustainable Development of the Seas of East Asia, Malaysia, 2003
Ramsar Convention Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat, Ramsar, 1971
Regional Convention for the Conservation of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden Environment, Jeddah, 1982
Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, Rotterdam, 1998
Stockholm Convention Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants Stockholm, 2001
Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, Vienna, 1985, including the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, Montreal, 1987
Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage, Vienna, 1963
Western Regional Climate Action Initiative
Working Environment (Air Pollution, Noise and Vibration) Convention, 1977
Topic order
General
Aarhus Convention Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, Aarhus, 1998
Espoo Convention Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transboundary Context, Espoo, 1991
Atmosphere
Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP), Geneva, 1979
Environmental Protection: Aircraft Engine Emissions, Annex 16, vol. 2 to the Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, Montreal, 1981
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), New York, 1992, including the Kyoto Protocol, 1997, and the Paris Agreement, 2015
Georgia Basin-Puget Sound International Airshed Strategy, Vancouver, Statement of Intent, 2002
U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement (bilateral U.S.-Canadian agreement on acid rain), 1986
Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, Vienna, 1985, including the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, Montreal, 1987
Freshwater resources
Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes (ECE Water Convention), Helsinki, 1992
Hazardous substances
Convention on Civil Liability for Damage Caused during Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road, Rail, and Inland Navigation Vessels (CRTD), Geneva, 1989
Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, Basel, 1989
Convention on the Ban of the Import into Africa and the Control of Transboundary Movements and Management of Hazardous Wastes Within Africa, Bamako, 1991
Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, Rotterdam, 1998
Convention on the Transboundary Effects of Industrial Accidents, Helsinki, 1992
European Agreement Concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Inland Waterways (AND), Geneva, 2000
European Agreement Concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Road (ADR), Geneva, 1957
FAO International Code of Conduct on the Distribution and Use of Pesticides, Rome, 1985
Minamata Convention on Mercury, Minamata, 2013
Stockholm Convention Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants Stockholm, 2001
Convention to Ban the Importation into Forum Island Countries of Hazardous and Radioactive Wastes and to Control the Transboundary Movement and Management of Hazardous Wastes within the South Pacific Region, Waigani, 1995
Marine environment – global conventions
Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (London Convention), London, 1972
International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships, 1973, as modified by the Protocol of 1978 relating thereto (MARPOL 73/78), London, 1973 and 1978
International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution of the Sea by Oil, London, 1954, 1962 and 1969
International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage (CLC), Brussels, 1969, 1976,1984 and 1992
International Convention on the Establishment of an International Fund for Compensation for Oil Pollution Damage(FUND)1971 and 1992, Brussels, 1971/1992
International Convention on Liability and Compensation for Damage in Connection with the Carriage of Hazardous and Noxious Substances by Sea (HNS), London, 1996
International Convention on Oil Pollution Preparedness, Response and Co-operation (OPRC), London, 1990
International Convention Relating to Intervention on the High Seas in Cases of Oil Pollution Casualties Intervention Convention, Brussels, 1969
Protocol on Preparedness, Response and Co-operation to Pollution Incidents by Hazardous and Noxious Substances OPRC-HNS Protocol, London, 2000
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea LOS Convention, Montego Bay, 1982
Marine environment – regional conventions
Convention for Co-operation in the Protection and Development of the Marine and Coastal Environment of the West and Central African Region, Abidjan, 1981
Convention for the Protection and Development of the Marine Environment and Coastal Region of the Mediterranean Sea Barcelona Convention, Barcelona, 1976
Convention for the Protection and Development of the Marine Environment of the Wider Caribbean Region, Cartagena de Indias, 1983
Convention for the Protection, Management and Development of the Marine and Coastal Environment of the Eastern African Region (Nairobi Convention), Nairobi, 1985
Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment and Coastal Area of the South-east Pacific, Lima, 1981
Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-east Atlantic OSPAR Convention, Paris, 1992
Convention for the Protection of the Natural Resources and Environment of the South Pacific Region, Nouméa, 1986
Convention on the Protection of the Black Sea against Pollution, Bucharest, 1992
Convention on the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Baltic Sea Area Helsinki Convention (HELCOM), Helsinki, 1974, 1992
Conventions within the UNEP Regional Seas Programme
Framework Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea
Kuwait Regional Convention for Co-operation on the Protection of the Marine Environment from Pollution, Kuwait, 1978
Regional Convention for the Conservation of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden Environment, Jeddah, 1982
Marine living resources
Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels
Agreement on the Conservation of Cetaceans in the Black Sea, Mediterranean Sea and contiguous Atlantic area (ACCOBAMS), Monaco, 1996
Agreement on the Conservation of Small Cetaceans of the Baltic, North East Atlantic, Irish and North Seas (ASCOBANS), New York, 1992
Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), Canberra, 1980
Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora
Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources
Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals
Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty
Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), Bonn, 1979
International Convention for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), Rio de Janeiro, 1966
International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), Washington, 1946
Nature conservation and terrestrial living resources
Antarctic Treaty, Washington, DC, 1959
Amazon Cooperation Treaty, Brasilia, 1978
Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Nairobi, 1992
Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), Bonn, 1979
Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES), Washington, DC, 1973
Organization of American States Convention on Nature Protection and Wild Life Preservation in the Western Hemisphere, Washington, DC, 1940
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), Paris, 1994
Food and Agriculture Organization International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources, Rome, 1983
the 1983 "voluntary undertaking" was updated and strengthened as the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, Madrid, 2001
International Tropical Timber Agreement (ITTA), Geneva, 1994
Memorandum of Understanding on the Conservation of Migratory Birds of Prey in Africa and Eurasia (Raptors MoU)
Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat ( the Convention on Wetlands), Ramsar, 1971
UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage ( the World Heritage Convention), Paris, 1972
Noise pollution
Working Environment (Air Pollution, Noise and Vibration) Convention, 1977
Nuclear safety
Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, 1996
Convention on Assistance in the Case of a Nuclear Accident or Radiological Emergency (Assistance Convention), Vienna, 1986
Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident (Notification Convention), Vienna, 1986
Convention on Nuclear Safety, Vienna, 1994
Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapon Tests in the Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Under Water
Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage, Vienna, 1963
See also
Action for Climate Empowerment
Arms control
Earth Negotiations Bulletin
Environmental law
Environmental organizations
Environmental tariff
International Network for Environmental Compliance and Enforcement
List of climate change initiatives
List of environmental laws by country
List of environmental lawsuits
List of international animal welfare conventions
List of supranational environmental agencies
List of treaties
Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System
References
External links
Relationship between MEAs and the World Trade Organization
Mitchell's Databaseproject on IEAs
ECOLEX-the gateway to environmental law
List
International relations lists
Environmental | [
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The (Latin for "British Encyclopaedia") is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia which is now published exclusively as an online encyclopaedia. It was formerly published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., and other publishers (for previous editions). It was written by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 contributors. The 2010 version of the 15th edition, which spans 32 volumes and 32,640 pages, was the last printed edition.
Printed for 244 years, the Britannica was the longest running in-print encyclopaedia in the English language. It was first published between 1768 and 1771 in the Scottish capital of Edinburgh, as three volumes. The encyclopaedia grew in size: the second edition was 10 volumes, and by its fourth edition (1801–1810) it had expanded to 20 volumes. Its rising stature as a scholarly work helped recruit eminent contributors, and the 9th (1875–1889) and 11th editions (1911) are landmark encyclopaedias for scholarship and literary style. Starting with the 11th edition and following its acquisition by an American firm, the Britannica shortened and simplified articles to broaden its appeal to the North American market. In 1933, the Britannica became the first encyclopaedia to adopt "continuous revision", in which the encyclopaedia is continually reprinted, with every article updated on a schedule. In March 2012, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced it would no longer publish printed editions, and would focus instead on the online version.
The 15th edition has a three-part structure: a 12-volume of short articles (generally fewer than 750 words), a 17-volume of long articles (two to 310 pages), and a single volume to give a hierarchical outline of knowledge. The was meant for quick fact-checking and as a guide to the ; readers are advised to study the outline to understand a subject's context and to find more detailed articles. Over 70 years, the size of the Britannica has remained steady, with about 40 million words on half a million topics. Though published in the United States since 1901, the Britannica has for the most part maintained British English spelling.
Present status
Print version
Since 1985, the Britannica had four parts: the , the , the , and a two-volume index. The Britannica articles are found in the and , which encompass 12 and 17 volumes, respectively, each volume having roughly one thousand pages. The 2007 has 699 in-depth articles, ranging in length from 2 to 310 pages and having references and named contributors. In contrast, the 2007 has roughly 65,000 articles, the vast majority (about 97%) of which contain fewer than 750 words, no references, and no named contributors. The articles are intended for quick fact-checking and to help in finding more thorough information in the . The articles are meant both as authoritative, well-written articles on their subjects and as storehouses of information not covered elsewhere. The longest article (310 pages) is on the United States, and resulted from the merger of the articles on the individual states. A 2013 "Global Edition" of Britannica contained approximately forty thousand articles.
Information can be found in the Britannica by following the cross-references in the and ; however, these are sparse, averaging one cross-reference per page. Hence, readers are recommended to consult instead the alphabetical index or the , which organizes the Britannica contents by topic.
The core of the is its "Outline of Knowledge", which aims to provide a logical framework for all human knowledge. Accordingly, the Outline is consulted by the Britannica editors to decide which articles should be included in the and . The Outline is also intended to be a study guide, to put subjects in their proper perspective, and to suggest a series of Britannica articles for the student wishing to learn a topic in depth. However, libraries have found that it is scarcely used, and reviewers have recommended that it be dropped from the encyclopaedia. The also has color transparencies of human anatomy and several appendices listing the staff members, advisors, and contributors to all three parts of the Britannica.
Taken together, the and comprise roughly 40 million words and 24,000 images. The two-volume index has 2,350 pages, listing the 228,274 topics covered in the Britannica, together with 474,675 subentries under those topics. The Britannica generally prefers British spelling over American; for example, it uses colour (not color), centre (not center), and encyclopaedia (not encyclopedia). However, there are exceptions to this rule, such as defense rather than defence. Common alternative spellings are provided with cross-references such as "Color: see Colour."
Since 1936, the articles of the Britannica have been revised on a regular schedule, with at least 10% of them considered for revision each year. According to one Britannica website, 46% of its articles were revised over the past three years; however, according to another Britannica website, only 35% of the articles were revised.
The alphabetization of articles in the and follows strict rules. Diacritical marks and non-English letters are ignored, while numerical entries such as "1812, War of" are alphabetized as if the number had been written out ("Eighteen-twelve, War of"). Articles with identical names are ordered first by persons, then by places, then by things. Rulers with identical names are organized first alphabetically by country and then by chronology; thus, Charles III of France precedes Charles I of England, listed in Britannica as the ruler of Great Britain and Ireland. (That is, they are alphabetized as if their titles were "Charles, France, 3" and "Charles, Great Britain and Ireland, 1".) Similarly, places that share names are organized alphabetically by country, then by ever-smaller political divisions.
In March 2012, the company announced that the 2010 edition would be the last printed version. This was announced as a move by the company to adapt to the times and focus on its future using digital distribution. The peak year for the printed encyclopaedia was 1990 when 120,000 sets were sold, but it dropped to 40,000 in 1996. 12,000 sets of the 2010 edition were printed, of which 8,000 had been sold . By late April 2012, the remaining copies of the 2010 edition had sold out at Britannica's online store. , a replica of Britannica's 1768 first edition is sold on the online store.
Related printed material
Britannica Junior was first published in 1934 as 12 volumes. It was expanded to 15 volumes in 1947, and renamed Britannica Junior Encyclopædia in 1963. It was taken off the market after the 1984 printing.
A British Children's Britannica edited by John Armitage was issued in London in 1960. Its contents were determined largely by the eleven-plus standardized tests given in Britain. Britannica introduced the Children's Britannica to the US market in 1988, aimed at ages seven to 14.
In 1961, a 16 volume Young Children's Encyclopaedia was issued for children just learning to read.
My First Britannica is aimed at children ages six to 12, and the Britannica Discovery Library is for children aged three to six (issued 1974 to 1991).
There have been, and are, several abridged Britannica encyclopaedias. The single-volume Britannica Concise Encyclopædia has 28,000 short articles condensing the larger 32-volume Britannica; there are authorized translations in languages such as Chinese and Vietnamese. Compton's by Britannica, first published in 2007, incorporating the former Compton's Encyclopedia, is aimed at 10- to 17-year-olds and consists of 26 volumes and 11,000 pages.
Since 1938, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. has published annually a Book of the Year covering the past year's events. A given edition of the Book of the Year is named in terms of the year of its publication, though the edition actually covers the events of the previous year. The company also publishes several specialized reference works, such as Shakespeare: The Essential Guide to the Life and Works of the Bard (Wiley, 2006).
Optical disc, online, and mobile versions
The Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2012 DVD contains over 100,000 articles. This includes regular Britannica articles, as well as others drawn from the Britannica Student Encyclopædia, and the Britannica Elementary Encyclopædia. The package includes a range of supplementary content including maps, videos, sound clips, animations and web links. It also offers study tools and dictionary and thesaurus entries from Merriam-Webster.
Britannica Online is a website with more than 120,000 articles and is updated regularly. It has daily features, updates and links to news reports from The New York Times and the BBC. , roughly 60% of Encyclopædia Britannica's revenue came from online operations, of which around 15% came from subscriptions to the consumer version of the websites. , subscriptions were available on a yearly, monthly or weekly basis. Special subscription plans are offered to schools, colleges and libraries; such institutional subscribers constitute an important part of Britannica's business. Beginning in early 2007, the Britannica made articles freely available if they are hyperlinked from an external site. Non-subscribers are served pop-ups and advertising.
On 20 February 2007, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced that it was working with mobile phone search company AskMeNow to launch a mobile encyclopaedia. Users will be able to send a question via text message, and AskMeNow will search Britannica 28,000-article concise encyclopaedia to return an answer to the query. Daily topical features sent directly to users' mobile phones are also planned.
On 3 June 2008, an initiative to facilitate collaboration between online expert and amateur scholarly contributors for Britannica's online content (in the spirit of a wiki), with editorial oversight from Britannica staff, was announced. Approved contributions would be credited, though contributing automatically grants Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. perpetual, irrevocable license to those contributions.
On 22 January 2009, Britannica's president, Jorge Cauz, announced that the company would be accepting edits and additions to the online Britannica website from the public. The published edition of the encyclopaedia will not be affected by the changes. Individuals wishing to edit the Britannica website will have to register under their real name and address prior to editing or submitting their content. All edits submitted will be reviewed and checked and will have to be approved by the encyclopaedia's professional staff. Contributions from non-academic users will sit in a separate section from the expert-generated Britannica content, as will content submitted by non-Britannica scholars. Articles written by users, if vetted and approved, will also only be available in a special section of the website, separate from the professional articles. Official Britannica material would carry a "Britannica Checked" stamp, to distinguish it from the user-generated content.
On 14 September 2010, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced a partnership with mobile phone development company Concentric Sky to launch a series of iPhone products aimed at the K-12 market. On 20 July 2011, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. announced that Concentric Sky had ported the Britannica Kids product line to Intel's Intel Atom-based Netbooks and on 26 October 2011 that it had launched its encyclopedia as an iPad app. In 2010, Britannica released Britannica ImageQuest, a database of images.
In March 2012, it was announced that the company would cease printing the encyclopaedia set, and that it would focus more on its online version.
On 7 June 2018, Britannica released a Google Chrome extension, Britannica Insights, which shows snippets of information from Britannica Online in a sidebar for Google Search results. The Britannica sidebar does not replace Google's sidebar and is instead placed above Google's sidebar. Britannica Insights was also available as a Firefox extension but this was taken down due to a code review issue.
Personnel and management
Contributors
The print version of the Britannica has 4,411 contributors, many eminent in their fields, such as Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, astronomer Carl Sagan, and surgeon Michael DeBakey. Roughly a quarter of the contributors are deceased, some as long ago as 1947 (Alfred North Whitehead), while another quarter are retired or emeritus. Most (approximately 98%) contribute to only a single article; however, 64 contributed to three articles, 23 contributed to four articles, 10 contributed to five articles, and 8 contributed to more than five articles. An exceptionally prolific contributor is Christine Sutton of the University of Oxford, who contributed 24 articles on particle physics.
While Britannica authors have included writers such as Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, and Leon Trotsky, as well as notable independent encyclopaedists such as Isaac Asimov, some have been criticized for lack of expertise. In 1911 the historian George L. Burr wrote:
Staff
in the fifteenth edition of Britannica, Dale Hoiberg, a sinologist, was listed as Britannica's Senior Vice President and editor-in-chief. Among his predecessors as editors-in-chief were Hugh Chisholm (1902–1924), James Louis Garvin (1926–1932), Franklin Henry Hooper (1932–1938), Walter Yust (1938–1960), Harry Ashmore (1960–1963), Warren E. Preece (1964–1968, 1969–1975), Sir William Haley (1968–1969), Philip W. Goetz (1979–1991), and Robert McHenry (1992–1997). Anita Wolff was listed as the Deputy Editor and Theodore Pappas as Executive Editor. Prior Executive Editors include John V. Dodge (1950–1964) and Philip W. Goetz.
Paul T. Armstrong remains the longest working employee of Encyclopædia Britannica. He began his career there in 1934, eventually earning the positions of treasurer, vice president, and chief financial officer in his 58 years with the company, before retiring in 1992.
The 2007 editorial staff of the Britannica included five Senior Editors and nine Associate Editors, supervised by Dale Hoiberg and four others. The editorial staff helped to write the articles of the and some sections of the .
Editorial advisors
The Britannica has an editorial board of advisors, which includes 12 distinguished scholars: non-fiction author Nicholas Carr, religion scholar Wendy Doniger, political economist Benjamin M. Friedman, Council on Foreign Relations President Emeritus Leslie H. Gelb, computer scientist David Gelernter, Physics Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, Carnegie Corporation of New York President Vartan Gregorian, philosopher Thomas Nagel, cognitive scientist Donald Norman, musicologist Don Michael Randel, Stewart Sutherland, Baron Sutherland of Houndwood, President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch.
The Propædia and its Outline of Knowledge were produced by dozens of editorial advisors under the direction of Mortimer J. Adler. Roughly half of these advisors have since died, including some of the Outline's chief architects – Rene Dubos (d. 1982), Loren Eiseley (d. 1977), Harold D. Lasswell (d. 1978), Mark Van Doren (d. 1972), Peter Ritchie Calder (d. 1982) and Mortimer J. Adler (d. 2001). The also lists just under 4,000 advisors who were consulted for the unsigned articles.
Corporate structure
In January 1996, the Britannica was purchased from the Benton Foundation by billionaire Swiss financier Jacqui Safra, who serves as its current chair of the board. In 1997, Don Yannias, a long-time associate and investment advisor of Safra, became CEO of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. In 1999, a new company, Britannica.com Inc., was created to develop digital versions of the Britannica; Yannias assumed the role of CEO in the new company, while his former position at the parent company remained vacant for two years. Yannias' tenure at Britannica.com Inc. was marked by missteps, considerable lay-offs, and financial losses. In 2001, Yannias was replaced by Ilan Yeshua, who reunited the leadership of the two companies. Yannias later returned to investment management, but remains on the Britannica Board of Directors.
In 2003, former management consultant Jorge Aguilar-Cauz was appointed President of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Cauz is the senior executive and reports directly to the Britannica's Board of Directors. Cauz has been pursuing alliances with other companies and extending the Britannica brand to new educational and reference products, continuing the strategy pioneered by former CEO Elkan Harrison Powell in the mid-1930s.
Under Safra's ownership, the company has experienced financial difficulties and has responded by reducing the price of its products and implementing drastic cost cuts. According to a 2003 report in the New York Post, the Britannica management has eliminated employee 401(k) accounts and encouraged the use of free images. These changes have had negative impacts, as freelance contributors have waited up to six months for checks and the Britannica staff have gone years without pay rises.
In the fall of 2017, Karthik Krishnan was appointed global chief executive officer of the Encyclopædia Britannica Group. Krishnan brought a varied perspective to the role based on several high-level positions in digital media, including RELX (formerly known as Reed Elsevier, and one of the constituents of the FTSE 100 Index) and Rodale, in which he was responsible for "driving business and cultural transformation and accelerating growth".
Taking the reins of the company as it was preparing to mark its 250th anniversary and define the next phase of its digital strategy for consumers and K-12 schools, Krishnan launched a series of new initiatives in his first year.
First was Britannica Insights, a free, downloadable software extension to the Google Chrome browser that served up edited, fact-checked Britannica information with queries on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Its purpose, the company said, was to "provide trusted, verified information" in conjunction with search results that were thought to be increasingly unreliable in the era of misinformation and "fake news."
The product was quickly followed by Britannica School Insights, which provided similar content for subscribers to Britannica's online classroom solutions, and a partnership with YouTube in which verified Britannica content appeared on the site as an antidote to user-generated video content that could be false or misleading.
Krishnan, himself an educator at New York University's Stern School of Business, believes in the "transformative power of education" and set steering the company toward solidifying its place among leaders in educational technology and supplemental curriculum. Krishnan aimed at providing more useful and relevant solutions to customer needs, extending and renewing Britannica's historical emphasis on "Utility", which had been the watchword of its first edition in 1768.
Krishnan also is active in civic affairs, with organizations such as the Urban Enterprise Initiative and Urban Upbound, whose board he serves on.
Competition
As the Britannica is a general encyclopaedia, it does not seek to compete with specialized encyclopaedias such as the Encyclopaedia of Mathematics or the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, which can devote much more space to their chosen topics. In its first years, the Britannica main competitor was the general encyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers and, soon thereafter, Rees's Cyclopædia and Coleridge's Encyclopædia Metropolitana. In the 20th century, successful competitors included Collier's Encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia Americana, and the World Book Encyclopedia. Nevertheless, from the 9th edition onwards, the Britannica was widely considered to have the greatest authority of any general English-language encyclopaedia, especially because of its broad coverage and eminent authors. The print version of the Britannica was significantly more expensive than its competitors.
Since the early 1990s, the Britannica has faced new challenges from digital information sources. The Internet, facilitated by the development of search engines, has grown into a common source of information for many people, and provides easy access to reliable original sources and expert opinions, thanks in part to initiatives such as Google Books, MIT's release of its educational materials and the open PubMed Central library of the National Library of Medicine. In general, the Internet tends to provide more current coverage than print media, due to the ease with which material on the Internet can be updated. In rapidly changing fields such as science, technology, politics, culture and modern history, the Britannica has struggled to stay up to date, a problem first analysed systematically by its former editor Walter Yust. Eventually, the Britannica turned to focus more on its online edition.
Print encyclopaedias
The has been compared with other print encyclopaedias, both qualitatively and quantitatively. A well-known comparison is that of Kenneth Kister, who gave a qualitative and quantitative comparison of the Britannica with two comparable encyclopaedias, Collier's Encyclopedia and the Encyclopedia Americana. For the quantitative analysis, ten articles were selected at random—circumcision, Charles Drew, Galileo, Philip Glass, heart disease, IQ, panda bear, sexual harassment, Shroud of Turin and Uzbekistan—and letter grades of A–D or F were awarded in four categories: coverage, accuracy, clarity, and recency. In all four categories and for all three encyclopaedias, the four average grades fell between B− and B+, chiefly because none of the encyclopaedias had an article on sexual harassment in 1994. In the accuracy category, the Britannica received one "D" and seven "A"s, Encyclopedia Americana received eight "A"s, and Collier's received one "D" and seven "A"s; thus, Britannica received an average score of 92% for accuracy to Americanas 95% and Collier's 92%. In the timeliness category, Britannica averaged an 86% to Americana'''s 90% and Collier's 85%.
In 2013, the President of Encyclopædia Britannica announced that after 244 years, the encyclopedia would cease print production and all future editions would be entirely digital.
Digital encyclopaedias on optical media
The most notable competitor of the Britannica among CD/DVD-ROM digital encyclopaedias was Encarta, now discontinued, a modern, multimedia encyclopaedia that incorporated three print encyclopaedias: Funk & Wagnalls, Collier's and the New Merit Scholar's Encyclopedia. Encarta was the top-selling multimedia encyclopaedia, based on total US retail sales from January 2000 to February 2006. Both occupied the same price range, with the 2007 Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate CD or DVD costing US$40–50 and the Microsoft Encarta Premium 2007 DVD costing US$45. The Britannica contains 100,000 articles and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus (US only), and offers Primary and Secondary School editions. Encarta contained 66,000 articles, a user-friendly Visual Browser, interactive maps, math, language and homework tools, a US and UK dictionary, and a youth edition. Like Encarta, the Britannica has been criticized for being biased towards United States audiences; the United Kingdom-related articles are updated less often, maps of the United States are more detailed than those of other countries, and it lacks a UK dictionary. Like the Britannica, Encarta was available online by subscription, although some content could be accessed free.
Internet encyclopaedias
The dominant internet encyclopaedia and main alternative to Britannica is Wikipedia. The key differences between the two lie in accessibility; the model of participation they bring to an encyclopedic project; their respective style sheets and editorial policies; relative ages; the number of subjects treated; the number of languages in which articles are written and made available; and their underlying economic models: unlike Britannica, Wikipedia is a not-for-profit and is not connected with traditional profit- and contract-based publishing distribution networks.
The 699 printed articles are generally written by identified contributors, and the roughly 65,000 printed articles are the work of the editorial staff and identified outside consultants. Thus, a Britannica article either has known authorship or a set of possible authors (the editorial staff). With the exception of the editorial staff, most of the Britannica contributors are experts in their field—some are Nobel laureates. By contrast, the articles of Wikipedia are written by people of unknown degrees of expertise: most do not claim any particular expertise, and of those who do, many are anonymous and have no verifiable credentials. It is for this lack of institutional vetting, or certification, that former Britannica editor-in-chief Robert McHenry notes his belief that Wikipedia cannot hope to rival the Britannica in accuracy.
In 2005, the journal Nature chose articles from both websites in a wide range of science topics and sent them to what it called "relevant" field experts for peer review. The experts then compared the competing articles—one from each site on a given topic—side by side, but were not told which article came from which site. Nature got back 42 usable reviews.
In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors, such as general misunderstandings of vital concepts: four from each site. It also discovered many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 in Wikipedia and 123 in Britannica, an average of 3.86 mistakes per article for Wikipedia and 2.92 for Britannica. Although Britannica was revealed as the more accurate encyclopedia, with fewer errors, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. in its detailed 20-page rebuttal called Nature's study flawed and misleading and called for a "prompt" retraction. It noted that two of the articles in the study were taken from a Britannica yearbook and not the encyclopaedia, and another two were from Compton's Encyclopedia (called the Britannica Student Encyclopedia on the company's website). The rebuttal went on to mention that some of the articles presented to reviewers were combinations of several articles, and that other articles were merely excerpts but were penalized for factual omissions. The company also noted that several of what Nature called errors were minor spelling variations, and that others were matters of interpretation. Nature defended its story and declined to retract, stating that, as it was comparing Wikipedia with the web version of Britannica, it used whatever relevant material was available on Britannicas website.
Interviewed in February 2009, the managing director of Britannica UK said: In a January 2016 press release, Britannica called Wikipedia "an impressive achievement."
Critical and popular assessments
Reputation
Since the 3rd edition, the Britannica has enjoyed a popular and critical reputation for general excellence. The 3rd and the 9th editions were pirated for sale in the United States, beginning with Dobson's Encyclopaedia. On the release of the 14th edition, Time magazine dubbed the Britannica the "Patriarch of the Library". In a related advertisement, naturalist William Beebe was quoted as saying that the Britannica was "beyond comparison because there is no competitor." References to the Britannica can be found throughout English literature, most notably in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's favourite Sherlock Holmes stories, "The Red-Headed League". The tale was highlighted by the Lord Mayor of London, Gilbert Inglefield, at the bicentennial of the Britannica.
The Britannica has a reputation for summarising knowledge. To further their education, some people have devoted themselves to reading the entire Britannica, taking anywhere from three to 22 years to do so. When Fat'h Ali became the Shah of Persia in 1797, he was given a set of the Britannica's 3rd edition, which he read completely; after this feat, he extended his royal title to include "Most Formidable Lord and Master of the ". Writer George Bernard Shaw claimed to have read the complete 9th edition—except for the science articles—and Richard Evelyn Byrd took the Britannica as reading material for his five-month stay at the South Pole in 1934, while Philip Beaver read it during a sailing expedition. More recently, A.J. Jacobs, an editor at Esquire magazine, read the entire 2002 version of the 15th edition, describing his experiences in the well-received 2004 book, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World. Only two people are known to have read two independent editions: the author C. S. Forester and Amos Urban Shirk, an American businessman who read the 11th and 14th editions, devoting roughly three hours per night for four and a half years to read the 11th. Elon Musk read the Britannica twice. Several editors-in-chief of the Britannica are likely to have read their editions completely, such as William Smellie (1st edition), William Robertson Smith (9th edition), and Walter Yust (14th edition).
Awards
The CD/DVD-ROM version of the Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, received the 2004 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers. On 15 July 2009, was awarded a spot as one of "Top Ten Superbrands in the UK" by a panel of more than 2,000 independent reviewers, as reported by the BBC.
Coverage of topics
Topics are chosen in part by reference to the "Outline of Knowledge". The bulk of the Britannica is devoted to geography (26% of the ), biography (14%), biology and medicine (11%), literature (7%), physics and astronomy (6%), religion (5%), art (4%), Western philosophy (4%), and law (3%). A complementary study of the found that geography accounted for 25% of articles, science 18%, social sciences 17%, biography 17%, and all other humanities 25%. Writing in 1992, one reviewer judged that the "range, depth, and catholicity of coverage [of the Britannica] are unsurpassed by any other general Encyclopaedia."
The Britannica does not cover topics in equivalent detail; for example, the whole of Buddhism and most other religions is covered in a single article, whereas 14 articles are devoted to Christianity, comprising nearly half of all religion articles. However, the Britannica has been lauded as the least biased of general Encyclopaedias marketed to Western readers and praised for its biographies of important women of all eras.
Criticism of editorial decisions
On rare occasions, the Britannica has been criticized for its editorial choices. Given its roughly constant size, the encyclopaedia has needed to reduce or eliminate some topics to accommodate others, resulting in controversial decisions. The initial 15th edition (1974–1985) was faulted for having reduced or eliminated coverage of children's literature, military decorations, and the French poet Joachim du Bellay; editorial mistakes were also alleged, such as inconsistent sorting of Japanese biographies. Its elimination of the index was condemned, as was the apparently arbitrary division of articles into the and . Summing up, one critic called the initial 15th edition a "qualified failure...[that] cares more for juggling its format than for preserving." More recently, reviewers from the American Library Association were surprised to find that most educational articles had been eliminated from the 1992 , along with the article on psychology.
Some very few Britannica-appointed contributors are mistaken. A notorious instance from the Britannica's early years is the rejection of Newtonian gravity by George Gleig, the chief editor of the 3rd edition (1788–1797), who wrote that gravity was caused by the classical element of fire. The Britannica has also staunchly defended a scientific approach to cultural topics, as it did with William Robertson Smith's articles on religion in the 9th edition, particularly his article stating that the Bible was not historically accurate (1875).
Other criticisms
The Britannica has received criticism, especially as editions become outdated. It is expensive to produce a completely new edition of the Britannica, and its editors delay for as long as fiscally sensible (usually about 25 years). For example, despite continuous revision, the 14th edition became outdated after 35 years (1929–1964). When American physicist Harvey Einbinder detailed its failings in his 1964 book, The Myth of the Britannica, the encyclopaedia was provoked to produce the 15th edition, which required 10 years of work. It is still difficult to keep the Britannica current; one recent critic writes, "it is not difficult to find articles that are out-of-date or in need of revision", noting that the longer articles are more likely to be outdated than the shorter articles. Information in the is sometimes inconsistent with the corresponding article(s), mainly because of the failure to update one or the other. The bibliographies of the articles have been criticized for being more out-of-date than the articles themselves.
In 2005, 12-year-old schoolboy Lucian George found several inaccuracies in the Britannica‘s entries on Poland and wildlife in Eastern Europe.
In 2010, an inaccurate entry about the Irish Civil War was discussed in the Irish press following a decision of the Department of Education and Science to pay for online access.Sheehy, Clodagh (4 February 2010). "Are they taking the Mick? It's the encyclopedia that thinks the Civil War was between the north and south" . Evening Herald (Dublin).
Writing about the 3rd edition (1788–1797), Britannicas chief editor George Gleig observed that "perfection seems to be incompatible with the nature of works constructed on such a plan, and embracing such a variety of subjects." In March 2006, the Britannica wrote, "we in no way mean to imply that Britannica is error-free; we have never made such a claim" (although in 1962 Britannica's sales department famously said of the 14th edition "It is truth. It is unquestionable fact.") The sentiment is expressed by its original editor, William Smellie:
However, Jorge Cauz (president of Encyclopædia Britannica Inc.) asserted in 2012 that "Britannica [...] will always be factually correct."
History
Past owners have included, in chronological order, the Edinburgh, Scotland printers Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, Scottish bookseller Archibald Constable, Scottish publisher A & C Black, Horace Everett Hooper, Sears Roebuck and William Benton.
The present owner of Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. is Jacqui Safra, a Brazilian billionaire and actor. Recent advances in information technology and the rise of electronic encyclopaedias such as Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite, Encarta and Wikipedia have reduced the demand for print encyclopaedias. To remain competitive, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. has stressed the reputation of the Britannica, reduced its price and production costs, and developed electronic versions on CD-ROM, DVD, and the World Wide Web. Since the early 1930s, the company has promoted spin-off reference works.
Editions
The Britannica has been issued in 15 editions, with multi-volume supplements to the 3rd and 4th editions (see the Table below). The 5th and 6th editions were reprints of the 4th, the 10th edition was only a supplement to the 9th, just as the 12th and 13th editions were supplements to the 11th. The 15th underwent massive reorganization in 1985, but the updated, current version is still known as the 15th. The 14th and 15th editions were edited every year throughout their runs, so that later printings of each were entirely different from early ones.
Throughout history, the Britannica has had two aims: to be an excellent reference book, and to provide educational material. In 1974, the 15th edition adopted a third goal: to systematize all human knowledge. The history of the Britannica can be divided into five eras, punctuated by changes in management, or reorganization of the dictionary.
1768–1826
In the first era (1st–6th editions, 1768–1826), the Britannica was managed and published by its founders, Colin Macfarquhar and Andrew Bell, by Archibald Constable, and by others. The Britannica was first published between December 1768 and 1771 in Edinburgh as the Encyclopædia Britannica, or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, compiled upon a New Plan. In part, it was conceived in reaction to the French Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (published 1751–72), which had been inspired by Chambers's Cyclopaedia (first edition 1728). It went on sale 10 December.
The Britannica of this period was primarily a Scottish enterprise, and it is one of the most enduring legacies of the Scottish Enlightenment. In this era, the Britannica moved from being a three-volume set (1st edition) compiled by one young editor—William Smellie—to a 20-volume set written by numerous authorities. Several other encyclopaedias competed throughout this period, among them editions of Abraham Rees's Cyclopædia and Coleridge's Encyclopædia Metropolitana and David Brewster's Edinburgh Encyclopædia.
1827–1901
During the second era (7th–9th editions, 1827–1901), the Britannica was managed by the Edinburgh publishing firm A & C Black. Although some contributors were again recruited through friendships of the chief editors, notably Macvey Napier, others were attracted by the Britannica's reputation. The contributors often came from other countries and included the world's most respected authorities in their fields. A general index of all articles was included for the first time in the 7th edition, a practice maintained until 1974.
Production of the 9th edition was overseen by Thomas Spencer Baynes, the first English-born editor-in-chief. Dubbed the "Scholar's Edition", the 9th edition is the most scholarly of all Britannicas. After 1880, Baynes was assisted by William Robertson Smith. No biographies of living persons were included. James Clerk Maxwell and Thomas Huxley were special advisors on science. However, by the close of the 19th century, the 9th edition was outdated, and the Britannica faced financial difficulties.
1901–1973
In the third era (10th–14th editions, 1901–1973), the Britannica was managed by American businessmen who introduced direct marketing and door-to-door sales. The American owners gradually simplified articles, making them less scholarly for a mass market. The 10th edition was an eleven-volume supplement (including one each of maps and an index) to the 9th, numbered as volumes 25–35, but the 11th edition was a completely new work, and is still praised for excellence; its owner, Horace Hooper, lavished enormous effort on its perfection.
When Hooper fell into financial difficulties, the Britannica was managed by Sears Roebuck for 18 years (1920–1923, 1928–1943). In 1932, the vice-president of Sears, Elkan Harrison Powell, assumed presidency of the Britannica; in 1936, he began the policy of continuous revision. This was a departure from earlier practice, in which the articles were not changed until a new edition was produced, at roughly 25-year intervals, some articles unchanged from earlier editions. Powell developed new educational products that built upon the Britannicas reputation.
In 1943, Sears donated the to the University of Chicago. William Benton, then a vice president of the university, provided the working capital for its operation. The stock was divided between Benton and the university, with the university holding an option on the stock. Benton became chairman of the board and managed the Britannica until his death in 1973. Benton set up the Benton Foundation, which managed the Britannica until 1996, and whose sole beneficiary was the University of Chicago. In 1968, near the end of this era, the Britannica celebrated its bicentennial.
1974–1994
In the fourth era (1974–94), the Britannica introduced its 15th edition, which was reorganized into three parts: the , the , and the . Under Mortimer J. Adler (member of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica since its inception in 1949, and its chair from 1974; director of editorial planning for the 15th edition of Britannica from 1965), the Britannica sought not only to be a good reference work and educational tool, but to systematize all human knowledge. The absence of a separate index and the grouping of articles into parallel encyclopaedias (the and ) provoked a "firestorm of criticism" of the initial 15th edition.
In response, the 15th edition was completely reorganized and indexed for a re-release in 1985. This second version of the 15th edition continued to be published and revised until the 2010 print version. The official title of the 15th edition is the New Encyclopædia Britannica, although it has also been promoted as Britannica 3.
On 9 March 1976 the US Federal Trade Commission entered an opinion and order enjoining Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. from using: a) deceptive advertising practices in recruiting sales agents and obtaining sales leads, and b) deceptive sales practices in the door-to-door presentations of its sales agents.
1994–present
In the fifth era (1994–present), digital versions have been developed and released on optical media and online. In 1996, the Britannica was bought by Jacqui Safra at well below its estimated value, owing to the company's financial difficulties. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. split in 1999. One part retained the company name and developed the print version, and the other, Britannica.com Inc., developed digital versions. Since 2001, the two companies have shared a CEO, Ilan Yeshua, who has continued Powell's strategy of introducing new products with the Britannica name. In March 2012, Britannica's president, Jorge Cauz, announced that it would not produce any new print editions of the encyclopaedia, with the 2010 15th edition being the last. The company will focus only on the online edition and other educational tools.Britannicas final print edition was in 2010, a 32-volume set. Britannica Global Edition was also printed in 2010, containing 30 volumes and 18,251 pages, with 8,500 photographs, maps, flags, and illustrations in smaller "compact" volumes, as well as over 40,000 articles written by scholars from across the world, including Nobel Prize winners. Unlike the 15th edition, it did not contain and sections, but ran A through Z as all editions up through the 14th had. The following is Britannicas description of the work:
In 2020, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. released the Britannica All New Children's Encyclopedia: What We Know and What We Don't, an encyclopedia aimed primarily at younger readers, covering major topics. The encyclopedia was widely praised for bringing back the print format. It was Britannica's first encyclopedia for children since 1984.
Dedications
The Britannica was dedicated to the reigning British monarch from 1788 to 1901 and then, upon its sale to an American partnership, to the British monarch and the President of the United States. Thus, the 11th edition is "dedicated by Permission to His Majesty George the Fifth, King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, Emperor of India, and to William Howard Taft, President of the United States of America." The order of the dedications has changed with the relative power of the United States and Britain, and with relative sales; the 1954 version of the 14th edition is "Dedicated by Permission to the Heads of the Two English-Speaking Peoples, Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the Second." Consistent with this tradition, the 2007 version of the current 15th edition was "dedicated by permission to the current President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II", while the 2010 version of the current 15th edition is "dedicated by permission to Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, and Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II."
Edition summary
See also
Encyclopædia Britannica Films
Great Books of the Western World List of encyclopedias by branch of knowledge
List of encyclopedias by date
List of online encyclopedias
Notes
References
Further reading
Boyles, Denis. (2016) Everything Explained That Is Explainable: On the Creation of the Encyclopædia Britannicas Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910–1911 (2016) online review
Greenstein, Shane, and Michelle Devereux (2006). "The Crisis at Encyclopædia Britannica" case history, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.
Lee, Timothy. Techdirt Interviews Britannica President Jorge Cauz'', Techdirt.com, 2 June 2008
External links
Encyclopaedia Britannica at the National Library of Scotland, first ten editions (and supplements) in PDF format.
Encyclopaedia Britannica at the Online Books Page, currently including the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 6th and 11th editions in multiple formats.
3rd edition, (1797, first volume, use search facility for others) at Bavarian State Library MDZ-Reader | Band | Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a dictionary of arts, sciences, and miscellaneous literature | Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a dictionary of arts, sciences, and miscellaneous literature
7th edition (1842), fulltext via Hathi Trust
8th edition (1860, index volume, use search facility for others) at Bavarian State Library MDZ-Reader | Band | The Encyclopaedia Britannica, or Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature | The Encyclopaedia Britannica, or Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature
Scribner's 9th Edition (1878) archive.org
9th and 10th (1902) editions 1902Encyclopedia.com
1768 books
1768 establishments in Scotland
American encyclopedias
English-language encyclopedias
History of Edinburgh
Publications established in 1768
Scottish Enlightenment
Scottish encyclopedias
American online encyclopedias
British online encyclopedias | [
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Edmund Spenser (; 1552/1553 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of nascent Modern English verse and is often considered one of the greatest poets in the English language.
Life
Edmund Spenser was born in East Smithfield, London, around the year 1552; however, there is still some ambiguity as to the exact date of his birth. His parenthood is obscure, but he was probably the son of John Spenser, a journeyman clothmaker. As a young boy, he was educated in London at the Merchant Taylors' School and matriculated as a sizar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. While at Cambridge he became a friend of Gabriel Harvey and later consulted him, despite their differing views on poetry. In 1578, he became for a short time secretary to John Young, Bishop of Rochester. In 1579, he published The Shepheardes Calender and around the same time married his first wife, Machabyas Childe. They had two children, Sylvanus (d. 1638) and Katherine.
In July 1580, Spenser went to Ireland in service of the newly appointed Lord Deputy, Arthur Grey, 14th Baron Grey de Wilton. Spenser served under Lord Grey with Walter Raleigh at the Siege of Smerwick massacre. When Lord Grey was recalled to England, Spenser stayed on in Ireland, having acquired other official posts and lands in the Munster Plantation. Raleigh acquired other nearby Munster estates confiscated in the Second Desmond Rebellion. Sometime between 1587 and 1589, Spenser acquired his main estate at Kilcolman, near Doneraile in North Cork. He later bought a second holding to the south, at Rennie, on a rock overlooking the river Blackwater in North Cork. Its ruins are still visible today. A short distance away grew a tree, locally known as "Spenser's Oak" until it was destroyed in a lightning strike in the 1960s. Local legend claims that he penned some of The Faerie Queene under this tree.
In 1590, Spenser brought out the first three books of his most famous work, The Faerie Queene, having travelled to London to publish and promote the work, with the likely assistance of Raleigh. He was successful enough to obtain a life pension of £50 a year from the Queen. He probably hoped to secure a place at court through his poetry, but his next significant publication boldly antagonised the queen's principal secretary, Lord Burghley (William Cecil), through its inclusion of the satirical Mother Hubberd's Tale. He returned to Ireland.
In 1591, Spenser published a translation in verse of Joachim Du Bellay's sonnets, Les Antiquités de Rome, which had been published in 1558. Spenser's version, Ruines of Rome: by Bellay, may also have been influenced by Latin poems on the same subject, written by Jean or Janis Vitalis and published in 1576.
By 1594, Spenser's first wife had died, and in that year he married a much younger Elizabeth Boyle, a relative of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. He addressed to her the sonnet sequence Amoretti. The marriage itself was celebrated in Epithalamion. They had a son named Peregrine.
In 1596, Spenser wrote a prose pamphlet titled A View of the Present State of Ireland. This piece, in the form of a dialogue, circulated in manuscript, remaining unpublished until the mid-seventeenth century. It is probable that it was kept out of print during the author's lifetime because of its inflammatory content. The pamphlet argued that Ireland would never be totally "pacified" by the English until its indigenous language and customs had been destroyed, if necessary by violence.
In 1598, during the Nine Years' War, Spenser was driven from his home by the native Irish forces of Aodh Ó Néill. His castle at Kilcolman was burned, and Ben Jonson, who may have had private information, asserted that one of his infant children died in the blaze.
In the year after being driven from his home, 1599, Spenser travelled to London, where he died at the age of forty-six – "for want of bread", according to Ben Jonson; one of Jonson's more doubtful statements, since Spenser had a payment to him authorised by the government and was due his pension. His coffin was carried to his grave in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey by other poets, who threw many pens and pieces of poetry into his grave with many tears. His second wife survived him and remarried twice. His sister Sarah, who had accompanied him to Ireland, married into the Travers family, and her descendants were prominent landowners in Cork for centuries.
Rhyme and reason
Thomas Fuller, in Worthies of England, included a story where the Queen told her treasurer, William Cecil, to pay Spenser one hundred pounds for his poetry. The treasurer, however, objected that the sum was too much. She said, "Then give him what is reason". Without receiving his payment in due time, Spenser gave the Queen this quatrain on one of her progresses:
I was promis'd on a time,
To have a reason for my rhyme:
From that time unto this season,
I receiv'd nor rhyme nor reason.
She immediately ordered the treasurer pay Spenser the original £100.
This story seems to have attached itself to Spenser from Thomas Churchyard, who apparently had difficulty in getting payment of his pension, the only other pension Elizabeth awarded to a poet. Spenser seems to have had no difficulty in receiving payment when it was due as the pension was being collected for him by his publisher, Ponsonby.
The Shepheardes Calender
The Shepheardes Calender is Edmund Spenser's first major work, which appeared in 1579. It emulates Virgil's Eclogues of the first century BCE and the Eclogues of Mantuan by Baptista Mantuanus, a late medieval, early renaissance poet. An eclogue is a short pastoral poem that is in the form of a dialogue or soliloquy. Although all the months together form an entire year, each month stands alone as a separate poem. Editions of the late 16th and early 17th centuries include woodcuts for each month/poem, and thereby have a slight similarity to an emblem book which combines a number of self-contained pictures and texts, usually a short vignette, saying, or allegory with an accompanying illustration.
The Faerie Queene
Spenser's masterpiece is the epic poem The Faerie Queene. The first three books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1590, and the second set of three books were published in 1596. Spenser originally indicated that he intended the poem to consist of twelve books, so the version of the poem we have today is incomplete. Despite this, it remains one of the longest poems in the English language. It is an allegorical work, and can be read (as Spenser presumably intended) on several levels of allegory, including as praise of Queen Elizabeth I. In a completely allegorical context, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues. In Spenser's "A Letter of the Authors", he states that the entire epic poem is "cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises", and that the aim behind The Faerie Queene was to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline".
Shorter poems
Spenser published numerous relatively short poems in the last decade of the sixteenth century, almost all of which consider love or sorrow. In 1591, he published Complaints, a collection of poems that express complaints in mournful or mocking tones. Four years later, in 1595, Spenser published Amoretti and Epithalamion. This volume contains eighty-eight sonnets commemorating his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. In Amoretti, Spenser uses subtle humour and parody while praising his beloved, reworking Petrarchism in his treatment of longing for a woman. Epithalamion, similar to Amoretti, deals in part with the unease in the development of a romantic and sexual relationship. It was written for his wedding to his young bride, Elizabeth Boyle. Some have speculated that the attention to disquiet, in general, reflects Spenser's personal anxieties at the time, as he was unable to complete his most significant work, The Faerie Queene. In the following year, Spenser released Prothalamion, a wedding song written for the daughters of a duke, allegedly in hopes to gain favour in the court.
The Spenserian stanza and sonnet
Spenser used a distinctive verse form, called the Spenserian stanza, in several works, including The Faerie Queene. The stanza's main meter is iambic pentameter with a final line in iambic hexameter (having six feet or stresses, known as an Alexandrine), and the rhyme scheme is . He also used his own rhyme scheme for the sonnet. In a Spenserian sonnet, the last line of every quatrain is linked with the first line of the next one, yielding the rhyme scheme .
"Men Call you Fayre" is a fine Sonnet from Amoretti. The poet presents the concept of true beauty in the poem. He addresses the sonnet to his beloved, Elizabeth Boyle, and presents his courtship. Like all Renaissance men, Edmund Spenser believed that
love is an inexhaustible source of beauty and order.
In this Sonnet, the poet expresses his idea of true beauty. The physical beauty will finish after a few days; it is not a permanent beauty. He emphasises beauty of mind and beauty of intellect. He considers his beloved is not simply flesh but is also a spiritual being. The poet opines that he is beloved born of heavenly seed and she is derived from fair spirit. The poet states that because of her clean mind, pure heart and sharp intellect, men call her fair and she deserves it.
At the end, the poet praises her spiritual beauty and he worships her because of her Divine Soul.
Influences
Though Spenser was well-read in classical literature, scholars have noted that his poetry does not rehash tradition, but rather is distinctly his. This individuality may have resulted, to some extent, from a lack of comprehension of the classics. Spenser strove to emulate such ancient Roman poets as Virgil and Ovid, whom he studied during his schooling, but many of his best-known works are notably divergent from those of his predecessors. The language of his poetry is purposely archaic, reminiscent of earlier works such as The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer and Il Canzoniere of Francesco Petrarca, whom Spenser greatly admired.
An Anglican and a devotee of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, Spenser was particularly offended by the anti-Elizabethan propaganda that some Catholics circulated. Like most Protestants near the time of the Reformation, Spenser saw a Catholic church full of corruption, and he determined that it was not only the wrong religion but the anti-religion. This sentiment is an important backdrop for the battles of The Faerie Queene.
Spenser was called "the Poet's Poet" by Charles Lamb, and was admired by John Milton, William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson and others. Among his contemporaries Walter Raleigh wrote a commendatory poem to The Faerie Queene in 1590, in which he claims to admire and value Spenser's work more so than any other in the English language. John Milton in his Areopagitica mentions "our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas". In the eighteenth century, Alexander Pope compared Spenser to "a mistress, whose faults we see, but love her with them all."
A View of the Present State of Ireland
In his work A View of the Present State of Irelande (1596), Spenser discussed future plans to establish control over Ireland, the most recent Irish uprising, led by Hugh O'Neill having demonstrated the futility of previous efforts. The work is partly a defence of Lord Arthur Grey de Wilton, who was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1580, and who greatly influenced Spenser's thinking on Ireland.
The goal of the piece was to show that Ireland was in great need of reform. Spenser believed that "Ireland is a diseased portion of the State, it must first be cured and reformed, before it could be in a position to appreciate the good sound laws and blessings of the nation". In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser categorises the "evils" of the Irish people into three prominent categories: laws, customs and religion. According to Spenser, these three elements worked together in creating the supposedly "disruptive and degraded people" which inhabited the country. One example given in the work is the Irish law system termed "Brehon law", which at the time trumped the established law as dictated by the Crown. The Brehon system had its own court and methods of punishing infractions committed. Spenser viewed this system as a backward custom which contributed to the "degradation" of the Irish people. A particular legal punishment viewed with distaste by Spenser was the Brehon method of dealing with murder, which was to impose an éraic (fine) on the murderer's family. From Spenser's viewpoint, the appropriate punishment for murder was capital punishment. Spenser also warned of the dangers that allowing the education of children in the Irish language would bring: "Soe that the speach being Irish, the hart must needes be Irishe; for out of the aboundance of the hart, the tonge speaketh".
He pressed for a scorched earth policy in Ireland, noting its effectiveness in the Second Desmond Rebellion:
"'Out of everye corner of the woode and glenns they came creepinge forth upon theire handes, for theire legges could not beare them; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spake like ghostes, crying out of theire graves; they did eate of the carrions, happye wheare they could find them, yea, and one another soone after, in soe much as the verye carcasses they spared not to scrape out of theire graves; and if they found a plott of water-cresses or shamrockes, theyr they flocked as to a feast… in a shorte space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentyfull countrye suddenly lefte voyde of man or beast: yett sure in all that warr, there perished not manye by the sworde, but all by the extreamytie of famine ... they themselves had wrought.'"
List of works
Iambicum Trimetrum
1569: Jan van der Noodt's A Theatre for Worldlings, including poems translated into English by Spenser from French sources, published by Henry Bynneman in London
1579: The Shepheardes Calender, published under the pseudonym "Immerito" (entered into the Stationers' Register in December)
1590:
The Faerie Queene, Books 1–3
1591:
Complaints, Containing Sundrie Small Poemes of the Worlds Vanitie (entered into the Stationer's Register in 1590), includes:
"The Ruines of Time"
"The Teares of the Muses"
"Virgil's Gnat"
"Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale"
"Ruines of Rome: by Bellay"
"Muiopotmos, or the Fate of the Butterflie"
"Visions of the Worlds Vanitie"
"The Visions of Bellay"
"The Visions of Petrarch"
1592:
Axiochus, a translation of a pseudo-Platonic dialogue from the original Ancient Greek; published by Cuthbert Burbie; attributed to "Edw: Spenser" but the attribution is uncertain
Daphnaïda. An Elegy upon the Death of the Noble and Vertuous Douglas Howard, Daughter and Heire of Henry Lord Howard, Viscount Byndon, and Wife of Arthure Gorges Esquier (published in London in January, according to one source; another source gives 1591 as the year)
1595:
Amoretti and Epithalamion, containing:
"Amoretti"
"Epithalamion"
Astrophel. A Pastorall Elegie vpon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney
Colin Clouts Come Home Againe
1596:
Fowre Hymnes dedicated from the court at Greenwich; published with the second edition of Daphnaida
Prothalamion
The Faerie Queene, Books 4–6
Babel, Empress of the East – a dedicatory poem prefaced to Lewes Lewkenor's The Commonwealth of Venice, 1599.
Posthumous:
1609: Two Cantos of Mutabilitie published together with a reprint of The Faerie Queene 1611: First folio edition of Spenser's collected works
1633: A Vewe of the Present State of Irelande, a prose treatise on the reformation of Ireland, first published by Sir James Ware (historian) entitled The Historie of Ireland (Spenser's work was entered into the Stationer's Register in 1598 and circulated in manuscript but not published until it was edited by Ware)
Editions
Edmund Spenser, Selected Letters and Other Papers. Edited by Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher (Oxford, OUP, 2009).
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie-Queene (Longman-Annotated-English Poets, 2001, 2007) Edited by A. C. Hamilton, Text Edited by Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki.
Digital archive
Washington University in St. Louis professor Joseph Lowenstein, with the assistance of several undergraduate students, has been involved in creating, editing, and annotating a digital archive of the first publication of poet Edmund Spenser's collective works in 100 years. A large grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities has been given to support this ambitious project centralized at Washington University with support from other colleges in the United States.
References
Sources
Croft, Ryan J. "Sanctified Tyrannicide: Tyranny And Theology In John Ponet's Shorte Treatise Of Politike Power And Edmund “Spenser's The Faerie Queene." Studies in Philosophy, 108.4 (2011): 538–571. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 8 October 2012.
Johnson, William. "The struggle between good and evil in the first book of 'The Faerie Queene'." English Studies, Vol. 74,
Maley, Willy. “Spenser's Life.” The Oxford Dictionary of Edmund Spenser. Ed. Richard A. McCabe. 1st Ed. 2010. Print.
Rust, Jennifer. "Spenser's The Faerie Queene." Saint Louis University, St. Louis. 10 October 2007. No. 6. (December 1993) p. 507–519.
Zarucchi, Jeanne Morgan. "Du Bellay, Spenser, and Quevedo Search for Rome: A Teacher's Peregrination." The French Review, 17:2 (December 1997), pp. 192–203.
External links
The Edmund Spenser Home Page at the Cambridge University
Complete works in Verse and Prose at Internet Archive
The works of Edmund Spenser in a single volume at Internet Archive
Project Gutenberg edition of Biography of Edmund Spenser'' by John W. Hales
Profile and works at the Poetry Foundation
The Spenser Encyclopedia by A. C. Hamilton in Google Books Preview
[Hiroshi Yamashita: Bibliographical and Textual Studies of Edmund Spenser and Natsume Soseki
|- style="text-align:center;"
| style="width:30%; "|Preceded by:John Skelton
| style="width:40%; "|English Poet Laureate c. 1590–1599
| style="width:30%; "|Succeeded by:Samuel Daniel
People of Elizabethan Ireland
Alumni of Pembroke College, Cambridge
1550s births
1599 deaths
English Anglicans
Sonneteers
Burials at Westminster Abbey
People educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood
16th-century English poets
Critics of the Catholic Church
Writers of Arthurian literature
Chief Secretaries for Ireland
English male poets
Epic poets
People of the Second Desmond Rebellion | [
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Leonhard Euler (1707–1783) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist.
Euler may also refer to:
Science and technology
Euler (programming language), a computer programming language
Euler (software), a numerical software package
EulerOS, a Linux operating system based distribution
Euler Portal to Mathematics Publications, hosted by EMIS
Euler-Werke, an aircraft manufacturer owned by August Euler.
AMS Euler, a typeface
Project Euler a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems
Other uses
Euler (surname)
Euler Hermes, a global credit insurance company
EULAR, European rheumatology organization
Euler jump, an edge jump in figure skating
Euler (crater), a lunar impact crater in the southern half of the Mare Imbrium
See also
List of things named after Leonhard Euler
Oiler (disambiguation) | [
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] |
The European Parliament (EP) is one of three legislative branches of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it adopts European legislation, commonly on the proposal of the European Commission. The Parliament is composed of 705 members (MEPs). It represents the second-largest democratic electorate in the world (after the Parliament of India) and the largest trans-national democratic electorate in the world (375 million eligible voters in 2009).
Since 1979, the Parliament has been directly elected every five years by the citizens of the European Union through universal suffrage. Voter turnout in parliamentary elections decreased each time after 1979 until 2019, when voter turnout increased by eight percentage points, and went above 50% for the first time since 1994. The voting age is 18 in all member states except for Malta and Austria, where it is 16, and Greece, where it is 17.
Although the European Parliament has legislative power, as does the Council, it does not formally possess the right of initiative as most national parliaments of the member states do, right of initiative being a prerogative of the European Commission. The Parliament is the "first institution" of the European Union (mentioned first in its treaties and having ceremonial precedence over the other EU institutions), and shares equal legislative and budgetary powers with the Council (except on a few issues where the special legislative procedures apply). It likewise has equal control over the EU budget. Ultimately, the European Commission, which serves as the executive branch of the EU, is accountable to Parliament. In particular, Parliament can decide whether or not to approve the European Council's nominee for President of the Commission, and is further tasked with approving (or rejecting) the appointment of the Commission as a whole. It can subsequently force the current Commission to resign by adopting a motion of censure.
The president of the European Parliament is the body's speaker, and presides over the multi-party chamber. The five largest groups being the European People's Party Group (EPP), the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D), Renew Europe (previously ALDE), the Greens/European Free Alliance (Greens–EFA) and Identity and Democracy (ID). The last EU-wide election was held in 2019.
The Parliament is headquartered in Strasbourg, France, and has its administrative offices in Luxembourg City. Plenary sessions take place in Strasbourg as well as in Brussels, Belgium, while the Parliament's committee meetings are held primarily in Brussels.
History
The Parliament, like the other institutions, was not designed in its current form when it first met on 10 September 1952. One of the oldest common institutions, it began as the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). It was a consultative assembly of 78 appointed parliamentarians drawn from the national parliaments of member states, having no legislative powers. The change since its foundation was highlighted by Professor David Farrell of the University of Manchester: "For much of its life, the European Parliament could have been justly labelled a 'multi-lingual talking shop'."
Its development since its foundation shows how the European Union's structures have evolved without a clear 'master plan'. Tom Reid of The Washington Post, has said of the union that "nobody would have deliberately designed a government as complex and as redundant as the EU". Even the Parliament's two seats, which have switched several times, are a result of various agreements or lack of agreements. Although most MEPs would prefer to be based just in Brussels, at John Major's 1992 Edinburgh summit, France engineered a treaty amendment to maintain Parliament's plenary seat permanently at Strasbourg.
Consultative assembly
The body was not mentioned in the original Schuman Declaration. It was assumed or hoped that difficulties with the British would be resolved to allow the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to perform the task. A separate Assembly was introduced during negotiations on the Treaty as an institution which would counterbalance and monitor the executive while providing democratic legitimacy. The wording of the ECSC Treaty demonstrated the leaders' desire for more than a normal consultative assembly by using the term "representatives of the people" and allowed for direct election. Its early importance was highlighted when the Assembly was given the task of drawing up the draft treaty to establish a European Political Community. By this document, the Ad Hoc Assembly was established on 13 September 1952 with extra members, but after the failure of the negotiated and proposed European Defence Community (French parliament veto) the project was dropped.
Despite this, the European Economic Community and Euratom were established in 1958 by the Treaties of Rome. The Common Assembly was shared by all three communities (which had separate executives) and it renamed itself the European Parliamentary Assembly. The first meeting was held on 19 March 1958 having been set up in Luxembourg City, it elected Schuman as its president and on 13 May it rearranged itself to sit according to political ideology rather than nationality. This is seen as the birth of the modern European Parliament, with Parliament's 50 years celebrations being held in March 2008 rather than 2002.
The three communities merged their remaining organs as the European Communities in 1967, and the body's name was changed to the current "European Parliament" in 1962. In 1970 the Parliament was granted power over areas of the Communities' budget, which were expanded to the whole budget in 1975. Under the Rome Treaties, the Parliament should have become elected. However, the Council was required to agree a uniform voting system beforehand, which it failed to do. The Parliament threatened to take the Council to the European Court of Justice; this led to a compromise whereby the Council would agree to elections, but the issue of voting systems would be put off until a later date.
Elected Parliament
In 1979, its members were directly elected for the first time. This sets it apart from similar institutions such as those of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe or Pan-African Parliament which are appointed. After that first election, the parliament held its first session on 17 July 1979, electing Simone Veil MEP as its president. Veil was also the first female president of the Parliament since it was formed as the Common Assembly.
As an elected body, the Parliament began to draft proposals addressing the functioning of the EU. For example, in 1984, inspired by its previous work on the Political Community, it drafted the "draft Treaty establishing the European Union" (also known as the 'Spinelli Plan' after its rapporteur Altiero Spinelli MEP). Although it was not adopted, many ideas were later implemented by other treaties. Furthermore, the Parliament began holding votes on proposed Commission Presidents from the 1980s, before it was given any formal right to veto.
Since it became an elected body, the membership of the European Parliament has simply expanded whenever new nations have joined (the membership was also adjusted upwards in 1994 after German reunification). Following this, the Treaty of Nice imposed a cap on the number of members to be elected: 732.
Like the other institutions, the Parliament's seat was not yet fixed. The provisional arrangements placed Parliament in Strasbourg, while the Commission and Council had their seats in Brussels. In 1985 the Parliament, wishing to be closer to these institutions, built a second chamber in Brussels and moved some of its work there despite protests from some states. A final agreement was eventually reached by the European Council in 1992. It stated the Parliament would retain its formal seat in Strasbourg, where twelve sessions a year would be held, but with all other parliamentary activity in Brussels. This two-seat arrangement was contested by the Parliament, but was later enshrined in the Treaty of Amsterdam. To this day the institution's locations are a source of contention.
The Parliament gained more powers from successive treaties, namely through the extension of the ordinary legislative procedure (then called the codecision procedure), and in 1999, the Parliament forced the resignation of the Santer Commission. The Parliament had refused to approve the Community budget over allegations of fraud and mis-management in the Commission. The two main parties took on a government-opposition dynamic for the first time during the crisis which ended in the Commission resigning en masse, the first of any forced resignation, in the face of an impending censure from the Parliament.
Parliament pressure on the Commission
In 2004, following the largest trans-national election in history, despite the European Council choosing a President from the largest political group (the EPP), the Parliament again exerted pressure on the Commission. During the Parliament's hearings of the proposed Commissioners MEPs raised doubts about some nominees with the Civil Liberties committee rejecting Rocco Buttiglione from the post of Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security over his views on homosexuality. That was the first time the Parliament had ever voted against an incoming Commissioner and despite Barroso's insistence upon Buttiglione the Parliament forced Buttiglione to be withdrawn. A number of other Commissioners also had to be withdrawn or reassigned before Parliament allowed the Barroso Commission to take office.
Along with the extension of the ordinary legislative procedure, the Parliament's democratic mandate has given it greater control over legislation against the other institutions. In voting on the Bolkestein directive in 2006, the Parliament voted by a large majority for over 400 amendments that changed the fundamental principle of the law. The Financial Times described it in the following terms:
In 2007, for the first time, Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini included Parliament in talks on the second Schengen Information System even though MEPs only needed to be consulted on parts of the package. After that experiment, Frattini indicated he would like to include Parliament in all justice and criminal matters, informally pre-empting the new powers they were due to gain in 2009 as part of the Treaty of Lisbon. Between 2007 and 2009, a special working group on parliamentary reform implemented a series of changes to modernise the institution such as more speaking time for rapporteurs, increase committee co-operation and other efficiency reforms.
Recent history
The Lisbon Treaty came into force on 1 December 2009, granting Parliament powers over the entire EU budget, making Parliament's legislative powers equal to the Council's in nearly all areas and linking the appointment of the Commission President to Parliament's own elections. Barroso gained the support of the European Council for a second term and secured majority support from the Parliament in September 2009. Parliament voted 382 votes in favour and 219 votes against (117 abstentions) with support of the European People's Party, European Conservatives and Reformists and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. The liberals gave support after Barroso gave them a number of concessions; the liberals previously joined the socialists' call for a delayed vote (the EPP had wanted to approve Barroso in July of that year).
Once Barroso put forward the candidates for his next Commission, another opportunity to gain concessions arose. Bulgarian nominee Rumiana Jeleva was forced to step down by Parliament due to concerns over her experience and financial interests. She only had the support of the EPP which began to retaliate on left wing candidates before Jeleva gave in and was replaced (setting back the final vote further).
Before the final vote, Parliament demanded a number of concessions as part of a future working agreement under the new Lisbon Treaty. The deal includes that Parliament's President will attend high level Commission meetings. Parliament will have a seat in the EU's Commission-led international negotiations and have a right to information on agreements. However, Parliament secured only an observer seat. Parliament also did not secure a say over the appointment of delegation heads and special representatives for foreign policy. Although they will appear before parliament after they have been appointed by the High Representative. One major internal power was that Parliament wanted a pledge from the Commission that it would put forward legislation when parliament requests. Barroso considered this an infringement on the Commission's powers but did agree to respond within three months. Most requests are already responded to positively.
During the setting up of the European External Action Service (EEAS), Parliament used its control over the EU budget to influence the shape of the EEAS. MEPs had aimed at getting greater oversight over the EEAS by linking it to the Commission and having political deputies to the High Representative. MEPs didn't manage to get everything they demanded. However, they got broader financial control over the new body.
In December 2017, Politico denounced the lack of racial diversity among Members of the European Parliament. The subsequent news coverage contributed to create the Brussels So White movement.
In January 2019, Conservative MEPs supported proposals to boost opportunities for women and tackle sexual harassment in the European Parliament.
Powers and functions
The Parliament and Council have been compared to the two chambers of a bicameral legislature. However, there are some differences from national legislatures; for example, neither the Parliament nor the Council have the power of legislative initiative (except for the fact that the Council has the power in some intergovernmental matters). In Community matters, this is a power uniquely reserved for the European Commission (the executive). Therefore, while Parliament can amend and reject legislation, to make a proposal for legislation, it needs the Commission to draft a bill before anything can become law. The value of such a power has been questioned by noting that in the national legislatures of the member states 85% of initiatives introduced without executive support fail to become law. Yet it has been argued by former Parliament president Hans-Gert Pöttering that as the Parliament does have the right to ask the Commission to draft such legislation, and as the Commission is following Parliament's proposals more and more Parliament does have a de facto right of legislative initiative.
The Parliament also has a great deal of indirect influence, through non-binding resolutions and committee hearings, as a "pan-European soapbox" with the ear of thousands of Brussels-based journalists. There is also an indirect effect on foreign policy; the Parliament must approve all development grants, including those overseas. For example, the support for post-war Iraq reconstruction, or incentives for the cessation of Iranian nuclear development, must be supported by the Parliament. Parliamentary support was also required for the transatlantic passenger data-sharing deal with the United States. Finally, Parliament holds a non-binding vote on new EU treaties but cannot veto it. However, when Parliament threatened to vote down the Nice Treaty, the Belgian and Italian Parliaments said they would veto the treaty on the European Parliament's behalf.
Legislative procedure
With each new treaty, the powers of the Parliament, in terms of its role in the Union's legislative procedures, have expanded. The procedure which has slowly become dominant is the "ordinary legislative procedure" (previously named "codecision procedure"), which provides an equal footing between Parliament and Council. In particular, under the procedure, the Commission presents a proposal to Parliament and the Council which can only become law if both agree on a text, which they do (or not) through successive readings up to a maximum of three. In its first reading, Parliament may send amendments to the Council which can either adopt the text with those amendments or send back a "common position". That position may either be approved by Parliament, or it may reject the text by an absolute majority, causing it to fail, or it may adopt further amendments, also by an absolute majority. If the Council does not approve these, then a "Conciliation Committee" is formed. The Committee is composed of the Council members plus an equal number of MEPs who seek to agree a compromise. Once a position is agreed, it has to be approved by Parliament, by a simple majority. This is also aided by Parliament's mandate as the only directly democratic institution, which has given it leeway to have greater control over legislation than other institutions, for example over its changes to the Bolkestein directive in 2006.
The few other areas that operate the special legislative procedures are justice and home affairs, budget and taxation, and certain aspects of other policy areas, such as the fiscal aspects of environmental policy. In these areas, the Council or Parliament decide law alone. The procedure also depends upon which type of institutional act is being used. The strongest act is a regulation, an act or law which is directly applicable in its entirety. Then there are directives which bind member states to certain goals which they must achieve. They do this through their own laws and hence have room to manoeuvre in deciding upon them. A decision is an instrument which is focused at a particular person or group and is directly applicable. Institutions may also issue recommendations and opinions which are merely non-binding, declarations. There is a further document which does not follow normal procedures, this is a "written declaration" which is similar to an early day motion used in the Westminster system. It is a document proposed by up to five MEPs on a matter within the EU's activities used to launch a debate on that subject. Having been posted outside the entrance to the hemicycle, members can sign the declaration and if a majority do so it is forwarded to the President and announced to the plenary before being forwarded to the other institutions and formally noted in the minutes.
Budget
The legislative branch officially holds the Union's budgetary authority with powers gained through the Budgetary Treaties of the 1970s and the Lisbon Treaty. The EU budget is subject to a form of the ordinary legislative procedure with a single reading giving Parliament power over the entire budget (before 2009, its influence was limited to certain areas) on an equal footing to the Council. If there is a disagreement between them, it is taken to a conciliation committee as it is for legislative proposals. If the joint conciliation text is not approved, the Parliament may adopt the budget definitively.
The Parliament is also responsible for discharging the implementation of previous budgets based on the annual report of the European Court of Auditors. It has refused to approve the budget only twice, in 1984 and in 1998. On the latter occasion it led to the resignation of the Santer Commission; highlighting how the budgetary power gives Parliament a great deal of power over the Commission. Parliament also makes extensive use of its budgetary, and other powers, elsewhere; for example in the setting up of the European External Action Service, Parliament has a de facto veto over its design as it has to approve the budgetary and staff changes.
Control of the executive
The President of the European Commission is proposed by the European Council on the basis of the European elections to Parliament. That proposal has to be approved by the Parliament (by a simple majority) who "elect" the President according to the treaties. Following the approval of the Commission President, the members of the Commission are proposed by the President in accord with the member states. Each Commissioner comes before a relevant parliamentary committee hearing covering the proposed portfolio. They are then, as a body, approved or rejected by the Parliament.
In practice, the Parliament has never voted against a President or his Commission, but it did seem likely when the Barroso Commission was put forward. The resulting pressure forced the proposal to be withdrawn and changed to be more acceptable to parliament. That pressure was seen as an important sign by some of the evolving nature of the Parliament and its ability to make the Commission accountable, rather than being a rubber stamp for candidates. Furthermore, in voting on the Commission, MEPs also voted along party lines, rather than national lines, despite frequent pressure from national governments on their MEPs. This cohesion and willingness to use the Parliament's power ensured greater attention from national leaders, other institutions and the public who previously gave the lowest ever turnout for the Parliament's elections.
The Parliament also has the power to censure the Commission if they have a two-thirds majority which will force the resignation of the entire Commission from office. As with approval, this power has never been used but it was threatened to the Santer Commission, who subsequently resigned of their own accord. There are a few other controls, such as: the requirement of Commission to submit reports to the Parliament and answer questions from MEPs; the requirement of the President-in-office of the Council to present its programme at the start of their presidency; the obligation on the President of the European Council to report to Parliament after each of its meetings; the right of MEPs to make requests for legislation and policy to the Commission; and the right to question members of those institutions (e.g. "Commission Question Time" every Tuesday). At present, MEPs may ask a question on any topic whatsoever, but in July 2008 MEPs voted to limit questions to those within the EU's mandate and ban offensive or personal questions.
Supervisory powers
The Parliament also has other powers of general supervision, mainly granted by the Maastricht Treaty. The Parliament has the power to set up a Committee of Inquiry, for example over mad cow disease or CIA detention flights the former led to the creation of the European veterinary agency. The Parliament can call other institutions to answer questions and if necessary to take them to court if they break EU law or treaties. Furthermore, it has powers over the appointment of the members of the Court of Auditors and the president and executive board of the European Central Bank. The ECB president is also obliged to present an annual report to the parliament.
The European Ombudsman is elected by the Parliament, who deals with public complaints against all institutions. Petitions can also be brought forward by any EU citizen on a matter within the EU's sphere of activities. The Committee on Petitions hears cases, some 1500 each year, sometimes presented by the citizen themselves at the Parliament. While the Parliament attempts to resolve the issue as a mediator they do resort to legal proceedings if it is necessary to resolve the citizens dispute.
Members
The parliamentarians are known in English as Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). They are elected every five years by universal adult suffrage and sit according to political allegiance; about one third are women. Before the first direct elections, in 1979, they were appointed by their national parliaments.
The Parliament has been criticized for underrepresentation of minority groups. In 2017, an estimated 17 MEPs were nonwhite, and of these, three were black, a disproportionately low number. According to activist organization European Network Against Racism, while an estimated 10% of Europe is composed of racial and ethnic minorities, only 5% of MEPs were members of such groups following the 2019 European Parliament election.
Under the Lisbon Treaty, seats are allocated to each state according to population and the maximum number of members is set at 751 (however, as the President cannot vote while in the chair there will only be 750 voting members at any one time). Since 1 February 2020, 705 MEPs (including the president of the Parliament) sit in the European Parliament, the reduction in size due to the United Kingdom leaving the EU.
Representation is currently limited to a maximum of 96 seats and a minimum of 6 seats per state and the seats are distributed according to "degressive proportionality", i.e., the larger the state, the more citizens are represented per MEP. As a result, Maltese and Luxembourgish voters have roughly 10x more influence per voter than citizens of the six largest countries.
, Germany (80.9 million inhabitants) has 96 seats (previously 99 seats), i.e. one seat for 843,000 inhabitants. Malta (0.4 million inhabitants) has 6 seats, i.e. one seat for 70,000 inhabitants.
The new system implemented under the Lisbon Treaty, including revising the seating well before elections, was intended to avoid political horse trading when the allocations have to be revised to reflect demographic changes.
Pursuant to this apportionment, the constituencies are formed. In four EU member states (Belgium, Ireland, Italy and Poland), the national territory is divided into a number of constituencies. In the remaining member states, the whole country forms a single constituency. All member states hold elections to the European Parliament using various forms of proportional representation.
Transitional arrangements
Due to the delay in ratifying the Lisbon Treaty, the seventh parliament was elected under the lower Nice Treaty cap. A small scale treaty amendment was ratified on 29 November 2011. This amendment brought in transitional provisions to allow the 18 additional MEPs created under the Lisbon Treaty to be elected or appointed before the 2014 election. Under the Lisbon Treaty reforms, Germany was the only state to lose members from 99 to 96. However, these seats were not removed until the 2014 election.
Salaries and expenses
Before 2009, members received the same salary as members of their national parliament. However, from 2009 a new members statute came into force, after years of attempts, which gave all members an equal monthly pay, of €8,484.05 each in 2016, subject to a European Union tax and which can also be taxed nationally. MEPs are entitled to a pension, paid by Parliament, from the age of 63. Members are also entitled to allowances for office costs and subsistence, and travelling expenses, based on actual cost. Besides their pay, members are granted a number of privileges and immunities. To ensure their free movement to and from the Parliament, they are accorded by their own states the facilities accorded to senior officials travelling abroad and, by other state governments, the status of visiting foreign representatives. When in their own state, they have all the immunities accorded to national parliamentarians, and, in other states, they have immunity from detention and legal proceedings. However, immunity cannot be claimed when a member is found committing a criminal offence and the Parliament also has the right to strip a member of their immunity.
Political groups
MEPs in Parliament are organised into eight different parliamentary groups, including thirty non-attached members known as non-inscrits. The two largest groups are the European People's Party (EPP) and the Socialists & Democrats (S&D). These two groups have dominated the Parliament for much of its life, continuously holding between 50 and 70 percent of the seats between them. No single group has ever held a majority in Parliament. As a result of being broad alliances of national parties, European group parties are very decentralised and hence have more in common with parties in federal states like Germany or the United States than unitary states like the majority of the EU states. Nevertheless, the European groups were actually more cohesive than their US counterparts between 2004 and 2009.
Groups are often based on a single European political party such as the European People's Party. However, they can, like the liberal group, include more than one European party as well as national parties and independents. For a group to be recognised, it needs 23 MEPs from seven different countries. Groups receive funding from the parliament.
Grand coalition
Given that the Parliament does not form the government in the traditional sense of a Parliamentary system, its politics have developed along more consensual lines rather than majority rule of competing parties and coalitions. Indeed, for much of its life it has been dominated by a grand coalition of the European People's Party and the Party of European Socialists. The two major parties tend to co-operate to find a compromise between their two groups leading to proposals endorsed by huge majorities. However, this does not always produce agreement, and each may instead try to build other alliances, the EPP normally with other centre-right or right wing Groups and the PES with centre-left or left wing groups. Sometimes, the Liberal Group is then in the pivotal position. There are also occasions where very sharp party political divisions have emerged, for example over the resignation of the Santer Commission.
When the initial allegations against the Commission emerged, they were directed primarily against Édith Cresson and Manuel Marín, both socialist members. When the parliament was considering refusing to discharge the Community budget, President Jacques Santer stated that a no vote would be tantamount to a vote of no confidence. The Socialist group supported the Commission and saw the issue as an attempt by the EPP to discredit their party ahead of the 1999 elections. Socialist leader, Pauline Green MEP, attempted a vote of confidence and the EPP put forward counter motions. During this period the two parties took on similar roles to a government-opposition dynamic, with the Socialists supporting the executive and EPP renouncing its previous coalition support and voting it down. Politicisation such as this has been increasing, in 2007 Simon Hix of the London School of Economics noted that:
During the fifth term, 1999 to 2004, there was a break in the grand coalition resulting in a centre-right coalition between the Liberal and People's parties. This was reflected in the Presidency of the Parliament with the terms being shared between the EPP and the ELDR, rather than the EPP and Socialists. In the following term the liberal group grew to hold 88 seats, the largest number of seats held by any third party in Parliament.
Elections
Elections have taken place, directly in every member state, every five years since 1979. there have been nine elections. When a nation joins mid-term, a by-election will be held to elect their representatives. This has happened six times, most recently when Croatia joined in 2013. Elections take place across four days according to local custom and, apart from having to be proportional, the electoral system is chosen by the member state. This includes allocation of sub-national constituencies; while most members have a national list, some, like the UK and Poland, divide their allocation between regions. Seats are allocated to member states according to their population, since 2014 with no state having more than 96, but no fewer than 6, to maintain proportionality.
The most recent Union-wide elections to the European Parliament were the European elections of 2019, held from 23 to 26 May 2019. They were the largest simultaneous transnational elections ever held anywhere in the world.
The first session of the ninth parliament started 2 July 2019.
European political parties have the exclusive right to campaign during the European elections (as opposed to their corresponding EP groups). There have been a number of proposals designed to attract greater public attention to the elections. One such innovation in the 2014 elections was that the pan-European political parties fielded "candidates" for president of the Commission, the so-called Spitzenkandidaten (German, "leading candidates" or "top candidates"). However, European Union governance is based on a mixture of intergovernmental and supranational features: the President of the European Commission is nominated by the European Council, representing the governments of the member states, and there is no obligation for them to nominate the successful "candidate". The Lisbon Treaty merely states that they should take account of the results of the elections when choosing whom to nominate. The so-called Spitzenkandidaten were Jean-Claude Juncker for the European People's Party, Martin Schulz for the Party of European Socialists, Guy Verhofstadt for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party, Ska Keller and José Bové jointly for the European Green Party and Alexis Tsipras for the Party of the European Left.
Turnout dropped consistently every year since the first election, and from 1999 until 2019 was below 50%. In 2007 both Bulgaria and Romania elected their MEPs in by-elections, having joined at the beginning of 2007. The Bulgarian and Romanian elections saw two of the lowest turnouts for European elections, just 28.6% and 28.3% respectively. This trend was interrupted in the 2019 election, when turnout increased by 8% EU-wide, rising to 50.6%, the highest since 1994.
In England, Scotland and Wales, EP elections were originally held for a constituency MEP on a first-past-the-post basis. In 1999 the system was changed to a form of proportional representation where a large group of candidates stand for a post within a very large regional constituency. One can vote for a party, but not a candidate (unless that party has a single candidate).
Proceedings
Each year the activities of the Parliament cycle between committee weeks where reports are discussed in committees and interparliamentary delegations meet, political group weeks for members to discuss work within their political groups and session weeks where members spend 3½ days in Strasbourg for part-sessions. In addition six 2-day part-sessions are organised in Brussels throughout the year. Four weeks are allocated as constituency week to allow members to do exclusively constituency work. Finally there are no meetings planned during the summer weeks. The Parliament has the power to meet without being convened by another authority. Its meetings are partly controlled by the treaties but are otherwise up to Parliament according to its own "Rules of Procedure" (the regulations governing the parliament).
During sessions, members may speak after being called on by the President. Members of the Council or Commission may also attend and speak in debates. Partly due to the need for interpretation, and the politics of consensus in the chamber, debates tend to be calmer and more polite than, say, the Westminster system. Voting is conducted primarily by a show of hands, that may be checked on request by electronic voting. Votes of MEPs are not recorded in either case, however; that only occurs when there is a roll-call ballot. This is required for the final votes on legislation and also whenever a political group or 30 MEPs request it. The number of roll-call votes has increased with time. Votes can also be a completely secret ballot (for example, when the president is elected). All recorded votes, along with minutes and legislation, are recorded in the Official Journal of the European Union and can be accessed online. Votes usually do not follow a debate, but rather they are grouped with other due votes on specific occasions, usually at noon on Tuesdays, Wednesdays or Thursdays. This is because the length of the vote is unpredictable and if it continues for longer than allocated it can disrupt other debates and meetings later in the day.
Members are arranged in a hemicycle according to their political groups (in the Common Assembly, prior to 1958, members sat alphabetically) who are ordered mainly by left to right, but some smaller groups are placed towards the outer ring of the Parliament. All desks are equipped with microphones, headphones for translation and electronic voting equipment. The leaders of the groups sit on the front benches at the centre, and in the very centre is a podium for guest speakers. The remaining half of the circular chamber is primarily composed of the raised area where the President and staff sit. Further benches are provided between the sides of this area and the MEPs, these are taken up by the Council on the far left and the Commission on the far right. Both the Brussels and Strasbourg hemicycle roughly follow this layout with only minor differences. The hemicycle design is a compromise between the different Parliamentary systems. The British-based system has the different groups directly facing each other while the French-based system is a semicircle (and the traditional German system had all members in rows facing a rostrum for speeches). Although the design is mainly based on a semicircle, the opposite ends of the spectrum do still face each other. With access to the chamber limited, entrance is controlled by ushers who aid MEPs in the chamber (for example in delivering documents). The ushers can also occasionally act as a form of police in enforcing the President, for example in ejecting an MEP who is disrupting the session (although this is rare). The first head of protocol in the Parliament was French, so many of the duties in the Parliament are based on the French model first developed following the French Revolution. The 180 ushers are highly visible in the Parliament, dressed in black tails and wearing a silver chain, and are recruited in the same manner as the European civil service. The President is allocated a personal usher.
President and organisation
The President is essentially the speaker of the Parliament and presides over the plenary when it is in session. The President's signature is required for all acts adopted by co-decision, including the EU budget. The President is also responsible for representing the Parliament externally, including in legal matters, and for the application of the rules of procedure. The President is elected for two-and-a-half-year terms, meaning two elections per parliamentary term. The current President of the European Parliament is Roberta Metsola, who was elected in January 2022.
In most countries, the protocol of the head of state comes before all others; however, in the EU the Parliament is listed as the first institution, and hence the protocol of its president comes before any other European, or national, protocol. The gifts given to numerous visiting dignitaries depend upon the President. President Josep Borrell MEP of Spain gave his counterparts a crystal cup created by an artist from Barcelona who had engraved upon it parts of the Charter of Fundamental Rights among other things.
A number of notable figures have been President of the Parliament and its predecessors. The first President was Paul-Henri Spaak MEP, one of the founding fathers of the Union. Other founding fathers include Alcide de Gasperi MEP and Robert Schuman MEP. The two female Presidents were Simone Veil MEP in 1979 (first President of the elected Parliament) and Nicole Fontaine MEP in 1999, both Frenchwomen. The previous president, Jerzy Buzek was the first East-Central European to lead an EU institution, a former Prime Minister of Poland who rose out of the Solidarity movement in Poland that helped overthrow communism in the Eastern Bloc.
During the election of a President, the previous President (or, if unable to, one of the previous Vice-Presidents) presides over the chamber. Prior to 2009, the oldest member fulfilled this role but the rule was changed to prevent far-right French MEP Jean-Marie Le Pen taking the chair.
Below the President, there are 14 Vice-Presidents who chair debates when the President is not in the chamber. There are a number of other bodies and posts responsible for the running of parliament besides these speakers. The two main bodies are the Bureau, which is responsible for budgetary and administration issues, and the Conference of Presidents which is a governing body composed of the presidents of each of the parliament's political groups. Looking after the financial and administrative interests of members are five Quaestors.
, the European Parliament budget was EUR 1.756 billion. A 2008 report on the Parliament's finances highlighted certain overspending and miss-payments. Despite some MEPs calling for the report to be published, Parliamentary authorities had refused until an MEP broke confidentiality and leaked it.
Committees and delegations
The Parliament has 20 Standing Committees consisting of 25 to 73 MEPs each (reflecting the political make-up of the whole Parliament) including a chair, a bureau and secretariat. They meet twice a month in public to draw up, amend to adopt legislative proposals and reports to be presented to the plenary. The rapporteurs for a committee are supposed to present the view of the committee, although notably this has not always been the case. In the events leading to the resignation of the Santer Commission, the rapporteur went against the Budgetary Control Committee's narrow vote to discharge the budget, and urged the Parliament to reject it.
Committees can also set up sub-committees (e.g. the Subcommittee on Human Rights) and temporary committees to deal with a specific topic (e.g. on extraordinary rendition). The chairs of the Committees co-ordinate their work through the "Conference of Committee Chairmen". When co-decision was introduced it increased the Parliament's powers in a number of areas, but most notably those covered by the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety. Previously this committee was considered by MEPs as a "Cinderella committee"; however, as it gained a new importance, it became more professional and rigorous, attracting increasing attention to its work.
The nature of the committees differ from their national counterparts as, although smaller in comparison to those of the United States Congress, the European Parliament's committees are unusually large by European standards with between eight and twelve dedicated members of staff and three to four support staff. Considerable administration, archives and research resources are also at the disposal of the whole Parliament when needed.
Delegations of the Parliament are formed in a similar manner and are responsible for relations with Parliaments outside the EU. There are 34 delegations made up of around 15 MEPs, chairpersons of the delegations also cooperate in a conference like the committee chairs do. They include "Interparliamentary delegations" (maintain relations with Parliament outside the EU), "joint parliamentary committees" (maintaining relations with parliaments of states which are candidates or associates of the EU), the delegation to the ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly and the delegation to the Euro-Mediterranean Parliamentary Assembly. MEPs also participate in other international activities such as the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly, the Transatlantic Legislators' Dialogue and through election observation in third countries.
Intergroups
The Intergroups in the European Parliament are informal fora which gather MEPs from various political groups around any topic. They do not express the view of the European Parliament. They serve a double purpose: to address a topic which is transversal to several committees and in a less formal manner. Their daily secretariat can be run either through the office of MEPs or through interest groups, be them corporate lobbies or NGOs. The favored access to MEPs which the organization running the secretariat enjoys can be one explanation to the multiplication of Intergroups in the 1990s. They are now strictly regulated and financial support, direct or otherwise (via Secretariat staff, for example) must be officially specified in a declaration of financial interests. Also Intergroups are established or renewed at the beginning of each legislature through a specific process. Indeed, the proposal for the constitution or renewal of an Intergroup must be supported by at least 3 political groups whose support is limited to a specific number of proposals in proportion to their size (for example, for the legislature 2014-2019, the EPP or S&D political groups could support 22 proposals whereas the Greens/EFA or the EFDD political groups only 7).
Translation and interpretation
Speakers in the European Parliament are entitled to speak in any of the 24 official languages of the European Union, ranging from French and German to Maltese and Irish. Simultaneous interpreting is offered in all plenary sessions, and all final texts of legislation are translated. With twenty-four languages, the European Parliament is the most multilingual parliament in the world and the biggest employer of interpreters in the world (employing 350 full-time and 400 free-lancers when there is higher demand). Citizens may also address the Parliament in Basque, Catalan/Valencian and Galician.
Usually a language is translated from a foreign tongue into a translator's native tongue. Due to the large number of languages, some being minor ones, since 1995 interpreting is sometimes done the opposite way, out of an interpreter's native tongue (the "retour" system). In addition, a speech in a minor language may be interpreted through a third language for lack of interpreters ("relay" interpreting) for example, when interpreting out of Estonian into Maltese. Due to the complexity of the issues, interpretation is not word for word. Instead, interpreters have to convey the political meaning of a speech, regardless of their own views. This requires detailed understanding of the politics and terms of the Parliament, involving a great deal of preparation beforehand (e.g. reading the documents in question). Difficulty can often arise when MEPs use profanities, jokes and word play or speak too fast.
While some see speaking their native language as an important part of their identity, and can speak more fluently in debates, interpretation and its cost has been criticised by some. A 2006 report by Alexander Stubb MEP highlighted that by only using English, French and German costs could be reduced from €118,000 per day (for 21 languages then Romanian, Bulgarian and Croatian having not yet been included) to €8,900 per day. There has also been a small-scale campaign to make French the reference language for all legal texts, on the basis of an argument that it is more clear and precise for legal purposes.
Because the proceedings are translated into all of the official EU languages, they have been used to make a multilingual corpus known as Europarl. It is widely used to train statistical machine translation systems.
Annual costs
According to the European Parliament website, the annual parliament budget for 2016 was €1.838 billion. The main cost categories were:
34% staff, interpretation and translation costs
24% information policy, IT, telecommunications
23% MEPs' salaries, expenses, travel, offices and staff
13% buildings
6% political group activities
According to a European Parliament study prepared in 2013, the Strasbourg seat costs an extra €103 million over maintaining a single location and according to the Court of Auditors an additional €5 million is related to travel expenses caused by having two seats.
As a comparison, the German lower house of parliament (Bundestag) is estimated to cost €517 million in total for 2018, for a parliament with 709 members. The British House of Commons reported total annual costs in 2016-2017 of £249 million (€279 million). It had 650 seats.
According to The Economist, the European Parliament costs more than the British, French and German parliaments combined. A quarter of the costs is estimated to be related to translation and interpretation costs (c. €460 million) and the double seats are estimated to add an additional €180 million a year. For a like-for-like comparison, these two cost blocks can be excluded.
On 2 July 2018, MEPs rejected proposals to tighten the rules around the General Expenditure Allowance (GEA), which "is a controversial €4,416 per month payment that MEPs are given to cover office and other expenses, but they are not required to provide any evidence of how the money is spent".
Seat
The Parliament is based in three different cities with numerous buildings. A protocol attached to the Treaty of Amsterdam requires that 12 plenary sessions be held in Strasbourg (none in August but two in September), which is the Parliament's official seat, while extra part sessions as well as committee meetings are held in Brussels. Luxembourg City hosts the Secretariat of the European Parliament. The European Parliament is one of at least two assemblies in the world with more than one meeting place (another being the parliament of the Isle of Man, Tynwald) and one of the few that does not have the power to decide its own location.
The Strasbourg seat is seen as a symbol of reconciliation between France and Germany, the Strasbourg region having been fought over by the two countries in the past. However, the cost and inconvenience of having two seats is questioned. While Strasbourg is the official seat, and sits alongside the Council of Europe, Brussels is home to nearly all other major EU institutions, with the majority of Parliament's work being carried out there. Critics have described the two-seat arrangement as a "travelling circus", and there is a strong movement to establish Brussels as the sole seat. This is because the other political institutions (the Commission, Council and European Council) are located there, and hence Brussels is treated as the 'capital' of the EU. This movement has received strong backing from numerous figures, including Margot Wallström, Commission First-Vice President from 2004 to 2010, who stated that "something that was once a very positive symbol of the EU reuniting France and Germany has now become a negative symbol of wasting money, bureaucracy and the insanity of the Brussels institutions". The Green Party has also noted the environmental cost in a study led by Jean Lambert MEP and Caroline Lucas MEP; in addition to the extra 200 million euro spent on the extra seat, there are over 20,268 tonnes of additional carbon dioxide, undermining any environmental stance of the institution and the Union. The campaign is further backed by a million-strong online petition started by Cecilia Malmström MEP. In August 2014, an assessment by the European Court of Auditors calculated that relocating the Strasbourg seat of the European Parliament to Brussels would save €113.8 million per year. In 2006, there were allegations of irregularities in the charges made by the city of Strasbourg on buildings the Parliament rented, thus further harming the case for the Strasbourg seat.
Most MEPs prefer Brussels as a single base. A poll of MEPs found 89% of the respondents wanting a single seat, and 81% preferring Brussels. Another survey found 68% support. In July 2011, an absolute majority of MEPs voted in favour of a single seat. In early 2011, the Parliament voted to scrap one of the Strasbourg sessions by holding two within a single week. The mayor of Strasbourg officially reacted by stating "we will counter-attack by upturning the adversary's strength to our own profit, as a judoka would do". However, as Parliament's seat is now fixed by the treaties, it can only be changed by the Council acting unanimously, meaning that France could veto any move. The former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has stated that the Strasbourg seat is "non-negotiable", and that France has no intention of surrendering the only EU Institution on French soil. Given France's declared intention to veto any relocation to Brussels, some MEPs have advocated civil disobedience by refusing to take part in the monthly exodus to Strasbourg.
Channels of dialogue, information, and communication with European civil society
Over the last few years, European institutions have committed to promoting transparency, openness, and the availability of information about their work. In particular, transparency is regarded as pivotal to the action of European institutions and a general principle of EU law, to be applied to the activities of EU institutions in order to strengthen the Union's democratic foundation. The general principles of openness and transparency are reaffirmed in the articles 8 A, point 3 and 10.3 of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Maastricht Treaty respectively, stating that "every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union. Decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen". Furthermore, both treaties acknowledge the value of dialogue between citizens, representative associations, civil society, and European institutions.
Dialogue with religious and non-confessional organisations
Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) lays the juridical foundation for an open, transparent dialogue between European institutions and churches, religious associations, and non-confessional and philosophical organisations. In July 2014, in the beginning of the 8th term, then President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz tasked Antonio Tajani, then Vice-President, with implementing the dialogue with the religious and confessional organisations included in article 17. In this framework, the European Parliament hosts high-level conferences on inter-religious dialogue, also with focus on current issues and in relation with parliamentary works.
European Parliament Mediator for International Parental Child Abduction
The chair of European Parliament Mediator for International Parental Child Abduction was established in 1987 by initiative of British MEP Charles Henry Plumb, with the goal of helping minor children of international couples victim of parental abduction. The Mediator finds negotiated solutions in the higher interest of the minor when said minor is abducted by a parent following separation of the couple, regardless whether married or unmarried. Since its institution, the chair has been held by Mairead McGuinness (since 2014), Roberta Angelilli (2009–2014), Evelyne Gebhardt (2004–2009), Mary Banotti (1995–2004), and Marie-Claude Vayssade (1987–1994). The Mediator's main task is to assist parents in finding a solution in the minor's best interest through mediation, i.e. a form of controversy resolution alternative to lawsuit. The Mediator is activated by request of a citizen and, after evaluating the request, starts a mediation process aimed at reaching an agreement. Once subscribed by both parties and the Mediator, the agreement is official. The nature of the agreement is that of a private contract between parties. In defining the agreement, the European Parliament offers the parties the juridical support necessary to reach a sound, lawful agreement based on legality and equity. The agreement can be ratified by the competent national courts and can also lay the foundation for consensual separation or divorce.
European Parliamentary Research Service
The European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) is the European Parliament's in-house research department and think tank. It provides Members of the European Parliament and, where appropriate, parliamentary committees with independent, objective and authoritative analysis of, and research on, policy issues relating to the European Union, in order to assist them in their parliamentary work. It is also designed to increase Members' and EP committees' capacity to scrutinise and oversee the European Commission and other EU executive bodies.
EPRS aims to provide a comprehensive range of products and services, backed by specialist internal expertise and knowledge sources in all policy fields, so empowering Members and committees through knowledge and contributing to the Parliament's effectiveness and influence as an institution. In undertaking this work, the EPRS supports and promotes parliamentary outreach to the wider public, including dialogue with relevant stakeholders in the EU's system of multi-level governance. All publications by EPRS are publicly available on the EP Think Tank platform.
Eurobarometer of the European Parliament
The European Parliament periodically commissions opinion polls and studies on public opinion trends in Member States to survey perceptions and expectations of citizens about its work and the overall activities of the European Union. Topics include citizens' perception of the European Parliament's role, their knowledge of the institution, their sense of belonging in the European Union, opinions on European elections and European integration, identity, citizenship, political values, but also on current issues such as climate change, current economy and politics, etc.. Eurobarometer analyses seek to provide an overall picture of national situations, regional specificities, socio-demographic cleavages, and historical trends.
Prizes
Sakharov Prize
With the Sakharov Prize, created in 1988, the European Parliament supports human rights by awarding individuals that contribute to promoting human rights worldwide, thus raising awareness on human rights violations. Priorities include: protection of human rights and fundamental liberties, with particular focus on freedom of expression; protection of minority rights; compliance with international law; and development of democracy and authentic rule of law.
European Charlemagne Youth Prize
The European Charlemagne Youth Prize seeks to encourage youth participation in the European integration process. It is awarded by the European Parliament and the Foundation of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen to youth projects aimed at nurturing common European identity and European citizenship.
European Citizens' Prize
The European Citizens' Prize is awarded by the European Parliament to activities and actions carried out by citizens and associations to promote integration between the citizens of EU member states and transnational cooperation projects in the EU.
LUX Prize
Since 2007, the LUX Prize is awarded by the European Parliament to films dealing with current topics of public European interest that encourage reflection on Europe and its future. Over time, the Lux Prize has become a prestigious cinema award which supports European film and production also outside the EU.
Daphne Caruana Galizia Journalism Prize
From 2021, the Daphne Caruana Galizia Journalism prize shall be awarded by the European Parliament to outstanding journalism that reflect EU values. The prize consists in an award of 20,000 euros and the very first winner will be revealed in October 2021. This award is named after the late Maltese journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia who was assassinated in Malta on 16 October 2017. In 2021 the prize was awarded to the Pegasus Project.
See also
Parlamentarium
Parliamentwatch
State of the Union address (European Union)
Rules of Procedure of the European Parliament
Notes
References
Further reading
The same three co-authors have written every edition since the first in 1990.
(draft version on-line)
Lodge, Juliet, ed. The 2009 Elections to the European Parliament (Palgrave Macmillan; 2011) 327 pages
Sabbati, Giulio (2015). European Parliament: Facts and Figures. European Parliament – European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS).
Dick Toornstra; Christian Meseth (2012). Inside the European Parliament: A guide to its parliamentary and administrative structures. European Parliament – Office for Promotion of Parliamentary Democracy (OPPD).
External links
1952 establishments in France
Organisations based in Brussels
Organizations based in Strasbourg
Organizations established in 1952
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] |
In physics, an electronvolt (symbol eV, also written electron-volt and electron volt) is the measure of an amount of kinetic energy gained by a single electron accelerating from rest through an electric potential difference of one volt in vacuum. When used as a unit of energy, the numerical value of 1 eV in joules (symbol J) is equivalent to the numerical value of the charge of an electron in coulombs (symbol C). Under the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, this sets 1 eV equal to the exact value J.
Historically, the electronvolt was devised as a standard unit of measure through its usefulness in electrostatic particle accelerator sciences, because a particle with electric charge q has an energy after passing through the potential V; if q is quoted in integer units of the elementary charge and the potential in volts, one gets an energy in eV.
It is a common unit of energy within physics, widely used in solid state, atomic, nuclear, and particle physics, and high-energy astrophysics. It is commonly used with the metric prefixes milli-, kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, peta- or exa- (meV, keV, MeV, GeV, TeV, PeV and EeV respectively). In some older documents, and in the name Bevatron, the symbol BeV is used, which stands for billion (109) electronvolts; it is equivalent to the GeV.
Definition
An electronvolt is the amount of kinetic energy gained or lost by a single electron accelerating from rest through an electric potential difference of one volt in vacuum. Hence, it has a value of one volt, , multiplied by the electron's elementary charge e, Therefore, one electronvolt is equal to
The electronvolt, as opposed to the volt, is not an SI unit. The electronvolt (eV) is a unit of energy whereas the volt (V) is the derived SI unit of electric potential. The SI unit for energy is the joule (J).
Mass
By mass–energy equivalence, the electronvolt is also a unit of mass. It is common in particle physics, where units of mass and energy are often interchanged, to express mass in units of eV/c2, where c is the speed of light in vacuum (from ). It is common to simply express mass in terms of "eV" as a unit of mass, effectively using a system of natural units with c set to 1. The mass equivalent of is
For example, an electron and a positron, each with a mass of , can annihilate to yield of energy. The proton has a mass of . In general, the masses of all hadrons are of the order of , which makes the GeV (gigaelectronvolt) a convenient unit of mass for particle physics:
The unified atomic mass unit (u), almost exactly 1 gram divided by the Avogadro number, is almost the mass of a hydrogen atom, which is mostly the mass of the proton. To convert to electron volts, use the formula:
Momentum
In high-energy physics, the electronvolt is often used as a unit of momentum. A potential difference of 1 volt causes an electron to gain an amount of energy (i.e., ). This gives rise to usage of eV (and keV, MeV, GeV or TeV) as units of momentum, for the energy supplied results in acceleration of the particle.
The dimensions of momentum units are . The dimensions of energy units are . Then, dividing the units of energy (such as eV) by a fundamental constant that has units of velocity (), facilitates the required conversion of using energy units to describe momentum. In the field of high-energy particle physics, the fundamental velocity unit is the speed of light in vacuum c.
By dividing energy in eV by the speed of light, one can describe the momentum of an electron in units of eV/c.
The fundamental velocity constant c is often dropped from the units of momentum by way of defining units of length such that the value of c is unity. For example, if the momentum p of an electron is said to be , then the conversion to MKS can be achieved by:
Distance
In particle physics, a system of "natural units" in which the speed of light in vacuum c and the reduced Planck constant ħ are dimensionless and equal to unity is widely used: . In these units, both distances and times are expressed in inverse energy units (while energy and mass are expressed in the same units, see mass–energy equivalence). In particular, particle scattering lengths are often presented in units of inverse particle masses.
Outside this system of units, the conversion factors between electronvolt, second, and nanometer are the following:
The above relations also allow expressing the mean lifetime τ of an unstable particle (in seconds) in terms of its decay width Γ (in eV) via . For example, the B0 meson has a lifetime of 1.530(9) picoseconds, mean decay length is , or a decay width of .
Conversely, the tiny meson mass differences responsible for meson oscillations are often expressed in the more convenient inverse picoseconds.
Energy in electronvolts is sometimes expressed through the wavelength of light with photons of the same energy:
Temperature
In certain fields, such as plasma physics, it is convenient to use the electronvolt to express temperature. The electronvolt is divided by the Boltzmann constant to convert to the Kelvin scale:
Where kB is the Boltzmann constant, K is Kelvin, J is Joules, eV is electronvolts.
The kB is assumed when using the electronvolt to express temperature, for example, a typical magnetic confinement fusion plasma is (kilo-electronvolts), which is equal to 174 MK (million Kelvin).
As an approximation: kBT is about (≈ ) at a temperature of .
Properties
The energy E, frequency v, and wavelength λ of a photon are related by
where h is the Planck constant, c is the speed of light. This reduces to
A photon with a wavelength of (green light) would have an energy of approximately . Similarly, would correspond to an infrared photon of wavelength or frequency .
Scattering experiments
In a low-energy nuclear scattering experiment, it is conventional to refer to the nuclear recoil energy in units of eVr, keVr, etc. This distinguishes the nuclear recoil energy from the "electron equivalent" recoil energy (eVee, keVee, etc.) measured by scintillation light. For example, the yield of a phototube is measured in phe/keVee (photoelectrons per keV electron-equivalent energy). The relationship between eV, eVr, and eVee depends on the medium the scattering takes place in, and must be established empirically for each material.
Energy comparisons
Per mole
One mole of particles given 1 eV of energy has approximately 96.5 kJ of energy – this corresponds to the Faraday constant (F ≈ ), where the energy in joules of n moles of particles each with energy E eV is equal to E·F·n.
See also
Orders of magnitude (energy)
References
External links
BIPM's definition of the electronvolt
physical constants reference; CODATA data
Particle physics
Units of chemical measurement
Units of energy
Voltage | [
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An extremophile (from Latin meaning "extreme" and Greek () meaning "love") is an organism that is able to live (or in some cases thrive) in extreme environments, i.e. environment that make survival challenging such as due to extreme temperature, radiation, salinity, or pH level.
These organisms are ecologically dominant in the evolutionary history of the planet. Dating back to more than 40 million years ago, extremophiles have continued to thrive in the most extreme conditions, making them one of the most abundant lifeforms.
Characteristics
In the 1980s and 1990s, biologists found that microbial life has great flexibility for surviving in extreme environments—niches that are acidic, extraordinarily hot or within irregular air pressure for example—that would be completely inhospitable to complex organisms. Some scientists even concluded that life may have begun on Earth in hydrothermal vents far under the ocean's surface.
According to astrophysicist Steinn Sigurdsson, "There are viable bacterial spores that have been found that are 40 million years old on Earth—and we know they're very hardened to radiation." Some bacteria were found living in the cold and dark in a lake buried a half-mile deep under the ice in Antarctica, and in the Marianas Trench, the deepest place in Earth's oceans. Expeditions of the International Ocean Discovery Program found microorganisms in 120 °C sediment that is 1.2 km below seafloor in the Nankai Trough subduction zone. Some microorganisms have been found thriving inside rocks up to below the sea floor under of ocean off the coast of the northwestern United States. According to one of the researchers, "You can find microbes everywhere—they're extremely adaptable to conditions, and survive wherever they are." A key to extremophile adaptation is their amino acid composition, affecting their protein folding ability under particular conditions. Studying extreme environments on Earth can help researchers understand the limits of habitability on other worlds.
Tom Gheysens from Ghent University in Belgium and some of his colleagues have presented research findings that show spores from a species of Bacillus bacteria survived and were still viable after being heated to temperatures of .
Classifications
There are many classes of extremophiles that range all around the globe; each corresponding to the way its environmental niche differs from mesophilic conditions. These classifications are not exclusive. Many extremophiles fall under multiple categories and are classified as polyextremophiles. For example, organisms living inside hot rocks deep under Earth's surface are thermophilic and piezophilic such as Thermococcus barophilus. A polyextremophile living at the summit of a mountain in the Atacama Desert might be a radioresistant xerophile, a psychrophile, and an oligotroph. Polyextremophiles are well known for their ability to tolerate both high and low pH levels.
Terms
AcidophileAn organism with optimal growth at pH levels of 3.0 or below.
AlkaliphileAn organism with optimal growth at pH levels of 9.0 or above.
AnaerobeAn organism with optimal growth in the absence of molecular oxygen. Two sub-types exist: facultative anaerobe and obligate anaerobe. A facultative anaerobe can tolerate anoxic and oxic conditions whilst an obligate anaerobe will die in the presence of even low levels of molecular oxygen.:
Capnophile
An organism with optimal growth conditions in high concentrations of carbon dioxide. An example would be Mannheimia succiniciproducens, a bacterium that inhabits a ruminant animal's digestive system.
Cryptoendolith
An organism that lives in microscopic spaces within rocks, such as pores between aggregate grains. These may also be called endolith, a term that also includes organisms populating fissures, aquifers, and faults filled with groundwater in the deep subsurface.
HalophileAn organism with optimal growth at a concentration of dissolved salts of 50 g/L (= 5% m/v) or above.
HyperpiezophileAn organism with optimal growth at hydrostatic pressures above 50 MPa (= 493 atm = 7,252 psi).
HyperthermophileAn organism with optimal growth at temperatures above .
HypolithAn organism that lives underneath rocks in cold deserts.
MetallotolerantCapable of tolerating high levels of dissolved heavy metals in solution, such as copper, cadmium, arsenic, and zinc. Examples include Ferroplasma sp., Cupriavidus metallidurans and GFAJ-1.
OligotrophAn organism with optimal growth in nutritionally limited environments.
OsmophileAn organism with optimal growth in environments with a high sugar concentration.
PiezophileAn organism with optimal growth in hydrostatic pressures above 10 MPa (= 99 atm = 1,450 psi). Also referred to as barophile.
PolyextremophileA polyextremophile (faux Ancient Latin/Greek for 'affection for many extremes') is an organism that qualifies as an extremophile under more than one category.
Psychrophile/CryophileAn organism with optimal growth at temperatures of or lower.
RadioresistantOrganisms resistant to high levels of ionizing radiation, most commonly ultraviolet radiation. This category also includes organisms capable of resisting nuclear radiation.:
Sulphophile
An organism with optimal growth conditions in high concentrations of sulfur. An example would be Sulfurovum Epsilonproteobacteria, a sulfur-oxidizing bacteria that inhabits deep-water sulfur vents.
ThermophileAn organism with optimal growth at temperatures above .
XerophileAn organism with optimal growth at water activity below 0.8.
In astrobiology
Astrobiology is the multidisciplinary field that investigates the deterministic conditions and contingent events with which life arises, distributes, and evolves in the universe. Astrobiology makes use of physics, chemistry, astronomy, solar physics, biology, molecular biology, ecology, planetary science, geography, and geology to investigate the possibility of life on other worlds and help recognize biospheres that might be different from that on Earth. Astrobiologists are particularly interested in studying extremophiles, as it allows them to map what is known about the limits of life on Earth to potential extraterrestrial environments For example, analogous deserts of Antarctica are exposed to harmful UV radiation, low temperature, high salt concentration and low mineral concentration. These conditions are similar to those on Mars. Therefore, finding viable microbes in the subsurface of Antarctica suggests that there may be microbes surviving in endolithic communities and living under the Martian surface. Research indicates it is unlikely that Martian microbes exist on the surface or at shallow depths, but may be found at subsurface depths of around 100 meters.
Recent research carried out on extremophiles in Japan involved a variety of bacteria including Escherichia coli and Paracoccus denitrificans being subject to conditions of extreme gravity. The bacteria were cultivated while being rotated in an ultracentrifuge at high speeds corresponding to 403,627 g (i.e. 403,627 times the gravity experienced on Earth). Paracoccus denitrificans was one of the bacteria which displayed not only survival but also robust cellular growth under these conditions of hyperacceleration which are usually found only in cosmic environments, such as on very massive stars or in the shock waves of supernovas. Analysis showed that the small size of prokaryotic cells is essential for successful growth under hypergravity. The research has implications on the feasibility of panspermia.
On 26 April 2012, scientists reported that lichen survived and showed remarkable results on the adaptation capacity of photosynthetic activity within the simulation time of 34 days under Martian conditions in the Mars Simulation Laboratory (MSL) maintained by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
On 29 April 2013, scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, funded by NASA, reported that, during spaceflight on the International Space Station, microbes seem to adapt to the space environment in ways "not observed on Earth" and in ways that "can lead to increases in growth and virulence".
On 19 May 2014, scientists announced that numerous microbes, like Tersicoccus phoenicis, may be resistant to methods usually used in spacecraft assembly clean rooms. It's not currently known if such resistant microbes could have withstood space travel and are present on the Curiosity rover now on the planet Mars.
On 20 August 2014, scientists confirmed the existence of microorganisms living half a mile below the ice of Antarctica.
In September 2015, scientists from CNR-National Research Council of Italy reported that S.soflataricus was able to survive under Martian radiation at a wavelength that was considered extremely lethal to most bacteria. This discovery is significant because it indicates that not only bacterial spores, but also growing cells can be remarkably resistant to strong UV radiation.
In June 2016, scientists from Brigham Young University conclusively reported that endospores of Bacillus subtilis were able to survive high speed impacts up to 299±28 m/s, extreme shock, and extreme deceleration. They pointed out that this feature might allow endospores to survive and to be transferred between planets by traveling within meteorites or by experiencing atmosphere disruption. Moreover, they suggested that the landing of spacecraft may also result in interplanetary spore transfer, given that spores can survive high-velocity impact while ejected from the spacecraft onto the planet surface. This is the first study which reported that bacteria can survive in such high-velocity impact. However, the lethal impact speed is unknown, and further experiments should be done by introducing higher-velocity impact to bacterial endospores.
In August 2020 scientists reported that bacteria that feed on air discovered 2017 in Antarctica are likely not limited to Antarctica after discovering the two genes previously linked to their "atmospheric chemosynthesis" in soil of two other similar cold desert sites, which provides further information on this carbon sink and further strengthens the extremophile evidence that supports the potential existence of microbial life on alien planets.
The same month, scientists reported that bacteria from Earth, particularly Deinococcus radiodurans, were found to survive for three years in outer space, based on studies on the International Space Station. These findings support the notion of panspermia.
However, it has also been shown that evolution put some restrictions on extremophiles as analogues to life elsewhere in the solar system and beyond.
Bioremediation
Extremophiles can also be useful players in the bioremediation of contaminated sites as some species are capable of biodegradation under conditions too extreme for classic bioremediation candidate species. Anthropogenic activity causes the release of pollutants that may potentially settle in extreme environments as is the case with tailings and sediment released from deep-sea mining activity. While most bacteria would be crushed by the pressure in these environments, piezophiles can tolerate these depths and can metabolize pollutants of concern if they possess bioremediation potential.
Hydrocarbons
There are multiple potential destinations for hydrocarbons after an oil spill has settled and currents routinely deposit them in extreme environments. Methane bubbles resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill were found 1.1 kilometers below water surface level and at concentrations as high as 183 μmol per kilogram. The combination of low temperatures and high pressures in this environment result in low microbial activity. However, bacteria that are present including species of Pseudomonas, Aeromonas and Vibrio were found to be capable of bioremediation, albeit at a tenth of the speed they would perform at sea level pressure. Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons increase in solubility and bioavailability with increasing temperature. Thermophilic Thermus and Bacillus species have demonstrated higher gene expression for the alkane mono-oxygenase alkB at temperatures exceeding 60 °C. The expression of this gene is a crucial precursor to the bioremediation process. Fungi that have been genetically modified with cold-adapted enzymes to tolerate differing pH levels and temperatures have been shown to be effective at remediating hydrocarbon contamination in freezing conditions in the Antarctic.
Metals
Acidithiubacillus ferroxidans has been shown to be effective in remediating mercury in acidic soil due to its merA gene making it mercury resistant. Industrial effluent contain high levels of metals that can be detrimental to both human and ecosystem health. In extreme heat environments the extremophile Geobacillus thermodenitrificans has been shown to effectively manage the concentration of these metals within twelve hours of introduction. Some acidophilic microorganisms are effective at metal remediation in acidic environments due to proteins found in their periplasm, not present in any mesophilic organisms, allowing them to protect themselves from high proton concentrations. Rice paddies are highly oxidative environments that can produce high levels of lead or cadmium. Deinococcus radiodurans are resistant to the harsh conditions of the environment and are therefore candidate species for limiting the extent of contamination of these metals.
Some bacteria are know to also use rare earth elements on their biological processes for example Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum, Methylorubrum extorquens and Methylobacterium radiotolerans are known to be able to use lanthanides as cofactors of to increase their methanol dehydrogenase activity.
Acid mine drainage
Acid mine drainage is a major environmental concern associated with many metal mines. One of the most productive methods of its remediation is through the introduction of the extremophile organism Thiobacillus ferrooxidans.
Radioactive materials
Any bacteria capable of inhabiting radioactive mediums can be classified as an extremophile. Radioresistant organisms are therefore critical in the bioremediation of radionuclides. Uranium is particularly challenging to contain when released into an environment and very harmful to both human and ecosystem health. The NANOBINDERS project is equipping bacteria that can survive in uranium rich environments with gene sequences that enable proteins to bind to uranium in mining effluent, making it more convenient to collect and dispose of. Some examples are Shewanella putrefaciens, Geobacter metallireducens and some strains of Burkholderia fungorum.
Radioresistance has also been observed in certain species of macroscopic lifeforms. The lethal dose required to kill up to 50% of a tortoise population is 40,000 roentgens, compared to only 800 roentgens needed to kill 50% of a human population. In experiments exposing lepidopteran insects to gamma radiation, significant DNA damage was detected only at 20 Gy and higher doses, in contrast with human cells that showed similar damage at only 2 Gy.
Examples and recent findings
New sub-types of -philes are identified frequently and the sub-category list for extremophiles is always growing. For example, microbial life lives in the liquid asphalt lake, Pitch Lake. Research indicates that extremophiles inhabit the asphalt lake in populations ranging between 106 to 107 cells/gram. Likewise, until recently boron tolerance was unknown but a strong borophile was discovered in bacteria. With the recent isolation of Bacillus boroniphilus, borophiles came into discussion. Studying these borophiles may help illuminate the mechanisms of both boron toxicity and boron deficiency.
In July 2019, a scientific study of Kidd Mine in Canada discovered sulfur-breathing organisms which live 7900 feet below the surface, and which breathe sulfur in order to survive. These organisms are also remarkable due to eating rocks such as pyrite as their regular food source.
Biotechnology
The thermoalkaliphilic catalase, which initiates the breakdown of hydrogen peroxide into oxygen and water, was isolated from an organism, Thermus brockianus, found in Yellowstone National Park by Idaho National Laboratory researchers. The catalase operates over a temperature range from 30 °C to over 94 °C and a pH range from 6–10. This catalase is extremely stable compared to other catalases at high temperatures and pH. In a comparative study, the T. brockianus catalase exhibited a half life of 15 days at 80 °C and pH 10 while a catalase derived from Aspergillus niger had a half life of 15 seconds under the same conditions. The catalase will have applications for removal of hydrogen peroxide in industrial processes such as pulp and paper bleaching, textile bleaching, food pasteurization, and surface decontamination of food packaging.
DNA modifying enzymes such as Taq DNA polymerase and some Bacillus enzymes used in clinical diagnostics and starch liquefaction are produced commercially by several biotechnology companies.
DNA transfer
Over 65 prokaryotic species are known to be naturally competent for genetic transformation, the ability to transfer DNA from one cell to another cell followed by integration of the donor DNA into the recipient cell's chromosome. Several extremophiles are able to carry out species-specific DNA transfer, as described below. However, it is not yet clear how common such a capability is among extremophiles.
The bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans is one of the most radioresistant organisms known. This bacterium can also survive cold, dehydration, vacuum and acid and is thus known as a polyextremophile. D. radiodurans is competent to perform genetic transformation. Recipient cells are able to repair DNA damage in donor transforming DNA that had been UV irradiated as efficiently as they repair cellular DNA when the cells themselves are irradiated. The extreme thermophilic bacterium Thermus thermophilus and other related Thermus species are also capable of genetic transformation.
Halobacterium volcanii, an extreme halophilic (saline tolerant) archaeon, is capable of natural genetic transformation. Cytoplasmic bridges are formed between cells that appear to be used for DNA transfer from one cell to another in either direction.
Sulfolobus solfataricus and Sulfolobus acidocaldarius are hyperthermophilic archaea. Exposure of these organisms to the DNA damaging agents UV irradiation, bleomycin or mitomycin C induces species-specific cellular aggregation. UV-induced cellular aggregation of S. acidocaldarius mediates chromosomal marker exchange with high frequency. Recombination rates exceed those of uninduced cultures by up to three orders of magnitude. Frols et al. and Ajon et al. hypothesized that cellular aggregation enhances species-specific DNA transfer between Sulfolobus cells in order to repair damaged DNA by means of homologous recombination. Van Wolferen et al. noted that this DNA exchange process may be crucial under DNA damaging conditions such as high temperatures. It has also been suggested that DNA transfer in Sulfolobus may be an early form of sexual interaction similar to the more well-studied bacterial transformation systems that involve species-specific DNA transfer leading to homologous recombinational repair of DNA damage (and see Transformation (genetics)).
Extracellular membrane vesicles (MVs) might be involved in DNA transfer between different hyperthermophilic archaeal species. It has been shown that both plasmids and viral genomes can be transferred via MVs. Notably, a horizontal plasmid transfer has been documented between hyperthermophilic Thermococcus and Methanocaldococcus species, respectively belonging to the orders Thermococcales and Methanococcales.
See also
Dissimilatory metal-reducing microorganisms
Extremotroph
List of microorganisms tested in outer space
RISE project
Tardigrade
Mesophile – Organism that grows best in moderate temperatures
Neutrophile – Organism that grows best in a neutral pH level
References
Further reading
External links
Extreme Environments - Science Education Resource Center
Extremophile Research
Eukaryotes in extreme environments
The Research Center of Extremophiles
DaveDarling's Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight
The International Society for Extremophiles
Idaho National Laboratory
Polyextremophile on David Darling's Encyclopedia of Astrobiology, Astronomy, and Spaceflight
T-Limit Expedition
Environmental microbiology
Astrobiology
Bacteria
Ecology
Geomicrobiology
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In mathematics, the Euler–Maclaurin formula is a formula for the difference between an integral and a closely related sum. It can be used to approximate integrals by finite sums, or conversely to evaluate finite sums and infinite series using integrals and the machinery of calculus. For example, many asymptotic expansions are derived from the formula, and Faulhaber's formula for the sum of powers is an immediate consequence.
The formula was discovered independently by Leonhard Euler and Colin Maclaurin around 1735. Euler needed it to compute slowly converging infinite series while Maclaurin used it to calculate integrals. It was later generalized to Darboux's formula.
The formula
If and are natural numbers and is a real or complex valued continuous function for real numbers in the interval , then the integral
can be approximated by the sum (or vice versa)
(see rectangle method). The Euler–Maclaurin formula provides expressions for the difference between the sum and the integral in terms of the higher derivatives evaluated at the endpoints of the interval, that is to say and .
Explicitly, for a positive integer and a function that is times continuously differentiable on the interval , we have
where is the th Bernoulli number (with ) and is an error term which depends on , , , and and is usually small for suitable values of .
The formula is often written with the subscript taking only even values, since the odd Bernoulli numbers are zero except for . In this case we have
or alternatively
The remainder term
The remainder term arises because the integral is usually not exactly equal to the sum. The formula may be derived by applying repeated integration by parts to successive intervals for . The boundary terms in these integrations lead to the main terms of the formula, and the leftover integrals form the remainder term.
The remainder term has an exact expression in terms of the periodized Bernoulli functions . The Bernoulli polynomials may be defined recursively by and, for ,
The periodized Bernoulli functions are defined as
where denotes the largest integer less than or equal to , so that always lies in the interval .
With this notation, the remainder term equals
When , it can be shown that
where denotes the Riemann zeta function; one approach to prove this inequality is to obtain the Fourier series for the polynomials . The bound is achieved for even when is zero. The term may be omitted for odd but the proof in this case is more complex (see Lehmer). Using this inequality, the size of the remainder term can be estimated as
Low-order cases
The Bernoulli numbers from to are . Therefore the low-order cases of the Euler–Maclaurin formula are:
Applications
The Basel problem
The Basel problem is to determine the sum
Euler computed this sum to 20 decimal places with only a few terms of the Euler–Maclaurin formula in 1735. This probably convinced him that the sum equals , which he proved in the same year.
Sums involving a polynomial
If is a polynomial and is big enough, then the remainder term vanishes. For instance, if , we can choose to obtain, after simplification,
Approximation of integrals
The formula provides a means of approximating a finite integral. Let be the endpoints of the interval of integration. Fix , the number of points to use in the approximation, and denote the corresponding step size by . Set , so that and . Then:
This may be viewed as an extension of the trapezoid rule by the inclusion of correction terms. Note that this asymptotic expansion is usually not convergent; there is some , depending upon and , such that the terms past order increase rapidly. Thus, the remainder term generally demands close attention.
The Euler–Maclaurin formula is also used for detailed error analysis in numerical quadrature. It explains the superior performance of the trapezoidal rule on smooth periodic functions and is used in certain extrapolation methods. Clenshaw–Curtis quadrature is essentially a change of variables to cast an arbitrary integral in terms of integrals of periodic functions where the Euler–Maclaurin approach is very accurate (in that particular case the Euler–Maclaurin formula takes the form of a discrete cosine transform). This technique is known as a periodizing transformation.
Asymptotic expansion of sums
In the context of computing asymptotic expansions of sums and series, usually the most useful form of the Euler–Maclaurin formula is
where and are integers. Often the expansion remains valid even after taking the limits or or both. In many cases the integral on the right-hand side can be evaluated in closed form in terms of elementary functions even though the sum on the left-hand side cannot. Then all the terms in the asymptotic series can be expressed in terms of elementary functions. For example,
Here the left-hand side is equal to , namely the first-order polygamma function defined by
the gamma function is equal to when is a positive integer. This results in an asymptotic expansion for . That expansion, in turn, serves as the starting point for one of the derivations of precise error estimates for Stirling's approximation of the factorial function.
Examples
If is an integer greater than 1 we have:
Collecting the constants into a value of the Riemann zeta function, we can write an asymptotic expansion:
For equal to 2 this simplifies to
or
When , the corresponding technique gives an asymptotic expansion for the harmonic numbers:
where is the Euler–Mascheroni constant.
Proofs
Derivation by mathematical induction
We outline the argument given in Apostol.
The Bernoulli polynomials and the periodic Bernoulli functions for were introduced above.
The first several Bernoulli polynomials are
The values are the Bernoulli numbers . Notice that for we have
and for ,
The functions agree with the Bernoulli polynomials on the interval and are periodic with period 1. Furthermore, except when , they are also continuous. Thus,
Let be an integer, and consider the integral
where
Integrating by parts, we get
Using , , and summing the above from to , we get
Adding to both sides and rearranging, we have
This is the case of the summation formula. To continue the induction, we apply integration by parts to the error term:
where
The result of integrating by parts is
Summing from to and substituting this for the lower order error term results in the case of the formula,
This process can be iterated. In this way we get a proof of the Euler–Maclaurin summation formula which can be formalized by mathematical induction, in which the induction step relies on integration by parts and on identities for periodic Bernoulli functions.
See also
Cesàro summation
Euler summation
Gauss–Kronrod quadrature formula
Darboux's formula
Euler–Boole summation
References
Further reading
External links
Approximation theory
Asymptotic analysis
Hilbert space
Numerical integration (quadrature)
Articles containing proofs
Theorems in analysis
Summability methods
Leonhard Euler | [
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An electric light is a device that produces visible light from electric power. It is the most common form of artificial lighting and is essential to modern society, providing interior lighting for buildings and exterior light for evening and nighttime activities. In technical usage, a replaceable component that produces light from electricity is called a lamp. Lamps are commonly called light bulbs; for example, the incandescent light bulb. Lamps usually have a base made of ceramic, metal, glass, or plastic, which secures the lamp in the socket of a light fixture. The electrical connection to the socket may be made with a screw-thread base, two metal pins, two metal caps or a bayonet cap.
The three main categories of electric lights are incandescent lamps, which produce light by a filament heated white-hot by electric current, gas-discharge lamps, which produce light by means of an electric arc through a gas, such as fluorescent lamps, and LED lamps, which produce light by a flow of electrons across a band gap in a semiconductor.
Before electric lighting became common in the early 20th century, people used candles, gas lights, oil lamps, and fires. English chemist Humphry Davy developed the first incandescent light in 1802, followed by the first practical electric arc light in 1806. By the 1870s, Davy's arc lamp had been successfully commercialized, and was used to light many public spaces. Efforts by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison
led to commercial incandescent light bulbs becoming widely available in the 1880s, and by the early twentieth century these had completely replaced arc lamps.
The energy efficiency of electric lighting has increased radically since the first demonstration of arc lamps and the incandescent light bulb of the 19th century. Modern electric light sources come in a profusion of types and sizes adapted to many applications. Most modern electric lighting is powered by centrally generated electric power, but lighting may also be powered by mobile or standby electric generators or battery systems. Battery-powered light is often reserved for when and where stationary lights fail, often in the form of flashlights or electric lanterns, as well as in vehicles.
Types
Types of electric lighting include:
Incandescent light bulb, a heated filament inside a glass envelope
Halogen lamps are incandescent lamps that use a fused quartz envelope filled with halogen gas
LED lamp, a solid-state lamp that uses light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as the source of light
Arc lamp
Carbon arc lamp
Xenon arc lamp, used in many camera flashes, stroboscopes and digital cinema projectors
Mercury-xenon arc lamp
Ultra-high-performance lamp, an ultra-high-pressure mercury-vapor arc lamp used in many video projectors
Gas-discharge lamp, a light source that generates light by sending an electric discharge through an ionized gas
Fluorescent lamp
Compact fluorescent lamp, a fluorescent lamp designed to replace an incandescent lamp
Neon lamp
Mercury-vapor lamp
Sodium-vapor lamp
Sulfur lamp
Metal-halide lamp
High-intensity discharge lamp
Electrodeless lamp, a gas discharge lamp in which the power is transferred into the lamp via electromagnetic fields or radio waves
Plasma lamp
Different types of lights have vastly differing efficacies and color of light.
*Color temperature is defined as the temperature of a black body emitting a similar spectrum; these spectra are quite different from those of black bodies.
The most efficient source of electric light is the low-pressure sodium lamp. It produces, for all practical purposes, a monochromatic orange-yellow light, which gives a similarly monochromatic perception of any illuminated scene. For this reason, it is generally reserved for outdoor public lighting applications. Low-pressure sodium lights are favoured for public lighting by astronomers, since the light pollution that they generate can be easily filtered, contrary to broadband or continuous spectra.
Incandescent light bulb
The modern incandescent light bulb, with a coiled filament of tungsten, and commercialized in the 1920s, developed from the carbon filament lamp introduced about 1880.
Less than 3% of the input energy is converted into usable light. Nearly all of the input energy ends up as heat that, in warm climates, must then be removed from the building by ventilation or air conditioning, often resulting in more energy consumption. In colder climates where heating and lighting is required during the cold and dark winter months, the heat byproduct has some value. Incandescent bulbs are being phased out in many countries due to their low energy efficiency.
As well as bulbs for normal illumination, there is a very wide range, including low voltage, low-power types often used as components in equipment, but now largely displaced by LEDs.
Halogen lamp
Halogen lamps are usually much smaller than standard incandescent lamps, because for successful operation a bulb temperature over 200 °C is generally necessary. For this reason, most have a bulb of fused silica (quartz) or aluminosilicate glass. This is often sealed inside an additional layer of glass. The outer glass is a safety precaution, to reduce ultraviolet emission and to contain hot glass shards should the inner envelope explode during operation. Oily residue from fingerprints may cause a hot quartz envelope to shatter due to excessive heat buildup at the contamination site. The risk of burns or fire is also greater with bare bulbs, leading to their prohibition in some places, unless enclosed by the luminaire.
Those designed for 12- or 24-volt operation have compact filaments, useful for good optical control. Also, they have higher efficacies (lumens per watt) and better lives than non-halogen types. The light output remains almost constant throughout their life.
Fluorescent lamp
Fluorescent lamps consist of a glass tube that contains mercury vapour or argon under low pressure. Electricity flowing through the tube causes the gases to give off ultraviolet energy. The inside of the tubes are coated with phosphors that give off visible light when struck by ultraviolet photons. They have much higher efficiency than incandescent lamps. For the same amount of light generated, they typically use around one-quarter to one-third the power of an incandescent. The typical luminous efficacy of fluorescent lighting systems is 50–100 lumens per watt, several times the efficacy of incandescent bulbs with comparable light output. Fluorescent lamp fixtures are more costly than incandescent lamps, because they require a ballast to regulate the current through the lamp, but the lower energy cost typically offsets the higher initial cost. Compact fluorescent lamps are available in the same popular sizes as incandescent lamps and are used as an energy-saving alternative in homes. Because they contain mercury, many fluorescent lamps are classified as hazardous waste. The United States Environmental Protection Agency recommends that fluorescent lamps be segregated from general waste for recycling or safe disposal, and some jurisdictions require recycling of them.
LED lamp
The solid-state light-emitting diode (LED) has been popular as an indicator light in consumer electronics and professional audio gear since the 1970s. In the 2000s, efficacy and output have risen to the point where LEDs are now being used in lighting applications such as car headlights and brake lights, in flashlights and bicycle lights, as well as in decorative applications, such as holiday lighting. Indicator LEDs are known for their extremely long life, up to 100,000 hours, but lighting LEDs are operated much less conservatively, and consequently have shorter lives. LED technology is useful for lighting designers, because of its low power consumption, low heat generation, instantaneous on/off control, and in the case of single color LEDs, continuity of color throughout the life of the diode and relatively low cost of manufacture. LED lifetime depends strongly on the temperature of the diode. Operating an LED lamp in conditions that increase the internal temperature can greatly shorten the lamp's life.
Carbon arc lamp
Carbon arc lamps consist of two carbon rod electrodes in open air, supplied by a current-limiting ballast. The electric arc is struck by touching the rod tips then separating them. The ensuing arc produces a white-hot plasma between the rod tips. These lamps have higher efficacy than filament lamps, but the carbon rods are short-lived and require constant adjustment in use, as the intense heat of the arc erodes them. The lamps produce significant ultraviolet output, they require ventilation when used indoors, and due to their intensity they need protection from direct sight.
Invented by Humphry Davy around 1805, the carbon arc was the first practical electric light. It was used commercially beginning in the 1870s for large building and street lighting until it was superseded in the early 20th century by the incandescent light. Carbon arc lamps operate at high power and produce high intensity white light. They also are a point source of light. They remained in use in limited applications that required these properties, such as movie projectors, stage lighting, and searchlights, until after World War II.
Discharge lamp
A discharge lamp has a glass or silica envelope containing two metal electrodes separated by a gas. Gases used include, neon, argon, xenon, sodium, metal halide, and mercury. The core operating principle is much the same as the carbon arc lamp, but the term "arc lamp" normally refers to carbon arc lamps, with more modern types of gas discharge lamp normally called discharge lamps. With some discharge lamps, very high voltage is used to strike the arc. This requires an electrical circuit called an igniter, which is part of the electrical ballast circuitry. After the arc is struck, the internal resistance of the lamp drops to a low level, and the ballast limits the current to the operating current. Without a ballast, excess current would flow, causing rapid destruction of the lamp.
Some lamp types contain a little neon, which permits striking at normal running voltage, with no external ignition circuitry. Low pressure sodium lamps operate this way. The simplest ballasts are just an inductor, and are chosen where cost is the deciding factor, such as street lighting. More advanced electronic ballasts may be designed to maintain constant light output over the life of the lamp, may drive the lamp with a square wave to maintain completely flicker-free output, and shut down in the event of certain faults.
Form factors
Many lamp units, or light bulbs, are specified in standardized shape codes and socket names. Incandescent bulbs and their retrofit replacements are often specified as "A19/A60 E26/E27", a common size for these kind of light bulbs. In this example, the "A" parameters describe the bulb size and shape while the "E" parameters describe the Edison screw base size and thread characteristics.
Lamp life expectancy
Life expectancy for many types of lamp is defined as the number of hours of operation at which 50% of them fail, that is the median life of the lamps. Production tolerances as low as 1% can create a variance of 25% in lamp life, so in general some lamps will fail well before the rated life expectancy, and some will last much longer. For LEDs, lamp life is defined as the operation time at which 50% of lamps have experienced a 70% decrease in light output.
Some types of lamp are also sensitive to switching cycles. Rooms with frequent switching, such as bathrooms, can expect much shorter lamp life than what is printed on the box. Compact fluorescent lamps are particularly sensitive to switching cycles.
Public lighting
The total amount of artificial light (especially from street light) is sufficient for cities to be easily visible at night from the air, and from space. This light is the source of light pollution that burdens astronomers and others.
Uses other than illumination
Electric lamps can be used as heat sources, for example in incubators, as infrared lamps in fast food restaurants and toys such as the Kenner Easy-Bake Oven.
Due to their nonlinear resistance characteristics, tungsten filament lamps have long been used as fast-acting thermistors in electronic circuits. Popular uses have included:
Stabilization of sine wave oscillators
Protection of tweeters in loudspeaker enclosures; excess current that is too high for the tweeter illuminates the light rather than destroying the tweeter.
Automatic volume control in telephones
A stylized depiction of a light bulb features as the logo of the Turkish AK Party.
Circuit symbols
In circuit diagrams lamps usually are shown as symbols. There are two main types of symbols, these are:
Cultural symbolism
In Western culture, a lightbulb — in particular, the appearance of an illuminated lightbulb above a person's head — signifies sudden inspiration.
See also
Light tube
List of light sources
Flameless candle
References
Light
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Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (; 16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919) was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and connected many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures, collected in his Kunstformen der Natur ("Art Forms of Nature"), a book which would go on to influence the Art Nouveau artistic movement. As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträthsel (1895–1899; in English: The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution.
Haeckel was also a promoter of scientific racism and embraced the idea of Social Darwinism.
Life
Ernst Haeckel was born on 16 February 1834, in Potsdam (then part of the Kingdom of Prussia).
In 1852 Haeckel completed studies at the Domgymnasium, the cathedral high-school of Merseburg. He then studied medicine in Berlin and Würzburg, particularly with Albert von Kölliker, Franz Leydig, Rudolf Virchow (with whom he later worked briefly as assistant), and with the anatomist-physiologist Johannes Peter Müller (1801–1858). Together with Hermann Steudner he attended botany lectures in Würzburg. In 1857 Haeckel attained a doctorate in medicine, and afterwards he received the license to practice medicine. The occupation of physician appeared less worthwhile to Haeckel after contact with suffering patients.
Ernst Haeckel studied under Karl Gegenbaur at the University of Jena for three years, earning a habilitation in comparative anatomy in 1861, before becoming a professor of zoology at the University at Jena, where he remained for 47 years, from 1862 to 1909. Between 1859 and 1866 Haeckel worked on many phyla, such as radiolarians, poriferans (sponges) and annelids (segmented worms). During a trip to the Mediterranean, Haeckel named nearly 150 new species of radiolarians.
In 1864, his beloved first wife, Anna Sethe, died. Haeckel dedicated some species of jellyfish of particular beauty (such as Desmonema annasethe) to his unforgettable wife.
From 1866 to 1867 Haeckel made an extended journey to the Canary Islands with Hermann Fol. On 17 October 1866 he arrived in London. Over the next few days he met Charles Lyell, and visited Thomas Huxley and family at their home. On 21 October he visited Charles Darwin at Down House in Kent. In 1867 he married Agnes Huschke. Their son Walter was born in 1868, their daughters Elizabeth in 1871 and Emma in 1873. In 1869 he traveled as a researcher to Norway, in 1871 to Croatia (where he lived on the island of Hvar in a monastery), and in 1873 to Egypt, Turkey, and Greece. In 1907 he had a museum built in Jena to teach the public about evolution. Haeckel retired from teaching in 1909, and in 1910 he withdrew from the Evangelical Church of Prussia.
On the occasion of his 80th birthday celebration he was presented with a two-volume work entitled Was wir Ernst Haeckel verdanken (What We Owe to Ernst Haeckel), edited at the request of the German Monistenbund by Heinrich Schmidt of Jena.
Haeckel's wife, Agnes, died in 1915, and he became substantially frailer, breaking his leg and arm. He sold his "Villa Medusa" in Jena in 1918 to the Carl Zeiss foundation, which preserved his library. Haeckel died on 9 August 1919.
Haeckel became the most famous proponent of Monism in Germany.
Politics
Haeckel's affinity for the German Romantic movement, coupled with his acceptance of a form of Lamarckism, influenced his political beliefs. Rather than being a strict Darwinian, Haeckel believed that the characteristics of an organism were acquired through interactions with the environment and that ontogeny reflected phylogeny. He saw the social sciences as instances of "applied biology", and that phrase was picked up and used for Nazi propaganda.
In 1906 Haeckel belonged to the founders of the Monist League (Deutscher Monistenbund), which took a stance against philosophical materialism and promote a "natural Weltanschauung". This organization lasted until 1933 and included such notable members as Wilhelm Ostwald, Georg von Arco (1869–1940), Helene Stöcker and Walter Arthur Berendsohn. He was the first person to use the term "first world war".
However, Haeckel's books were banned by the Nazi Party, which refused Monism and Haeckel's freedom of thought. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that Haeckel had often overtly recognized the great contribution of educated Jews to the German culture.
Research
Haeckel was a zoologist, an accomplished artist and illustrator, and later a professor of comparative anatomy. Although Haeckel's ideas are important to the history of evolutionary theory, and although he was a competent invertebrate anatomist most famous for his work on radiolaria, many speculative concepts that he championed are now considered incorrect. For example, Haeckel described and named hypothetical ancestral microorganisms that have never been found.
He was one of the first to consider psychology as a branch of physiology. He also proposed the kingdom Protista in 1866. His chief interests lay in evolution and life development processes in general, including development of nonrandom form, which culminated in the beautifully illustrated Kunstformen der Natur (Art forms of nature). Haeckel did not support natural selection, rather believing in Lamarckism.
Haeckel advanced a version of the earlier recapitulation theory previously set out by Étienne Serres in the 1820s and supported by followers of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire including Robert Edmond Grant. It proposed a link between ontogeny (development of form) and phylogeny (evolutionary descent), summed up by Haeckel in the phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny". His concept of recapitulation has been refuted in the form he gave it (now called "strong recapitulation"), in favour of the ideas first advanced by Karl Ernst von Baer. The strong recapitulation hypothesis views ontogeny as repeating forms of adult ancestors, while weak recapitulation means that what is repeated (and built upon) is the ancestral embryonic development process. Haeckel supported the theory with embryo drawings that have since been shown to be oversimplified and in part inaccurate, and the theory is now considered an oversimplification of quite complicated relationships, however comparison of embryos remains a powerful way to demonstrate that all animals are related. Haeckel introduced the concept of heterochrony, the change in timing of embryonic development over the course of evolution.
Haeckel was a flamboyant figure, who sometimes took great, non-scientific leaps from available evidence. For example, at the time when Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), Haeckel postulated that evidence of human evolution would be found in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). At that time, no remains of human ancestors had yet been identified. He described these theoretical remains in great detail and even named the as-yet unfound species, Pithecanthropus alalus, and instructed his students such as Richard and Oskar Hertwig to go and find it.
One student did find some remains: a Dutchman named Eugène Dubois searched the East Indies from 1887 to 1895, discovering the remains of Java Man in 1891, consisting of a skullcap, thighbone, and a few teeth. These remains are among the oldest hominid remains ever found. Dubois classified Java Man with Haeckel's Pithecanthropus label, though they were later reclassified as Homo erectus. Some scientists of the day suggested Dubois' Java Man as a potential intermediate form between modern humans and the common ancestor we share with the other great apes. The current consensus of anthropologists is that the direct ancestors of modern humans were African populations of Homo erectus (possibly Homo ergaster), rather than the Asian populations exemplified by Java Man and Peking Man. (Ironically, a new human species, Homo floresiensis, a dwarf human type, has recently been discovered in the island of Flores).
Polygenism and racial theory
The creationist polygenism of Samuel George Morton and Louis Agassiz, which presented human races as separately created species, was rejected by Charles Darwin, who argued for the monogenesis of the human species and the African origin of modern humans. In contrast to most of Darwin's supporters, Haeckel put forward a doctrine of evolutionary polygenism based on the ideas of the linguist August Schleicher, in which several different language groups had arisen separately from speechless prehuman Urmenschen (), which themselves had evolved from simian ancestors. These separate languages had completed the transition from animals to man, and under the influence of each main branch of languages, humans had evolved – in a kind of Lamarckian use-inheritance – as separate species, which could be subdivided into races. From this, Haeckel drew the implication that languages with the most potential yield the human races with the most potential, led by the Semitic and Indo-Germanic groups, with Berber, Jewish, Greco-Roman and Germanic varieties to the fore. As Haeckel stated:
Haeckel's view can be seen as a forerunner of the views of Carleton Coon, who also believed that human races evolved independently and in parallel with each other. These ideas eventually fell from favour.
Haeckel also applied the hypothesis of polygenism to the modern diversity of human groups. He became a key figure in social darwinism and leading proponent of scientific racism, stating for instance:
Haeckel divided human beings into ten races, of which the Caucasian was the highest and the primitives were doomed to extinction. In his view, 'Negroes' were savages and Whites were the most civilised: for instance, he claimed that '[t]he Negro' had stronger and more freely movable toes than any other race, which, he argued, was evidence of their being less evolved, and which led him to compare them to four-handed" Apes'.
In his Ontogeny and Phylogeny Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "[Haeckel's] evolutionary racism; his call to the German people for racial purity and unflinching devotion to a 'just' state; his belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, conferring upon favored races the right to dominate others ... all contributed to the rise of Nazism."
In his introduction to the Nazi party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's 1930 book, [The Myth of the Twentieth Century], Peter Peel affirms that Rosenberg had indeed read Haeckel.
In the same line of thought, historian Daniel Gasman states that Haeckel's ideology stimulated the birth of Fascist ideology in Italy and France.
However, Robert J. Richards notes: "Haeckel, on his travels to Ceylon and Indonesia, often formed closer and more intimate relations with natives, even members of the untouchable classes, than with the European colonials." and says the Nazis rejected Haeckel, since he opposed antisemitism, while supporting ideas they disliked (for instance atheism, feminism, internationalism, pacifism etc.).
Asia hypothesis
Haeckel claimed the origin of humanity was to be found in Asia: he believed that Hindustan (Indian subcontinent) was the actual location where the first humans had evolved. Haeckel argued that humans were closely related to the primates of Southeast Asia and rejected Darwin's hypothesis of Africa.
Haeckel later claimed that the missing link was to be found on the lost continent of Lemuria located in the Indian Ocean. He believed that Lemuria was the home of the first humans and that Asia was the home of many of the earliest primates; he thus supported that Asia was the cradle of hominid evolution. Haeckel also claimed that Lemuria connected Asia and Africa, which allowed the migration of humans to the rest of the world.
In Haeckel's book The History of Creation (1884) he included migration routes which he thought the first humans had used outside of Lemuria.
Embryology and recapitulation theory
When Haeckel was a student in the 1850s he showed great interest in embryology, attending the rather unpopular lectures twice and in his notes sketched the visual aids: textbooks had few illustrations, and large format plates were used to show students how to see the tiny forms under a reflecting microscope, with the translucent tissues seen against a black background. Developmental series were used to show stages within a species, but inconsistent views and stages made it even more difficult to compare different species. It was agreed by all European evolutionists that all vertebrates looked very similar at an early stage, in what was thought of as a common ideal type, but there was a continuing debate from the 1820s between the Romantic recapitulation theory that human embryos developed through stages of the forms of all the major groups of adult animals, literally manifesting a sequence of organisms on a linear chain of being, and Karl Ernst von Baer's opposing view, stated in von Baer's laws of embryology, that the early general forms diverged into four major groups of specialised forms without ever resembling the adult of another species, showing affinity to an archetype but no relation to other types or any transmutation of species. By the time Haeckel was teaching he was able to use a textbook with woodcut illustrations written by his own teacher Albert von Kölliker, which purported to explain human development while also using other mammalian embryos to claim a coherent sequence. Despite the significance to ideas of transformism, this was not really polite enough for the new popular science writing, and was a matter for medical institutions and for experts who could make their own comparisons.
Darwin, Naturphilosophie and Lamarck
Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which made a powerful impression on Haeckel when he read it in 1864, was very cautious about the possibility of ever reconstructing the history of life, but did include a section reinterpreting von Baer's embryology and revolutionising the field of study, concluding that "Embryology rises greatly in interest, when we thus look at the embryo as a picture, more or less obscured, of the common parent-form of each great class of animals." It mentioned von Baer's 1828 anecdote (misattributing it to Louis Agassiz) that at an early stage embryos were so similar that it could be impossible to tell whether an unlabelled specimen was of a mammal, a bird, or of a reptile, and Darwin's own research using embryonic stages of barnacles to show that they are crustaceans, while cautioning against the idea that one organism or embryonic stage is "higher" or "lower", or more or less evolved. Haeckel disregarded such caution, and in a year wrote his massive and ambitious Generelle Morphologie, published in 1866, presenting a revolutionary new synthesis of Darwin's ideas with the German tradition of Naturphilosophie going back to Goethe and with the progressive evolutionism of Lamarck in what he called Darwinismus. He used morphology to reconstruct the evolutionary history of life, in the absence of fossil evidence using embryology as evidence of ancestral relationships. He invented new terms, including ontogeny and phylogeny, to present his evolutionised recapitulation theory that "ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny". The two massive volumes sold poorly, and were heavy going: with his limited understanding of German, Darwin found them impossible to read. Haeckel's publisher turned down a proposal for a "strictly scholarly and objective" second edition.
Embryological drawings
Haeckel's aim was a reformed morphology with evolution as the organising principle of a cosmic synthesis unifying science, religion, and art. He was giving successful "popular lectures" on his ideas to students and townspeople in Jena, in an approach pioneered by his teacher Rudolf Virchow. To meet his publisher's need for a popular work he used a student's transcript of his lectures as the basis of his Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte of 1868, presenting a comprehensive presentation of evolution. In the Spring of that year he drew figures for the book, synthesising his views of specimens in Jena and published pictures to represent types. After publication he told a colleague that the images "are completely exact, partly copied from nature, partly assembled from all illustrations of these early stages that have hitherto become known". There were various styles of embryological drawings at that time, ranging from more schematic representations to "naturalistic" illustrations of specific specimens. Haeckel believed privately that his figures were both exact and synthetic, and in public asserted that they were schematic like most figures used in teaching. The images were reworked to match in size and orientation, and though displaying Haeckel's own views of essential features, they support von Baer's concept that vertebrate embryos begin similarly and then diverge. Relating different images on a grid conveyed a powerful evolutionary message. As a book for the general public, it followed the common practice of not citing sources.
The book sold very well, and while some anatomical experts hostile to Haeckel's evolutionary views expressed some private concerns that certain figures had been drawn rather freely, the figures showed what they already knew about similarities in embryos. The first published concerns came from Ludwig Rütimeyer, a professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Basel who had placed fossil mammals in an evolutionary lineage early in the 1860s and had been sent a complimentary copy. At the end of 1868 his review in the Archiv für Anthropologie wondered about the claim that the work was "popular and scholarly", doubting whether the second was true, and expressed horror about such public discussion of man's place in nature with illustrations such as the evolutionary trees being shown to non-experts. Though he made no suggestion that embryo illustrations should be directly based on specimens, to him the subject demanded the utmost "scrupulosity and conscientiousness" and an artist must "not arbitrarily model or generalise his originals for speculative purposes" which he considered proved by comparison with works by other authors. In particular, "one and the same, moreover incorrectly interpreted woodcut, is presented to the reader three times in a row and with three different captions as [the] embryo of the dog, the chick, [and] the turtle". He accused Haeckel of "playing fast and loose with the public and with science", and failing to live up to the obligation to the truth of every serious researcher. Haeckel responded with angry accusations of bowing to religious prejudice, but in the second (1870) edition changed the duplicated embryo images to a single image captioned "embryo of a mammal or bird". Duplication using galvanoplastic stereotypes (clichés) was a common technique in textbooks, but not on the same page to represent different eggs or embryos. In 1891 Haeckel made the excuse that this "extremely rash foolishness" had occurred in undue haste but was "bona fide", and since repetition of incidental details was obvious on close inspection, it is unlikely to have been intentional deception.
The revised 1870 second edition of 1,500 copies attracted more attention, being quickly followed by further revised editions with larger print runs as the book became a prominent part of the optimistic, nationalist, anticlerical "culture of progress" in Otto von Bismarck's new German Empire. The similarity of early vertebrate embryos became common knowledge, and the illustrations were praised by experts such as Michael Foster of the University of Cambridge. In the introduction to his 1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin gave particular praise to Haeckel, writing that if Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte "had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it". The first chapter included an illustration: "As some of my readers may never have seen a drawing of an embryo, I have given one of man and another of a dog, at about the same early stage of development, carefully copied from two works of undoubted accuracy" with a footnote citing the sources and noting that "Häckel has also given analogous drawings in his Schöpfungsgeschichte." The fifth edition of Haeckel's book appeared in 1874, with its frontispiece a heroic portrait of Haeckel himself, replacing the previous controversial image of the heads of apes and humans.
Controversy
Later in 1874, Haeckel's simplified embryology textbook Anthropogenie made the subject into a battleground over Darwinism aligned with Bismarck's Kulturkampf ("culture struggle") against the Catholic Church. Haeckel took particular care over the illustrations, changing to the leading zoological publisher Wilhelm Engelmann of Leipzig and obtaining from them use of illustrations from their other textbooks as well as preparing his own drawings including a dramatic double page illustration showing "early", "somewhat later" and "still later" stages of 8 different vertebrates. Though Haeckel's views had attracted continuing controversy, there had been little dispute about the embryos and he had many expert supporters, but Wilhelm His revived the earlier criticisms and introduced new attacks on the 1874 illustrations. Others joined in: both expert anatomists and Catholic priests and supporters were politically opposed to Haeckel's views.
While it has been widely claimed that Haeckel was charged with fraud by five professors and convicted by a university court at Jena, there does not appear to be an independently verifiable source for this claim. Recent analyses (Richardson 1998, Richardson and Keuck 2002) have found that some of the criticisms of Haeckel's embryo drawings were legitimate, but others were unfounded. There were multiple versions of the embryo drawings, and Haeckel rejected the claims of fraud. It was later said that "there is evidence of sleight of hand" on both sides of the feud between Haeckel and Wilhelm His. Robert J. Richards, in a paper published in 2008, defends the case for Haeckel, shedding doubt against the fraud accusations based on the material used for comparison with what Haeckel could access at the time.
Awards and honors
Haeckel was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1885. He was awarded the title of Excellency by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1907 and the Linnean Society of London's prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1908. In the United States, Mount Haeckel, a summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, is named in his honour, as is another Mount Haeckel, a summit in New Zealand; and the asteroid 12323 Haeckel.
In Jena he is remembered with a monument at Herrenberg (erected in 1969), an exhibition at Ernst-Haeckel-Haus, and at the Jena Phyletic Museum, which continues to teach about evolution and share his work to this day.
The ratfish, Harriotta haeckeli is named in his honor.
The research vessel Ernst Haeckel is named in his honor.
In 1981, a botanical journal called Ernstia was started being published in the city of Maracay, Venezuela.
In 2013, Ernstia, a genus of calcareous sponges in the family Clathrinidae. The genus was erected to contain five species previously assigned to Clathrina. The genus name honors Ernst Haeckel for his contributions towards sponge taxonomy and phylogeny.
Publications
Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species had immense popular influence, but although its sales exceeded its publisher's hopes it was a technical book rather than a work of popular science: long, difficult and with few illustrations. One of Haeckel's books did a great deal to explain his version of "Darwinism" to the world. It was a bestselling, provocatively illustrated book in German, titled Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte, published in Berlin in 1868, and translated into English as The History of Creation in 1876. Until 1909, eleven editions had appeared, as well as 25 translations into other languages. The Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte cemented Haeckel's reputation as one of Germany's most forceful popularizers of science. His Welträthsel were reprinted ten times after the book's first publication in 1899; ultimately, over 400,000 copies were sold.
Haeckel argued that human evolution consisted of precisely 22 phases, the 21st – the "missing link" – being a halfway step between apes and humans. He even formally named this missing link Pithecanthropus alalus, translated as "ape man without speech".
Haeckel's literary output was extensive, including many books, scientific papers, and illustrations.
Monographs
Radiolaria (1862)
Siphonophora (1869)
Monera (1870)
Calcareous Sponges (1872)
Challenger reports
Deep-Sea Medusae (1881)
Siphonophora (1888)
Deep-Sea Keratosa (1889)
Radiolaria (1887)
Books on biology and its philosophy
Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: allgemeine Grundzüge der organischen Formen-Wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendenz-Theorie. (1866) Berlin (General morphology of organisms: general foundations of form-science, mechanically grounded by the descendance theory reformed by Charles Darwin)
Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868); in English The History of Creation (1876; 6th ed.: New York, D. Appleton and Co., 1914, 2 volumes)
Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre (1877), in English, Free Science and Free Teaching
Die systematische Phylogenie (1894) – Systematic Phylogeny
Die Welträthsel (1895–1899), also spelled Die Welträtsel – in English The Riddle of the Universe, 1901
Über unsere gegenwärtige Kenntnis vom Ursprung des Menschen (1898) (On our current understanding of the origin of man) – in English The Last Link, 1898
Der Kampf um den Entwickelungsgedanken (1905) (The struggle over thought on evolution) – in English Last Words on Evolution, 1906
Die Lebenswunder (1904) – in English The Wonders of Life
Kristallseelen : Studien über das anorganische Leben (1917) (Crystal souls: studies on inorganic life)
Travel books
Indische Reisebriefe (1882) – Travel notes of India
Aus Insulinde: Malayische Reisebriefe (1901) – Travel notes of Malaysia
Kunstformen der Natur (1904) – Art forms of Nature, Digital Edition (1924)
Wanderbilder (1905) – "Travel Images"
A visit to Ceylon
For a fuller list of works of and about Haeckel, see his entry in the German Wikisource.
Assessments of potential influence on Nazism
Some historians have seen Haeckel's social Darwinism as a forerunner to Nazi ideology. Others have denied the relationship altogether.
The evidence is in some respects ambiguous. On one hand, Haeckel was an advocate of scientific racism. He held that evolutionary biology had definitively proven that races were unequal in intelligence and ability, and that their lives were also of unequal value, e.g., "These lower races (such as the Veddahs or Australian negroes) are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes or dogs) than to civilised Europeans; we must therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives." As a result of the "struggle for existence", it followed that the "lower" races would eventually be exterminated. He was also a social Darwinist who believed that "survival of the fittest" was a natural law, and that struggle led to improvement of the race. As an advocate of eugenics, he also believed that about 200,000 mentally and congenitally ill should be killed by a medical control board. This idea was later put into practice by Nazi Germany, as part of the Aktion T4 program. Alfred Ploetz, founder of the German Society for Racial Hygiene, praised Haeckel repeatedly, and invited him to become an honorary member. Haeckel accepted the invitation. Haeckel also believed that Germany should be governed by an authoritarian political system, and that inequalities both within and between societies were an inevitable product of evolutionary law. Haeckel was also an extreme German nationalist who believed strongly in the superiority of German culture.
On the other hand, Haeckel was not an anti-Semite. In the racial hierarchies he constructed Jews tended to appear closer to the top, rather than closer to the bottom as in Nazi racial thought. He was also a pacifist until the First World War, when he wrote propaganda in favor of the war. The principal arguments of historians who deny a meaningful connection between Haeckel and Nazism are that Haeckel's ideas were very common at the time, that Nazis were much more strongly influenced by other thinkers, and that Haeckel is properly classified as a 19th-century German liberal, rather than a forerunner to Nazism. They also point to incompatibilities between evolutionary biology and Nazi ideology.
Nazis themselves divided on the question of whether Haeckel should be counted as a pioneer of their ideology. SS captain and biologist Heinz Brücher wrote a biography of Haeckel in 1936, in which he praised Haeckel as a "pioneer in biological state thinking". This opinion was also shared by the scholarly journal, Der Biologie, which celebrated Haeckel's 100th birthday, in 1934, with several essays acclaiming him as a pioneering thinker of Nazism. Other Nazis kept their distance from Haeckel. Nazi propaganda guidelines issued in 1935 listed books which popularized Darwin and evolution on an "expunged list". Haeckel was included by name as a forbidden author. Gunther Hecht, a member of the Nazi Department of Race Politics, also issued a memorandum rejecting Haeckel as a forerunner of Nazism. Kurt Hildebrandt, a Nazi political philosopher, also rejected Haeckel. Eventually Haeckel was rejected by Nazi bureaucrats.
See also
Dysteleology
Embryology
Haeckelites
Haeckel's Tale
Heinrich Schmidt (philosopher)
Karl Blossfeldt
List of wildlife artists
Proteus (2004 film)
Footnotes
Sources
External links
E. Haeckel: Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte 1868 (front page of 1st edition, German)
E. Haeckel: Die Welträthsel 1899 (front page of 1st edition, German)
University of California, Berkeley – biography
Ernst Haeckel – Evolution's controversial artist. A slide-show essay
Kunstformen der Natur (from biolib.de)
Kunstformen der Natur (Digitization from Phaidra)
PNG alpha-transparencies of Haeckel's "Kustformen der natur"
Proteus – Animated documentary film on Haeckel's life and work
Ernst Haeckel Haus and Museum in Jena
View works by Haeckel at the Biodiversity Heritage Library
aDiatomea: artificial life experiment with 3d generated diatoms, influenced by Haeckel
Images from Anthropogenie, oder, Entwickelungsgeschichte des menschen
Ernst Haeckel's Radiolarians and Medusa – article on Haeckel in Villefranche-sur-Mer
1834 births
1919 deaths
Alldeutscher Verband members
Evolutionary biologists
German atheists
19th-century German biologists
German ecologists
German humanists
German male writers
19th-century German philosophers
19th-century German zoologists
Lemuria (continent)
Natural history illustrators
Scientists from Potsdam
People from the Province of Brandenburg
Protistologists
Scientific racism
University of Jena faculty
Spinozists
Members of the American Philosophical Society
People involved in scientific misconduct incidents | [
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In computer science, the Earley parser is an algorithm for parsing strings that belong to a given context-free language, though (depending on the variant) it may suffer problems with certain nullable grammars. The algorithm, named after its inventor, Jay Earley, is a chart parser that uses dynamic programming; it is mainly used for parsing in computational linguistics. It was first introduced in his dissertation in 1968 (and later appeared in an abbreviated, more legible, form in a journal).
Earley parsers are appealing because they can parse all context-free languages, unlike LR parsers and LL parsers, which are more typically used in compilers but which can only handle restricted classes of languages. The Earley parser executes in cubic time in the general case , where n is the length of the parsed string, quadratic time for unambiguous grammars , and linear time for all deterministic context-free grammars. It performs particularly well when the rules are written left-recursively.
Earley recogniser
The following algorithm describes the Earley recogniser. The recogniser can be easily modified to create a parse tree as it recognises, and in that way can be turned into a parser.
The algorithm
In the following descriptions, α, β, and γ represent any string of terminals/nonterminals (including the empty string), X and Y represent single nonterminals, and a represents a terminal symbol.
Earley's algorithm is a top-down dynamic programming algorithm. In the following, we use Earley's dot notation: given a production X → αβ, the notation X → α • β represents a condition in which α has already been parsed and β is expected.
Input position 0 is the position prior to input. Input position n is the position after accepting the nth token. (Informally, input positions can be thought of as locations at token boundaries.) For every input position, the parser generates a state set. Each state is a tuple (X → α • β, i), consisting of
the production currently being matched (X → α β)
the current position in that production (represented by the dot)
the position i in the input at which the matching of this production began: the origin position
(Earley's original algorithm included a look-ahead in the state; later research showed this to have little practical effect on the parsing efficiency, and it has subsequently been dropped from most implementations.)
The state set at input position k is called S(k). The parser is seeded with S(0) consisting of only the top-level rule. The parser then repeatedly executes three operations: prediction, scanning, and completion.
Prediction: For every state in S(k) of the form (X → α • Y β, j) (where j is the origin position as above), add (Y → • γ, k) to S(k) for every production in the grammar with Y on the left-hand side (Y → γ).
Scanning: If a is the next symbol in the input stream, for every state in S(k) of the form (X → α • a β, j), add (X → α a • β, j) to S(k+1).
Completion: For every state in S(k) of the form (Y → γ •, j), find all states in S(j) of the form (X → α • Y β, i) and add (X → α Y • β, i) to S(k).
Duplicate states are not added to the state set, only new ones. These three operations are repeated until no new states can be added to the set. The set is generally implemented as a queue of states to process, with the operation to be performed depending on what kind of state it is.
The algorithm accepts if (X → γ •, 0) ends up in S(n), where (X → γ) is the top level-rule and n the input length, otherwise it rejects.
Pseudocode
Adapted from Speech and Language Processing by Daniel Jurafsky and James H. Martin,
DECLARE ARRAY S;
function INIT(words)
S ← CREATE_ARRAY(LENGTH(words) + 1)
for k ← from 0 to LENGTH(words) do
S[k] ← EMPTY_ORDERED_SET
function EARLEY_PARSE(words, grammar)
INIT(words)
ADD_TO_SET((γ → •S, 0), S[0])
for k ← from 0 to LENGTH(words) do
for each state in S[k] do // S[k] can expand during this loop
if not FINISHED(state) then
if NEXT_ELEMENT_OF(state) is a nonterminal then
PREDICTOR(state, k, grammar) // non_terminal
else do
SCANNER(state, k, words) // terminal
else do
COMPLETER(state, k)
end
end
return chart
procedure PREDICTOR((A → α•Bβ, j), k, grammar)
for each (B → γ) in GRAMMAR_RULES_FOR(B, grammar) do
ADD_TO_SET((B → •γ, k), S[k])
end
procedure SCANNER((A → α•aβ, j), k, words)
if a ⊂ PARTS_OF_SPEECH(words[k]) then
ADD_TO_SET((A → αa•β, j), S[k+1])
end
procedure COMPLETER((B → γ•, x), k)
for each (A → α•Bβ, j) in S[x] do
ADD_TO_SET((A → αB•β, j), S[k])
end
Example
Consider the following simple grammar for arithmetic expressions:
<P> ::= <S> # the start rule
<S> ::= <S> "+" <M> | <M>
<M> ::= <M> "*" <T> | <T>
<T> ::= "1" | "2" | "3" | "4"
With the input:
2 + 3 * 4
This is the sequence of state sets:
The state (P → S •, 0) represents a completed parse. This state also appears in S(3) and S(1), which are complete sentences.
Constructing the parse forest
Earley's dissertation briefly describes an algorithm for constructing parse trees by adding a set of pointers from each non-terminal in an Earley item back to the items that caused it to be recognized. But Tomita noticed that this does not take into account the relations between symbols, so if we consider the grammar S → SS | b and the string bbb, it only notes that each S can match one or two b's, and thus produces spurious derivations for bb and bbbb as well as the two correct derivations for bbb.
Another method is to build the parse forest as you go, augmenting each Earley item with a pointer to a shared packed parse forest (SPPF) node labelled with a triple (s, i, j) where s is a symbol or an LR(0) item (production rule with dot), and i and j give the section of the input string derived by this node. A node's contents are either a pair of child pointers giving a single derivation, or a list of "packed" nodes each containing a pair of pointers and representing one derivation. SPPF nodes are unique (there is only one with a given label), but may contain more than one derivation for ambiguous parses. So even if an operation does not add an Earley item (because it already exists), it may still add a derivation to the item's parse forest.
Predicted items have a null SPPF pointer.
The scanner creates an SPPF node representing the non-terminal it is scanning.
Then when the scanner or completer advance an item, they add a derivation whose children are the node from the item whose dot was advanced, and the one for the new symbol that was advanced over (the non-terminal or completed item).
SPPF nodes are never labeled with a completed LR(0) item: instead they are labelled with the symbol that is produced so that all derivations are combined under one node regardless of which alternative production they come from.
Optimizations
Philippe McLean and R. Nigel Horspool in their paper "A Faster Earley Parser" combine Earley parsing with LR parsing and achieve an improvement in an order of magnitude.
See also
CYK algorithm
Context-free grammar
Parsing algorithms
Citations
Other reference materials
Implementations
C, C++
'Yet Another Earley Parser (YAEP)' – C/C++ libraries
'C Earley Parser' – an Earley parser C
Haskell
'Earley' – an Earley parser DSL in Haskell
Java
– a Java implementation of the Earley algorithm
PEN – a Java library that implements the Earley algorithm
Pep – a Java library that implements the Earley algorithm and provides charts and parse trees as parsing artifacts
digitalheir/java-probabilistic-earley-parser - a Java library that implements the probabilistic Earley algorithm, which is useful to determine the most likely parse tree from an ambiguous sentence
C#
coonsta/earley - An Earley parser in C#
patrickhuber/pliant - An Earley parser that integrates the improvements adopted by Marpa and demonstrates Elizabeth Scott's tree building algorithm.
ellisonch/CFGLib - Probabilistic Context Free Grammar (PCFG) Library for C# (Earley + SPPF, CYK)
JavaScript
Nearley – an Earley parser that's starting to integrate the improvements that Marpa adopted
A Pint-sized Earley Parser – a toy parser (with annotated pseudocode) to demonstrate Elizabeth Scott's technique for building the shared packed parse forest
lagodiuk/earley-parser-js – a tiny JavaScript implementation of Earley parser (including generation of the parsing-forest)
digitalheir/probabilistic-earley-parser-javascript - JavaScript implementation of the probabilistic Earley parser
OCaml
Simple Earley - An implementation of a simple Earley-like parsing algorithm, with documentation.
Perl
Marpa::R2 – a Perl module. Marpa is an Earley's algorithm that includes the improvements made by Joop Leo, and by Aycock and Horspool.
Parse::Earley – a Perl module implementing Jay Earley's original algorithm
Python
Lark – an object-oriented, procedural implementation of an Earley parser, that outputs a SPPF.
NLTK – a Python toolkit with an Earley parser
Spark – an object-oriented little language framework for Python implementing an Earley parser
spark_parser – updated and packaged version of the Spark parser above, which runs in both Python 3 and Python 2
earley3.py – a stand-alone implementation of the algorithm in less than 150 lines of code, including generation of the parsing-forest and samples
tjr_python_earley_parser - a minimal Earley parser in Python
Earley Parsing - A well explained and complete Earley parser tutorial in Python with epsilon handling and Leo optimization for right-recursion.
Common Lisp
CL-Earley-parser – a Common Lisp library implementing an Earley parser
Scheme, Racket
Charty-Racket – a Scheme-Racket implementation of an Earley parser
Wolfram
properEarleyParser - A basic minimal implementation of an Earley parser in Wolfram programming language with some essential test cases.
Resources
The Accent compiler-compiler
Parsing algorithms
Dynamic programming | [
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Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the modularity of mind is similar to that of the body and with different modular adaptations serving different functions. These evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
Evolutionary psychology is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology—its evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire field of psychology in the same way evolutionary biology has for biology.
Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations including the abilities to infer others' emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, and cooperate with others. Findings have been made regarding human social behaviour related to infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns, promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price, and parental investment. The theories and findings of evolutionary psychology have applications in many fields, including economics, environment, health, law, management, psychiatry, politics, and literature.
Criticism of evolutionary psychology involves questions of testability, cognitive and evolutionary assumptions (such as modular functioning of the brain, and large uncertainty about the ancestral environment), importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues due to interpretations of research results.
Scope
Principles
Evolutionary psychology is an approach that views human nature as the product of a universal set of evolved psychological adaptations to recurring problems in the ancestral environment. Proponents suggest that it seeks to integrate psychology into the other natural sciences, rooting it in the organizing theory of biology (evolutionary theory), and thus understanding psychology as a branch of biology. Anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides note:
Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences – a framework
that not only incorporates the evolutionary sciences on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all of the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires.
Just as human physiology and evolutionary physiology have worked to identify physical adaptations of the body that represent "human physiological nature," the purpose of evolutionary psychology is to identify evolved emotional and cognitive adaptations that represent "human psychological nature." According to Steven Pinker, it is "not a single theory but a large set of hypotheses" and a term that "has also come to refer to a particular way of applying evolutionary theory to the mind, with an emphasis on adaptation, gene-level selection, and modularity." Evolutionary psychology adopts an understanding of the mind that is based on the computational theory of mind. It describes mental processes as computational operations, so that, for example, a fear response is described as arising from a neurological computation that inputs the perceptional data, e.g. a visual image of a spider, and outputs the appropriate reaction, e.g. fear of possibly dangerous animals. Under this view, any domain-general learning is impossible because of the combinatorial explosion. Evolutionary Psychology specifies the domain as the problems of survival and reproduction.
While philosophers have generally considered the human mind to include broad faculties, such as reason and lust, evolutionary psychologists describe evolved psychological mechanisms as narrowly focused to deal with specific issues, such as catching cheaters or choosing mates. The discipline views the human brain as comprising many functional mechanisms called psychological adaptations or evolved cognitive mechanisms or cognitive modules, designed by the process of natural selection. Examples include language-acquisition modules, incest-avoidance mechanisms, cheater-detection mechanisms, intelligence and sex-specific mating preferences, foraging mechanisms, alliance-tracking mechanisms, agent-detection mechanisms, and others. Some mechanisms, termed domain-specific, deal with recurrent adaptive problems over the course of human evolutionary history. Domain-general mechanisms, on the other hand, are proposed to deal with evolutionary novelty.
Evolutionary psychology has roots in cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology but also draws on behavioral ecology, artificial intelligence, genetics, ethology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, and zoology. It is closely linked to sociobiology, but there are key differences between them including the emphasis on domain-specific rather than domain-general mechanisms, the relevance of measures of current fitness, the importance of mismatch theory, and psychology rather than behavior.
Nikolaas Tinbergen's four categories of questions can help to clarify the distinctions between several different, but complementary, types of explanations. Evolutionary psychology focuses primarily on the "why?" questions, while traditional psychology focuses on the "how?" questions.
Premises
Evolutionary psychology is founded on several core premises.
The brain is an information processing device, and it produces behavior in response to external and internal inputs.
The brain's adaptive mechanisms were shaped by natural and sexual selection.
Different neural mechanisms are specialized for solving problems in humanity's evolutionary past.
The brain has evolved specialized neural mechanisms that were designed for solving problems that recurred over deep evolutionary time, giving modern humans stone-age minds.
Most contents and processes of the brain are unconscious; and most mental problems that seem easy to solve are actually extremely difficult problems that are solved unconsciously by complicated neural mechanisms.
Human psychology consists of many specialized mechanisms, each sensitive to different classes of information or inputs. These mechanisms combine to produce manifest behavior.
History
Evolutionary psychology has its historical roots in Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. In The Origin of Species, Darwin predicted that psychology would develop an evolutionary basis:
Two of his later books were devoted to the study of animal emotions and psychology; The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in 1871 and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. Darwin's work inspired William James's functionalist approach to psychology. Darwin's theories of evolution, adaptation, and natural selection have provided insight into why brains function the way they do.
The content of evolutionary psychology has derived from, on the one hand, the biological sciences (especially evolutionary theory as it relates to ancient human environments, the study of paleoanthropology and animal behavior) and, on the other, the human sciences, especially psychology.
Evolutionary biology as an academic discipline emerged with the modern synthesis in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1930s the study of animal behavior (ethology) emerged with the work of the Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and the Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch.
W.D. Hamilton's (1964) papers on inclusive fitness and Robert Trivers's (1972) theories on reciprocity and parental investment helped to establish evolutionary thinking in psychology and the other social sciences. In 1975, Edward O. Wilson combined evolutionary theory with studies of animal and social behavior, building on the works of Lorenz and Tinbergen, in his book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
In the 1970s, two major branches developed from ethology. Firstly, the study of animal social behavior (including humans) generated sociobiology, defined by its pre-eminent proponent Edward O. Wilson in 1975 as "the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behavior" and in 1978 as "the extension of population biology and evolutionary theory to social organization." Secondly, there was behavioral ecology which placed less emphasis on social behavior; it focused on the ecological and evolutionary basis of animal and human behavior.
In the 1970s and 1980s university departments began to include the term evolutionary biology in their titles. The modern era of evolutionary psychology was ushered in, in particular, by Donald Symons' 1979 book The Evolution of Human Sexuality and Leda Cosmides and John Tooby's 1992 book The Adapted Mind. David Buller observed that the term "evolutionary psychology" is sometimes seen as denoting research based on the specific methodological and theoretical commitments of certain researchers from the Santa Barbara school (University of California), thus some evolutionary psychologists prefer to term their work "human ecology", "human behavioural ecology" or "evolutionary anthropology" instead.
From psychology there are the primary streams of developmental, social and cognitive psychology. Establishing some measure of the relative influence of genetics and environment on behavior has been at the core of behavioral genetics and its variants, notably studies at the molecular level that examine the relationship between genes, neurotransmitters and behavior. Dual inheritance theory (DIT), developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has a slightly different perspective by trying to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. DIT is seen by some as a "middle-ground" between views that emphasize human universals versus those that emphasize cultural variation.
Theoretical foundations
The theories on which evolutionary psychology is based originated with Charles Darwin's work, including his speculations about the evolutionary origins of social instincts in humans. Modern evolutionary psychology, however, is possible only because of advances in evolutionary theory in the 20th century.
Evolutionary psychologists say that natural selection has provided humans with many psychological adaptations, in much the same way that it generated humans' anatomical and physiological adaptations. As with adaptations in general, psychological adaptations are said to be specialized for the environment in which an organism evolved, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Sexual selection provides organisms with adaptations related to mating. For male mammals, which have a relatively high maximal potential reproduction rate, sexual selection leads to adaptations that help them compete for females. For female mammals, with a relatively low maximal potential reproduction rate, sexual selection leads to choosiness, which helps females select higher quality mates. Charles Darwin described both natural selection and sexual selection, and he relied on group selection to explain the evolution of altruistic (self-sacrificing) behavior. But group selection was considered a weak explanation, because in any group the less altruistic individuals will be more likely to survive, and the group will become less self-sacrificing as a whole.
In 1964, William D. Hamilton proposed inclusive fitness theory, emphasizing a gene-centered view of evolution. Hamilton noted that genes can increase the replication of copies of themselves into the next generation by influencing the organism's social traits in such a way that (statistically) results in helping the survival and reproduction of other copies of the same genes (most simply, identical copies in the organism's close relatives). According to Hamilton's rule, self-sacrificing behaviors (and the genes influencing them) can evolve if they typically help the organism's close relatives so much that it more than compensates for the individual animal's sacrifice. Inclusive fitness theory resolved the issue of how altruism can evolve. Other theories also help explain the evolution of altruistic behavior, including evolutionary game theory, tit-for-tat reciprocity, and generalized reciprocity. These theories help to explain the development of altruistic behavior, and account for hostility toward cheaters (individuals that take advantage of others' altruism).
Several mid-level evolutionary theories inform evolutionary psychology. The r/K selection theory proposes that some species prosper by having many offspring, while others follow the strategy of having fewer offspring but investing much more in each one. Humans follow the second strategy. Parental investment theory explains how parents invest more or less in individual offspring based on how successful those offspring are likely to be, and thus how much they might improve the parents' inclusive fitness. According to the Trivers–Willard hypothesis, parents in good conditions tend to invest more in sons (who are best able to take advantage of good conditions), while parents in poor conditions tend to invest more in daughters (who are best able to have successful offspring even in poor conditions). According to life history theory, animals evolve life histories to match their environments, determining details such as age at first reproduction and number of offspring. Dual inheritance theory posits that genes and human culture have interacted, with genes affecting the development of culture, and culture, in turn, affecting human evolution on a genetic level (see also the Baldwin effect).
Evolved psychological mechanisms
Evolutionary psychology is based on the hypothesis that, just like hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, and immune systems, cognition has a functional structure that has a genetic basis, and therefore has evolved by natural selection. Like other organs and tissues, this functional structure should be universally shared amongst a species and should solve important problems of survival and reproduction.
Evolutionary psychologists seek to understand psychological mechanisms by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might have served over the course of evolutionary history. These might include abilities to infer others' emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, cooperate with others and follow leaders. Consistent with the theory of natural selection, evolutionary psychology sees humans as often in conflict with others, including mates and relatives. For instance, a mother may wish to wean her offspring from breastfeeding earlier than does her infant, which frees up the mother to invest in additional offspring. Evolutionary psychology also recognizes the role of kin selection and reciprocity in evolving prosocial traits such as altruism. Like chimpanzees and bonobos, humans have subtle and flexible social instincts, allowing them to form extended families, lifelong friendships, and political alliances. In studies testing theoretical predictions, evolutionary psychologists have made modest findings on topics such as infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns, promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price and parental investment.
Historical topics
Proponents of evolutionary psychology in the 1990s made some explorations in historical events, but the response from historical experts was highly negative and there has been little effort to continue that line of research. Historian Lynn Hunt says that the historians complained that the researchers:
Hunt states that "the few attempts to build up a subfield of psychohistory collapsed under the weight of its presuppositions." She concludes that as of 2014 the "'iron curtain' between historians and psychology...remains standing."
Products of evolution: adaptations, exaptations, byproducts, and random variation
Not all traits of organisms are evolutionary adaptations. As noted in the table below, traits may also be exaptations, byproducts of adaptations (sometimes called "spandrels"), or random variation between individuals.
Psychological adaptations are hypothesized to be innate or relatively easy to learn and to manifest in cultures worldwide. For example, the ability of toddlers to learn a language with virtually no training is likely to be a psychological adaptation. On the other hand, ancestral humans did not read or write, thus today, learning to read and write requires extensive training, and presumably involves the repurposing of cognitive capacities that evolved in response to selection pressures unrelated to written language. However, variations in manifest behavior can result from universal mechanisms interacting with different local environments. For example, Caucasians who move from a northern climate to the equator will have darker skin. The mechanisms regulating their pigmentation do not change; rather the input to those mechanisms change, resulting in different outputs.
One of the tasks of evolutionary psychology is to identify which psychological traits are likely to be adaptations, byproducts or random variation. George C. Williams suggested that an "adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should only be used where it is really necessary." As noted by Williams and others, adaptations can be identified by their improbable complexity, species universality, and adaptive functionality.
Obligate and facultative adaptations
A question that may be asked about an adaptation is whether it is generally obligate (relatively robust in the face of typical environmental variation) or facultative (sensitive to typical environmental variation). The sweet taste of sugar and the pain of hitting one's knee against concrete are the result of fairly obligate psychological adaptations; typical environmental variability during development does not much affect their operation. By contrast, facultative adaptations are somewhat like "if-then" statements. For example, The adaptation for skin to tan is conditional to exposure to sunlight; this is an example of another facultative adaptation. When a psychological adaptation is facultative, evolutionary psychologists concern themselves with how developmental and environmental inputs influence the expression of the adaptation.
Cultural universals
Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations. Cultural universals include behaviors related to language, cognition, social roles, gender roles, and technology. Evolved psychological adaptations (such as the ability to learn a language) interact with cultural inputs to produce specific behaviors (e.g., the specific language learned).
Basic gender differences, such as greater eagerness for sex among men and greater coyness among women, are explained as sexually dimorphic psychological adaptations that reflect the different reproductive strategies of males and females.
Evolutionary psychologists contrast their approach to what they term the "standard social science model," according to which the mind is a general-purpose cognition device shaped almost entirely by culture.
Environment of evolutionary adaptedness
Evolutionary psychology argues that to properly understand the functions of the brain, one must understand the properties of the environment in which the brain evolved. That environment is often referred to as the "environment of evolutionary adaptedness".
The idea of an environment of evolutionary adaptedness was first explored as a part of attachment theory by John Bowlby. This is the environment to which a particular evolved mechanism is adapted. More specifically, the environment of evolutionary adaptedness is defined as the set of historically recurring selection pressures that formed a given adaptation, as well as those aspects of the environment that were necessary for the proper development and functioning of the adaptation.
Humans, comprising the genus Homo, appeared between 1.5 and 2.5 million years ago, a time that roughly coincides with the start of the Pleistocene 2.6 million years ago. Because the Pleistocene ended a mere 12,000 years ago, most human adaptations either newly evolved during the Pleistocene, or were maintained by stabilizing selection during the Pleistocene. Evolutionary psychology, therefore, proposes that the majority of human psychological mechanisms are adapted to reproductive problems frequently encountered in Pleistocene environments. In broad terms, these problems include those of growth, development, differentiation, maintenance, mating, parenting, and social relationships.
The environment of evolutionary adaptedness is significantly different from modern society. The ancestors of modern humans lived in smaller groups, had more cohesive cultures, and had more stable and rich contexts for identity and meaning. Researchers look to existing hunter-gatherer societies for clues as to how hunter-gatherers lived in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Unfortunately, the few surviving hunter-gatherer societies are different from each other, and they have been pushed out of the best land and into harsh environments, so it is not clear how closely they reflect ancestral culture. However, all around the world small-band hunter-gatherers offer a similar developmental system for the young ("hunter-gatherer childhood model," Konner, 2005;
"evolved developmental niche" or "evolved nest;" Narvaez et al., 2013). The characteristics of the niche are largely the same as for social mammals, who evolved over 30 million years ago: soothing perinatal experience, several years of on-request breastfeeding, nearly constant affection or physical proximity, responsiveness to need (mitigating offspring distress), self-directed play, and for humans, multiple responsive caregivers. Initial studies show the importance of these components in early life for positive child outcomes.
Evolutionary psychologists sometimes look to chimpanzees, bonobos, and other great apes for insight into human ancestral behavior.
Mismatches
Since an organism's adaptations were suited to its ancestral environment, a new and different environment can create a mismatch. Because humans are mostly adapted to Pleistocene environments, psychological mechanisms sometimes exhibit "mismatches" to the modern environment. One example is the fact that although about 10,000 people are killed with guns in the US annually, whereas spiders and snakes kill only a handful, people nonetheless learn to fear spiders and snakes about as easily as they do a pointed gun, and more easily than an unpointed gun, rabbits or flowers. A potential explanation is that spiders and snakes were a threat to human ancestors throughout the Pleistocene, whereas guns (and rabbits and flowers) were not. There is thus a mismatch between humans' evolved fear-learning psychology and the modern environment.
This mismatch also shows up in the phenomena of the supernormal stimulus, a stimulus that elicits a response more strongly than the stimulus for which the response evolved. The term was coined by Niko Tinbergen to refer to non-human animal behavior, but psychologist Deirdre Barrett said that supernormal stimulation governs the behavior of humans as powerfully as that of other animals. She explained junk food as an exaggerated stimulus to cravings for salt, sugar, and fats, and she says that television is an exaggeration of social cues of laughter, smiling faces and attention-grabbing action. Magazine centerfolds and double cheeseburgers pull instincts intended for an environment of evolutionary adaptedness where breast development was a sign of health, youth and fertility in a prospective mate, and fat was a rare and vital nutrient. The psychologist Mark van Vugt recently argued that modern organizational leadership is a mismatch. His argument is that humans are not adapted to work in large, anonymous bureaucratic structures with formal hierarchies. The human mind still responds to personalized, charismatic leadership primarily in the context of informal, egalitarian settings. Hence the dissatisfaction and alienation that many employees experience. Salaries, bonuses and other privileges exploit instincts for relative status, which attract particularly males to senior executive positions.
Research methods
Evolutionary theory is heuristic in that it may generate hypotheses that might not be developed from other theoretical approaches. One of the major goals of adaptationist research is to identify which organismic traits are likely to be adaptations, and which are byproducts or random variations. As noted earlier, adaptations are expected to show evidence of complexity, functionality, and species universality, while byproducts or random variation will not. In addition, adaptations are expected to manifest as proximate mechanisms that interact with the environment in either a generally obligate or facultative fashion (see above). Evolutionary psychologists are also interested in identifying these proximate mechanisms (sometimes termed "mental mechanisms" or "psychological adaptations") and what type of information they take as input, how they process that information, and their outputs. Evolutionary developmental psychology, or "evo-devo," focuses on how adaptations may be activated at certain developmental times (e.g., losing baby teeth, adolescence, etc.) or how events during the development of an individual may alter life-history trajectories.
Evolutionary psychologists use several strategies to develop and test hypotheses about whether a psychological trait is likely to be an evolved adaptation. Buss (2011) notes that these methods include:
Cross-cultural Consistency. Characteristics that have been demonstrated to be cross-cultural human universals such as smiling, crying, facial expressions are presumed to be evolved psychological adaptations. Several evolutionary psychologists have collected massive datasets from cultures around the world to assess cross-cultural universality.
Function to Form (or "problem to solution"). The fact that males, but not females, risk potential misidentification of genetic offspring (referred to as "paternity insecurity") led evolutionary psychologists to hypothesize that, compared to females, male jealousy would be more focused on sexual, rather than emotional, infidelity.
Form to Function (reverse-engineering – or "solution to problem"). Morning sickness, and associated aversions to certain types of food, during pregnancy seemed to have the characteristics of an evolved adaptation (complexity and universality). Margie Profet hypothesized that the function was to avoid the ingestion of toxins during early pregnancy that could damage fetus (but which are otherwise likely to be harmless to healthy non-pregnant women).
Corresponding Neurological Modules. Evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuropsychology are mutually compatible – evolutionary psychology helps to identify psychological adaptations and their ultimate, evolutionary functions, while neuropsychology helps to identify the proximate manifestations of these adaptations.
Current Evolutionary Adaptiveness. In addition to evolutionary models that suggest evolution occurs across large spans of time, recent research has demonstrated that some evolutionary shifts can be fast and dramatic. Consequently, some evolutionary psychologists have focused on the impact of psychological traits in the current environment. Such research can be used to inform estimates of the prevalence of traits over time. Such work has been informative in studying evolutionary psychopathology.
Evolutionary psychologists also use various sources of data for testing, including experiments, archaeological records, data from hunter-gatherer societies, observational studies, neuroscience data, self-reports and surveys, public records, and human products.
Recently, additional methods and tools have been introduced based on fictional scenarios, mathematical models, and multi-agent computer simulations.
Main areas of research
Foundational areas of research in evolutionary psychology can be divided into broad categories of adaptive problems that arise from evolutionary theory itself: survival, mating, parenting, family and kinship, interactions with non-kin, and cultural evolution.
Survival and individual-level psychological adaptations
Problems of survival are clear targets for the evolution of physical and psychological adaptations. Major problems the ancestors of present-day humans faced included food selection and acquisition; territory selection and physical shelter; and avoiding predators and other environmental threats.
Consciousness
Consciousness meets George Williams' criteria of species universality, complexity, and functionality, and it is a trait that apparently increases fitness.
In his paper "Evolution of consciousness," John Eccles argues that special anatomical and physical adaptations of the mammalian cerebral cortex gave rise to consciousness. In contrast, others have argued that the recursive circuitry underwriting consciousness is much more primitive, having evolved initially in pre-mammalian species because it improves the capacity for interaction with both social and natural environments by providing an energy-saving "neutral" gear in an otherwise energy-expensive motor output machine. Once in place, this recursive circuitry may well have provided a basis for the subsequent development of many of the functions that consciousness facilitates in higher organisms, as outlined by Bernard J. Baars. Richard Dawkins suggested that humans evolved consciousness in order to make themselves the subjects of thought. Daniel Povinelli suggests that large, tree-climbing apes evolved consciousness to take into account one's own mass when moving safely among tree branches. Consistent with this hypothesis, Gordon Gallup found that chimpanzees and orangutans, but not little monkeys or terrestrial gorillas, demonstrated self-awareness in mirror tests.
The concept of consciousness can refer to voluntary action, awareness, or wakefulness. However, even voluntary behavior involves unconscious mechanisms. Many cognitive processes take place in the cognitive unconscious, unavailable to conscious awareness. Some behaviors are conscious when learned but then become unconscious, seemingly automatic. Learning, especially implicitly learning a skill, can take place outside of consciousness. For example, plenty of people know how to turn right when they ride a bike, but very few can accurately explain how they actually do so. Evolutionary psychology approaches self-deception as an adaptation that can improve one's results in social exchanges.
Sleep may have evolved to conserve energy when activity would be less fruitful or more dangerous, such as at night, and especially during the winter season.
Sensation and perception
Many experts, such as Jerry Fodor, write that the purpose of perception is knowledge, but evolutionary psychologists hold that its primary purpose is to guide action. For example, they say, depth perception seems to have evolved not to help us know the distances to other objects but rather to help us move around in space. Evolutionary psychologists say that animals from fiddler crabs to humans use eyesight for collision avoidance, suggesting that vision is basically for directing action, not providing knowledge.
Building and maintaining sense organs is metabolically expensive, so these organs evolve only when they improve an organism's fitness. More than half the brain is devoted to processing sensory information, and the brain itself consumes roughly one-fourth of one's metabolic resources, so the senses must provide exceptional benefits to fitness. Perception accurately mirrors the world; animals get useful, accurate information through their senses.
Scientists who study perception and sensation have long understood the human senses as adaptations to their surrounding worlds. Depth perception consists of processing over half a dozen visual cues, each of which is based on a regularity of the physical world. Vision evolved to respond to the narrow range of electromagnetic energy that is plentiful and that does not pass through objects. Sound waves go around corners and interact with obstacles, creating a complex pattern that includes useful information about the sources of and distances to objects. Larger animals naturally make lower-pitched sounds as a consequence of their size. The range over which an animal hears, on the other hand, is determined by adaptation. Homing pigeons, for example, can hear the very low-pitched sound (infrasound) that carries great distances, even though most smaller animals detect higher-pitched sounds. Taste and smell respond to chemicals in the environment that are thought to have been significant for fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. For example, salt and sugar were apparently both valuable to the human or pre-human inhabitants of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, so present-day humans have an intrinsic hunger for salty and sweet tastes. The sense of touch is actually many senses, including pressure, heat, cold, tickle, and pain. Pain, while unpleasant, is adaptive. An important adaptation for senses is range shifting, by which the organism becomes temporarily more or less sensitive to sensation. For example, one's eyes automatically adjust to dim or bright ambient light. Sensory abilities of different organisms often coevolve, as is the case with the hearing of echolocating bats and that of the moths that have evolved to respond to the sounds that the bats make.
Evolutionary psychologists contend that perception demonstrates the principle of modularity, with specialized mechanisms handling particular perception tasks. For example, people with damage to a particular part of the brain suffer from the specific defect of not being able to recognize faces (prosopagnosia). Evolutionary psychology suggests that this indicates a so-called face-reading module.
Learning and facultative adaptations
In evolutionary psychology, learning is said to be accomplished through evolved capacities, specifically facultative adaptations. Facultative adaptations express themselves differently depending on input from the environment. Sometimes the input comes during development and helps shape that development. For example, migrating birds learn to orient themselves by the stars during a critical period in their maturation. Evolutionary psychologists believe that humans also learn language along an evolved program, also with critical periods. The input can also come during daily tasks, helping the organism cope with changing environmental conditions. For example, animals evolved Pavlovian conditioning in order to solve problems about causal relationships. Animals accomplish learning tasks most easily when those tasks resemble problems that they faced in their evolutionary past, such as a rat learning where to find food or water. Learning capacities sometimes demonstrate differences between the sexes. In many animal species, for example, males can solve spatial problems faster and more accurately than females, due to the effects of male hormones during development. The same might be true of humans.
Emotion and motivation
Motivations direct and energize behavior, while emotions provide the affective component to motivation, positive or negative. In the early 1970s, Paul Ekman and colleagues began a line of research which suggests that many emotions are universal. He found evidence that humans share at least five basic emotions: fear, sadness, happiness, anger, and disgust. Social emotions evidently evolved to motivate social behaviors that were adaptive in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness. For example, spite seems to work against the individual but it can establish an individual's reputation as someone to be feared. Shame and pride can motivate behaviors that help one maintain one's standing in a community, and self-esteem is one's estimate of one's status.
Motivation has a neurobiological basis in the reward system of the brain. Recently, it has been suggested that reward systems may evolve in such a way that there may be an inherent or unavoidable trade-off in the motivational system for activities of short versus long duration.
Cognition
Cognition refers to internal representations of the world and internal information processing. From an evolutionary psychology perspective, cognition is not "general purpose," but uses heuristics, or strategies, that generally increase the likelihood of solving problems that the ancestors of present-day humans routinely faced. For example, present-day humans are far more likely to solve logic problems that involve detecting cheating (a common problem given humans' social nature) than the same logic problem put in purely abstract terms. Since the ancestors of present-day humans did not encounter truly random events, present-day humans may be cognitively predisposed to incorrectly identify patterns in random sequences. "Gamblers' Fallacy" is one example of this. Gamblers may falsely believe that they have hit a "lucky streak" even when each outcome is actually random and independent of previous trials. Most people believe that if a fair coin has been flipped 9 times and Heads appears each time, that on the tenth flip, there is a greater than 50% chance of getting Tails. Humans find it far easier to make diagnoses or predictions using frequency data than when the same information is presented as probabilities or percentages, presumably because the ancestors of present-day humans lived in relatively small tribes (usually with fewer than 150 people) where frequency information was more readily available.
Personality
Evolutionary psychology is primarily interested in finding commonalities between people, or basic human psychological nature. From an evolutionary perspective, the fact that people have fundamental differences in personality traits initially presents something of a puzzle. (Note: The field of behavioral genetics is concerned with statistically partitioning differences between people into genetic and environmental sources of variance. However, understanding the concept of heritability can be tricky – heritability refers only to the differences between people, never the degree to which the traits of an individual are due to environmental or genetic factors, since traits are always a complex interweaving of both.)
Personality traits are conceptualized by evolutionary psychologists as due to normal variation around an optimum, due to frequency-dependent selection (behavioral polymorphisms), or as facultative adaptations. Like variability in height, some personality traits may simply reflect inter-individual variability around a general optimum. Or, personality traits may represent different genetically predisposed "behavioral morphs" – alternate behavioral strategies that depend on the frequency of competing behavioral strategies in the population. For example, if most of the population is generally trusting and gullible, the behavioral morph of being a "cheater" (or, in the extreme case, a sociopath) may be advantageous. Finally, like many other psychological adaptations, personality traits may be facultative – sensitive to typical variations in the social environment, especially during early development. For example, later-born children are more likely than firstborns to be rebellious, less conscientious and more open to new experiences, which may be advantageous to them given their particular niche in family structure. It is important to note that shared environmental influences do play a role in personality and are not always of less importance than genetic factors. However, shared environmental influences often decrease to near zero after adolescence but do not completely disappear.
Language
According to Steven Pinker, who builds on the work by Noam Chomsky, the universal human ability to learn to talk between the ages of 1 – 4, basically without training, suggests that language acquisition is a distinctly human psychological adaptation (see, in particular, Pinker's The Language Instinct). Pinker and Bloom (1990) argue that language as a mental faculty shares many likenesses with the complex organs of the body which suggests that, like these organs, language has evolved as an adaptation, since this is the only known mechanism by which such complex organs can develop.
Pinker follows Chomsky in arguing that the fact that children can learn any human language with no explicit instruction suggests that language, including most of grammar, is basically innate and that it only needs to be activated by interaction. Chomsky himself does not believe language to have evolved as an adaptation, but suggests that it likely evolved as a byproduct of some other adaptation, a so-called spandrel. But Pinker and Bloom argue that the organic nature of language strongly suggests that it has an adaptational origin.
Evolutionary psychologists hold that the FOXP2 gene may well be associated with the evolution of human language. In the 1980s, psycholinguist Myrna Gopnik identified a dominant gene that causes language impairment in the KE family of Britain. This gene turned out to be a mutation of the FOXP2 gene. Humans have a unique allele of this gene, which has otherwise been closely conserved through most of mammalian evolutionary history. This unique allele seems to have first appeared between 100 and 200 thousand years ago, and it is now all but universal in humans. However, the once-popular idea that FOXP2 is a 'grammar gene' or that it triggered the emergence of language in Homo sapiens is now widely discredited.
Currently, several competing theories about the evolutionary origin of language coexist, none of them having achieved a general consensus. Researchers of language acquisition in primates and humans such as Michael Tomasello and Talmy Givón, argue that the innatist framework has understated the role of imitation in learning and that it is not at all necessary to posit the existence of an innate grammar module to explain human language acquisition. Tomasello argues that studies of how children and primates actually acquire communicative skills suggest that humans learn complex behavior through experience, so that instead of a module specifically dedicated to language acquisition, language is acquired by the same cognitive mechanisms that are used to acquire all other kinds of socially transmitted behavior.
On the issue of whether language is best seen as having evolved as an adaptation or as a spandrel, evolutionary biologist W. Tecumseh Fitch, following Stephen J. Gould, argues that it is unwarranted to assume that every aspect of language is an adaptation, or that language as a whole is an adaptation. He criticizes some strands of evolutionary psychology for suggesting a pan-adaptionist view of evolution, and dismisses Pinker and Bloom's question of whether "Language has evolved as an adaptation" as being misleading. He argues instead that from a biological viewpoint the evolutionary origins of language is best conceptualized as being the probable result of a convergence of many separate adaptations into a complex system. A similar argument is made by Terrence Deacon who in The Symbolic Species argues that the different features of language have co-evolved with the evolution of the mind and that the ability to use symbolic communication is integrated in all other cognitive processes.
If the theory that language could have evolved as a single adaptation is accepted, the question becomes which of its many functions has been the basis of adaptation. Several evolutionary hypotheses have been posited: that language evolved for the purpose of social grooming, that it evolved as a way to show mating potential or that it evolved to form social contracts. Evolutionary psychologists recognize that these theories are all speculative and that much more evidence is required to understand how language might have been selectively adapted.
Mating
Given that sexual reproduction is the means by which genes are propagated into future generations, sexual selection plays a large role in human evolution. Human mating, then, is of interest to evolutionary psychologists who aim to investigate evolved mechanisms to attract and secure mates. Several lines of research have stemmed from this interest, such as studies of mate selection mate poaching, mate retention, mating preferences and conflict between the sexes.
In 1972 Robert Trivers published an influential paper on sex differences that is now referred to as parental investment theory. The size differences of gametes (anisogamy) is the fundamental, defining difference between males (small gametes – sperm) and females (large gametes – ova). Trivers noted that anisogamy typically results in different levels of parental investment between the sexes, with females initially investing more. Trivers proposed that this difference in parental investment leads to the sexual selection of different reproductive strategies between the sexes and to sexual conflict. For example, he suggested that the sex that invests less in offspring will generally compete for access to the higher-investing sex to increase their inclusive fitness (also see Bateman's principle). Trivers posited that differential parental investment led to the evolution of sexual dimorphisms in mate choice, intra- and inter- sexual reproductive competition, and courtship displays. In mammals, including humans, females make a much larger parental investment than males (i.e. gestation followed by childbirth and lactation). Parental investment theory is a branch of life history theory.
Buss and Schmitt's (1993) Sexual Strategies Theory proposed that, due to differential parental investment, humans have evolved sexually dimorphic adaptations related to "sexual accessibility, fertility assessment, commitment seeking and avoidance, immediate and enduring resource procurement, paternity certainty, assessment of mate value, and parental investment." Their Strategic Interference Theory suggested that conflict between the sexes occurs when the preferred reproductive strategies of one sex interfere with those of the other sex, resulting in the activation of emotional responses such as anger or jealousy.
Women are generally more selective when choosing mates, especially under long-term mating conditions. However, under some circumstances, short term mating can provide benefits to women as well, such as fertility insurance, trading up to better genes, reducing the risk of inbreeding, and insurance protection of her offspring.
Due to male paternity insecurity, sex differences have been found in the domains of sexual jealousy. Females generally react more adversely to emotional infidelity and males will react more to sexual infidelity. This particular pattern is predicted because the costs involved in mating for each sex are distinct. Women, on average, should prefer a mate who can offer resources (e.g., financial, commitment), thus, a woman risks losing such resources with a mate who commits emotional infidelity. Men, on the other hand, are never certain of the genetic paternity of their children because they do not bear the offspring themselves ("paternity insecurity"). This suggests that for men sexual infidelity would generally be more aversive than emotional infidelity because investing resources in another man's offspring does not lead to the propagation of their own genes.
Another interesting line of research is that which examines women's mate preferences across the ovulatory cycle. The theoretical underpinning of this research is that ancestral women would have evolved mechanisms to select mates with certain traits depending on their hormonal status. Known as the ovulatory shift hypothesis, the theory posits that, during the ovulatory phase of a woman's cycle (approximately days 10–15 of a woman's cycle), a woman who mated with a male with high genetic quality would have been more likely, on average, to produce and bear a healthy offspring than a woman who mated with a male with low genetic quality. These putative preferences are predicted to be especially apparent for short-term mating domains because a potential male mate would only be offering genes to a potential offspring. This hypothesis allows researchers to examine whether women select mates who have characteristics that indicate high genetic quality during the high fertility phase of their ovulatory cycles. Indeed, studies have shown that women's preferences vary across the ovulatory cycle. In particular, Haselton and Miller (2006) showed that highly fertile women prefer creative but poor men as short-term mates. Creativity may be a proxy for good genes. Research by Gangestad et al. (2004) indicates that highly fertile women prefer men who display social presence and intrasexual competition; these traits may act as cues that would help women predict which men may have, or would be able to acquire, resources.
Parenting
Reproduction is always costly for women, and can also be for men. Individuals are limited in the degree to which they can devote time and resources to producing and raising their young, and such expenditure may also be detrimental to their future condition, survival and further reproductive output.
Parental investment is any parental expenditure (time, energy etc.) that benefits one offspring at a cost to parents' ability to invest in other components of fitness (Clutton-Brock 1991: 9; Trivers 1972). Components of fitness (Beatty 1992) include the well-being of existing offspring, parents' future reproduction, and inclusive fitness through aid to kin (Hamilton, 1964). Parental investment theory is a branch of life history theory.
Robert Trivers' theory of parental investment predicts that the sex making the largest investment in lactation, nurturing and protecting offspring will be more discriminating in mating and that the sex that invests less in offspring will compete for access to the higher investing sex (see Bateman's principle). Sex differences in parental effort are important in determining the strength of sexual selection.
The benefits of parental investment to the offspring are large and are associated with the effects on condition, growth, survival, and ultimately, on the reproductive success of the offspring. However, these benefits can come at the cost of the parent's ability to reproduce in the future e.g. through the increased risk of injury when defending offspring against predators, the loss of mating opportunities whilst rearing offspring, and an increase in the time to the next reproduction. Overall, parents are selected to maximize the difference between the benefits and the costs, and parental care will likely evolve when the benefits exceed the costs.
The Cinderella effect is an alleged high incidence of stepchildren being physically, emotionally or sexually abused, neglected, murdered, or otherwise mistreated at the hands of their stepparents at significantly higher rates than their genetic counterparts. It takes its name from the fairy tale character Cinderella, who in the story was cruelly mistreated by her stepmother and stepsisters. Daly and Wilson (1996) noted: "Evolutionary thinking led to the discovery of the most important risk factor for child homicide – the presence of a stepparent. Parental efforts and investments are valuable resources, and selection favors those parental psyches that allocate effort effectively to promote fitness. The adaptive problems that challenge parental decision-making include both the accurate identification of one's offspring and the allocation of one's resources among them with sensitivity to their needs and abilities to convert parental investment into fitness increments…. Stepchildren were seldom or never so valuable to one's expected fitness as one's own offspring would be, and those parental psyches that were easily parasitized by just any appealing youngster must always have incurred a selective disadvantage"(Daly & Wilson, 1996, pp. 64–65). However, they note that not all stepparents will "want" to abuse their partner's children, or that genetic parenthood is any insurance against abuse. They see step parental care as primarily "mating effort" towards the genetic parent.
Family and kin
Inclusive fitness is the sum of an organism's classical fitness (how many of its own offspring it produces and supports) and the number of equivalents of its own offspring it can add to the population by supporting others. The first component is called classical fitness by Hamilton (1964).
From the gene's point of view, evolutionary success ultimately depends on leaving behind the maximum number of copies of itself in the population. Until 1964, it was generally believed that genes only achieved this by causing the individual to leave the maximum number of viable offspring. However, in 1964 W. D. Hamilton proved mathematically that, because close relatives of an organism share some identical genes, a gene can also increase its evolutionary success by promoting the reproduction and survival of these related or otherwise similar individuals. Hamilton concluded that this leads natural selection to favor organisms that would behave in ways that maximize their inclusive fitness. It is also true that natural selection favors behavior that maximizes personal fitness.
Hamilton's rule describes mathematically whether or not a gene for altruistic behavior will spread in a population:
where
is the reproductive cost to the altruist,
is the reproductive benefit to the recipient of the altruistic behavior, and
is the probability, above the population average, of the individuals sharing an altruistic gene – commonly viewed as "degree of relatedness".
The concept serves to explain how natural selection can perpetuate altruism. If there is an "altruism gene" (or complex of genes) that influences an organism's behavior to be helpful and protective of relatives and their offspring, this behavior also increases the proportion of the altruism gene in the population, because relatives are likely to share genes with the altruist due to common descent. Altruists may also have some way to recognize altruistic behavior in unrelated individuals and be inclined to support them. As Dawkins points out in The Selfish Gene (Chapter 6) and The Extended Phenotype, this must be distinguished from the green-beard effect.
Although it is generally true that humans tend to be more altruistic toward their kin than toward non-kin, the relevant proximate mechanisms that mediate this cooperation have been debated (see kin recognition), with some arguing that kin status is determined primarily via social and cultural factors (such as co-residence, maternal association of sibs, etc.), while others have argued that kin recognition can also be mediated by biological factors such as facial resemblance and immunogenetic similarity of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). For a discussion of the interaction of these social and biological kin recognition factors see Lieberman, Tooby, and Cosmides (2007) (PDF).
Whatever the proximate mechanisms of kin recognition there is substantial evidence that humans act generally more altruistically to close genetic kin compared to genetic non-kin.
Interactions with non-kin / reciprocity
Although interactions with non-kin are generally less altruistic compared to those with kin, cooperation can be maintained with non-kin via mutually beneficial reciprocity as was proposed by Robert Trivers. If there are repeated encounters between the same two players in an evolutionary game in which each of them can choose either to "cooperate" or "defect," then a strategy of mutual cooperation may be favored even if it pays each player, in the short term, to defect when the other cooperates. Direct reciprocity can lead to the evolution of cooperation only if the probability, w, of another encounter between the same two individuals exceeds the cost-to-benefit ratio of the altruistic act:
w > c/b
Reciprocity can also be indirect if information about previous interactions is shared. Reputation allows evolution of cooperation by indirect reciprocity. Natural selection favors strategies that base the decision to help on the reputation of the recipient: studies show that people who are more helpful are more likely to receive help. The calculations of indirect reciprocity are complicated and only a tiny fraction of this universe has been uncovered, but again a simple rule has emerged. Indirect reciprocity can only promote cooperation if the probability, q, of knowing someone's reputation exceeds the cost-to-benefit ratio of the altruistic act:
q > c/b
One important problem with this explanation is that individuals may be able to evolve the capacity to obscure their reputation, reducing the probability, q, that it will be known.
Trivers argues that friendship and various social emotions evolved in order to manage reciprocity. Liking and disliking, he says, evolved to help present-day humans' ancestors form coalitions with others who reciprocated and to exclude those who did not reciprocate. Moral indignation may have evolved to prevent one's altruism from being exploited by cheaters, and gratitude may have motivated present-day humans' ancestors to reciprocate appropriately after benefiting from others' altruism. Likewise, present-day humans feel guilty when they fail to reciprocate. These social motivations match what evolutionary psychologists expect to see in adaptations that evolved to maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of reciprocity.
Evolutionary psychologists say that humans have psychological adaptations that evolved specifically to help us identify nonreciprocators, commonly referred to as "cheaters." In 1993, Robert Frank and his associates found that participants in a prisoner's dilemma scenario were often able to predict whether their partners would "cheat," based on a half-hour of unstructured social interaction. In a 1996 experiment, for example, Linda Mealey and her colleagues found that people were better at remembering the faces of people when those faces were associated with stories about those individuals cheating (such as embezzling money from a church).
Strong reciprocity (or "tribal reciprocity")
Humans may have an evolved set of psychological adaptations that predispose them to be more cooperative than otherwise would be expected with members of their tribal in-group, and, more nasty to members of tribal out groups. These adaptations may have been a consequence of tribal warfare. Humans may also have predispositions for "altruistic punishment" – to punish in-group members who violate in-group rules, even when this altruistic behavior cannot be justified in terms of helping those you are related to (kin selection), cooperating with those who you will interact with again (direct reciprocity), or cooperating to better your reputation with others (indirect reciprocity).
Evolutionary psychology and culture
Though evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations, considerable work has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture (Tooby and Cosmides, 1989). Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich (but by no means the only) source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect." (Tooby and Cosmides 1989).
In psychology sub-fields
Developmental psychology
According to Paul Baltes, the benefits granted by evolutionary selection decrease with age. Natural selection has not eliminated many harmful conditions and nonadaptive characteristics that appear among older adults, such as Alzheimer disease. If it were a disease that killed 20-year-olds instead of 70-year-olds this may have been a disease that natural selection could have eliminated ages ago. Thus, unaided by evolutionary pressures against nonadaptive conditions, modern humans suffer the aches, pains, and infirmities of aging and as the benefits of evolutionary selection decrease with age, the need for modern technological mediums against non-adaptive conditions increases.
Social psychology
As humans are a highly social species, there are many adaptive problems associated with navigating the social world (e.g., maintaining allies, managing status hierarchies, interacting with outgroup members, coordinating social activities, collective decision-making). Researchers in the emerging field of evolutionary social psychology have made many discoveries pertaining to topics traditionally studied by social psychologists, including person perception, social cognition, attitudes, altruism, emotions, group dynamics, leadership, motivation, prejudice, intergroup relations, and cross-cultural differences.
When endeavouring to solve a problem humans at an early age show determination while chimpanzees have no comparable facial expression. Researchers suspect the human determined expression evolved because when a human is determinedly working on a problem other people will frequently help.
Abnormal psychology
Adaptationist hypotheses regarding the etiology of psychological disorders are often based on analogies between physiological and psychological dysfunctions, as noted in the table below. Prominent theorists and evolutionary psychiatrists include Michael T. McGuire, Anthony Stevens, and Randolph M. Nesse. They, and others, suggest that mental disorders are due to the interactive effects of both nature and nurture, and often have multiple contributing causes.
Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may reflect a side-effect of genes with fitness benefits, such as increased creativity. (Some individuals with bipolar disorder are especially creative during their manic phases and the close relatives of people with schizophrenia have been found to be more likely to have creative professions.) A 1994 report by the American Psychiatry Association found that people suffered from schizophrenia at roughly the same rate in Western and non-Western cultures, and in industrialized and pastoral societies, suggesting that schizophrenia is not a disease of civilization nor an arbitrary social invention. Sociopathy may represent an evolutionarily stable strategy, by which a small number of people who cheat on social contracts benefit in a society consisting mostly of non-sociopaths. Mild depression may be an adaptive response to withdraw from, and re-evaluate, situations that have led to disadvantageous outcomes (the "analytical rumination hypothesis") (see Evolutionary approaches to depression).
Some of these speculations have yet to be developed into fully testable hypotheses, and a great deal of research is required to confirm their validity.
Antisocial and criminal behavior
Evolutionary psychology has been applied to explain criminal or otherwise immoral behavior as being adaptive or related to adaptive behaviors. Males are generally more aggressive than females, who are more selective of their partners because of the far greater effort they have to contribute to pregnancy and child-rearing. Males being more aggressive is hypothesized to stem from the more intense reproductive competition faced by them. Males of low status may be especially vulnerable to being childless. It may have been evolutionary advantageous to engage in highly risky and violently aggressive behavior to increase their status and therefore reproductive success. This may explain why males are generally involved in more crimes, and why low status and being unmarried are associated with criminality. Furthermore, competition over females is argued to have been particularly intensive in late adolescence and young adulthood, which is theorized to explain why crime rates are particularly high during this period. Some sociologists have underlined differential exposure to androgens as the cause of these behaviors, notably Lee Ellis in his evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory.
Many conflicts that result in harm and death involve status, reputation, and seemingly trivial insults. Steven Pinker in his book The Blank Slate argues that in non-state societies without a police it was very important to have a credible deterrence against aggression. Therefore, it was important to be perceived as having a credible reputation for retaliation, resulting in humans developing instincts for revenge as well as for protecting reputation ("honor"). Pinker argues that the development of the state and the police have dramatically reduced the level of violence compared to the ancestral environment. Whenever the state breaks down, which can be very locally such as in poor areas of a city, humans again organize in groups for protection and aggression and concepts such as violent revenge and protecting honor again become extremely important.
Rape is theorized to be a reproductive strategy that facilitates the propagation of the rapist's progeny. Such a strategy may be adopted by men who otherwise are unlikely to be appealing to women and therefore cannot form legitimate relationships, or by high-status men on socially vulnerable women who are unlikely to retaliate to increase their reproductive success even further. The sociobiological theories of rape are highly controversial, as traditional theories typically do not consider rape to be a behavioral adaptation, and objections to this theory are made on ethical, religious, political, as well as scientific grounds.
Psychology of religion
Adaptationist perspectives on religious belief suggest that, like all behavior, religious behaviors are a product of the human brain. As with all other organ functions, cognition's functional structure has been argued to have a genetic foundation, and is therefore subject to the effects of natural selection and sexual selection. Like other organs and tissues, this functional structure should be universally shared amongst humans and should have solved important problems of survival and reproduction in ancestral environments. However, evolutionary psychologists remain divided on whether religious belief is more likely a consequence of evolved psychological adaptations, or a byproduct of other cognitive adaptations.
Coalitional psychology
Coalitional psychology is an approach to explain political behaviors between different coalitions and the conditionality of these behaviors in evolutionary psychological perspective. This approach assumes that since human beings appeared on the earth, they have evolved to live in groups instead of living as individuals to achieve benefits such as more mating opportunities and increased status. Human beings thus naturally think and act in a way that manages and negotiates group dynamics.
Coalitional psychology offers falsifiable ex ante prediction by positing five hypotheses on how these psychological adaptations operate:
Humans represent groups as a special category of individual, unstable and with a short shadow of the future
Political entrepreneurs strategically manipulate the coalitional environment, often appealing to emotional devices such as "outrage" to inspire collective action.
Relative gains dominate relations with enemies, whereas absolute gains characterize relations with allies.
Coalitional size and male physical strength will positively predict individual support for aggressive foreign policies.
Individuals with children, particularly women, will vary in adopting aggressive foreign policies than those without progeny.
Reception and criticism
Critics of evolutionary psychology accuse it of promoting genetic determinism, panadaptationism (the idea that all behaviors and anatomical features are adaptations), unfalsifiable hypotheses, distal or ultimate explanations of behavior when proximate explanations are superior, and malevolent political or moral ideas.
Ethical implications
Critics have argued that evolutionary psychology might be used to justify existing social hierarchies and reactionary policies. It has also been suggested by critics that evolutionary psychologists' theories and interpretations of empirical data rely heavily on ideological assumptions about race and gender.
In response to such criticism, evolutionary psychologists often caution against committing the naturalistic fallacy – the assumption that "what is natural" is necessarily a moral good. However, their caution against committing the naturalistic fallacy has been criticized as means to stifle legitimate ethical discussions.
Contradictions in models
Some criticisms of evolutionary psychology point at contradictions between different aspects of adaptive scenarios posited by evolutionary psychology. One example is the evolutionary psychology model of extended social groups selecting for modern human brains, a contradiction being that the synaptic function of modern human brains require high amounts of many specific essential nutrients so that such a transition to higher requirements of the same essential nutrients being shared by all individuals in a population would decrease the possibility of forming large groups due to bottleneck foods with rare essential nutrients capping group sizes. It is mentioned that some insects have societies with different ranks for each individual and that monkeys remain socially functioning after the removal of most of the brain as additional arguments against big brains promoting social networking. The model of males as both providers and protectors is criticized for the impossibility of being in two places at once, the male cannot both protect his family at home and be out hunting at the same time. In the case of the claim that a provider male could buy protection service for his family from other males by bartering food that he had hunted, critics point at the fact that the most valuable food (the food that contained the rarest essential nutrients) would be different in different ecologies and as such vegetable in some geographical areas and animal in others, making it impossible for hunting styles relying on physical strength or risk-taking to be universally of similar value in bartered food and instead of making it inevitable that in some parts of Africa, food gathered with no need for major physical strength would be the most valuable to barter for protection. A contradiction between evolutionary psychology's claim of men needing to be more sexually visual than women for fast speed of assessing women's fertility than women needed to be able to assess the male's genes and its claim of male sexual jealousy guarding against infidelity is also pointed at, as it would be pointless for a male to be fast to assess female fertility if he needed to assess the risk of there being a jealous male mate and in that case his chances of defeating him before mating anyway (pointlessness of assessing one necessary condition faster than another necessary condition can possibly be assessed).
Standard social science model
Evolutionary psychology has been entangled in the larger philosophical and social science controversies related to the debate on nature versus nurture. Evolutionary psychologists typically contrast evolutionary psychology with what they call the standard social science model (SSSM). They characterize the SSSM as the "blank slate", "relativist", "social constructionist", and "cultural determinist" perspective that they say dominated the social sciences throughout the 20th century and assumed that the mind was shaped almost entirely by culture.
Critics have argued that evolutionary psychologists created a false dichotomy between their own view and the caricature of the SSSM. Other critics regard the SSSM as a rhetorical device or a straw man and suggest that the scientists whom evolutionary psychologists associate with the SSSM did not believe that the mind was a blank state devoid of any natural predispositions.
Reductionism and determinism
Some critics view evolutionary psychology as a form of genetic reductionism and genetic determinism, a common critique being that evolutionary psychology does not address the complexity of individual development and experience and fails to explain the influence of genes on behavior in individual cases. Evolutionary psychologists respond that they are working within a nature-nurture interactionist framework that acknowledges that many psychological adaptations are facultative (sensitive to environmental variations during individual development). The discipline is generally not focused on proximate analyses of behavior, but rather its focus is on the study of distal/ultimate causality (the evolution of psychological adaptations). The field of behavioral genetics is focused on the study of the proximate influence of genes on behavior.
Testability of hypotheses
A frequent critique of the discipline is that the hypotheses of evolutionary psychology are frequently arbitrary and difficult or impossible to adequately test, thus questioning its status as an actual scientific discipline, for example because many current traits probably evolved to serve different functions than they do now. Thus because there are a potentially infinite number of alternative explanations for why a trait evolved, critics contend that it is impossible to determine the exact explanation. While evolutionary psychology hypotheses are difficult to test, evolutionary psychologists assert that it is not impossible. Part of the critique of the scientific base of evolutionary psychology includes a critique of the concept of the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA). Some critics have argued that researchers know so little about the environment in which Homo sapiens evolved that explaining specific traits as an adaption to that environment becomes highly speculative. Evolutionary psychologists respond that they do know many things about this environment, including the facts that present day humans' ancestors were hunter-gatherers, that they generally lived in small tribes, etc. Edward Hagen argues that the human past environments were not radically different in the same sense as the Carboniferous or Jurassic periods and that the animal and plant taxa of the era were similar to those of the modern world, as was the geology and ecology. Hagen argues that few would deny that other organs evolved in the EEA (for example, lungs evolving in an oxygen rich atmosphere) yet critics question whether or not the brain's EEA is truly knowable, which he argues constitutes selective scepticism. Hagen also argues that most evolutionary psychology research is based on the fact that females can get pregnant and males cannot, which Hagen observes was also true in the EEA.
John Alcock describes this as the "No Time Machine Argument", as critics are arguing that since it is not possible to travel back in time to the EEA, then it cannot be determined what was going on there and thus what was adaptive. Alcock argues that present-day evidence allows researchers to be reasonably confident about the conditions of the EEA and that the fact that so many human behaviours are adaptive in the current environment is evidence that the ancestral environment of humans had much in common with the present one, as these behaviours would have evolved in the ancestral environment. Thus Alcock concludes that researchers can make predictions on the adaptive value of traits. Similarly, Dominic Murphy argues that alternative explanations cannot just be forwarded but instead need their own evidence and predictions - if one explanation makes predictions that the others cannot, it is reasonable to have confidence in that explanation. In addition, Murphy argues that other historical sciences also make predictions about modern phenomena to come up with explanations about past phenomena, for example, cosmologists look for evidence for what we would expect to see in the modern-day if the Big Bang was true, while geologists make predictions about modern phenomena to determine if an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. Murphy argues that if other historical disciplines can conduct tests without a time machine, then the onus is on the critics to show why evolutionary psychology is untestable if other historical disciplines are not, as "methods should be judged across the board, not singled out for ridicule in one context."
Modularity of mind
Evolutionary psychologists generally presume that, like the body, the mind is made up of many evolved modular adaptations, although there is some disagreement within the discipline regarding the degree of general plasticity, or "generality," of some modules. It has been suggested that modularity evolves because, compared to non-modular networks, it would have conferred an advantage in terms of fitness and because connection costs are lower.
In contrast, some academics argue that it is unnecessary to posit the existence of highly domain specific modules, and, suggest that the neural anatomy of the brain supports a model based on more domain general faculties and processes. Moreover, empirical support for the domain-specific theory stems almost entirely from performance on variations of the Wason selection task which is extremely limited in scope as it only tests one subtype of deductive reasoning.
Cultural rather than genetic development of cognitive tools
Cecilia Heyes has argued that the picture presented by some evolutionary psychology of the human mind as a collection of cognitive instinctsorgans of thought shaped by genetic evolution over very long time periodsdoes not fit research results. She posits instead that humans have cognitive gadgets"special-purpose organs of thought" built in the course of development through social interaction. Similar criticisms are articulated by Subrena E. Smith of the University of New Hampshire.
Response by evolutionary psychologists
Evolutionary psychologists have addressed many of their critics (see, for example, books by Segerstråle (2000), Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, Barkow (2005), Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists, and Alcock (2001), The Triumph of Sociobiology). Among their rebuttals are that some criticisms are straw men, are based on an incorrect nature versus nurture dichotomy, are based on misunderstandings of the discipline, etc. Robert Kurzban suggested that "...critics of the field, when they err, are not slightly missing the mark. Their confusion is deep and profound. It's not like they are marksmen who can't quite hit the center of the target; they're holding the gun backwards."
See also
Affective neuroscience
Behavioural genetics
Biocultural evolution
Biosocial criminology
Collective unconscious
Cognitive neuroscience
Cultural neuroscience
Darwinian Happiness
Darwinian literary studies
Deep social mind
Dunbar's number
Evolution of the brain
List of evolutionary psychologists
Evolutionary origin of religions
Evolutionary psychiatry
Evolutionary psychology and culture
Molecular evolution
Primate cognition
Hominid intelligence
Human ethology
Great ape language
Chimpanzee intelligence
Cooperative eye hypothesis
Id, ego, and superego
Intersubjectivity
Mirror neuron
Noogenesis
Origin of language
Origin of speech
Ovulatory shift hypothesis
Primate empathy
Shadow (psychology)
Simulation theory of empathy
Theory of mind
Neuroethology
Paleolithic diet
Paleolithic lifestyle
r/K selection theory
Social neuroscience
Sociobiology
Universal Darwinism
Notes
References
Barkow, J., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. 1992. The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Buss, D. M. (1994). The evolution of desire: Strategies of human mating. New York: Basic Books.
Confer, Easton, Fleischman, Goetz, Lewis, Perilloux & Buss Evolutionary Psychology, American Psychologist, 2010.
Durrant, R., & Ellis, B.J. (2003). Evolutionary Psychology. In M. Gallagher & R.J. Nelson (Eds.), Comprehensive Handbook of Psychology, Volume Three: Biological Psychology (pp. 1–33). New York: Wiley & Sons.
Gaulin, Steven J. C. and Donald H. McBurney. Evolutionary psychology. Prentice Hall. 2003.
</ref>
Nesse, R.M. (2000). Tingergen's Four Questions Organized.
Schacter, Daniel L, Daniel Wegner and Daniel Gilbert. 2007. Psychology. Worth Publishers. .
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2005). Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology. In D. M. Buss (Ed.), The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (pp. 5–67). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Full text
Further reading
Heylighen F. (2012). "Evolutionary Psychology", in: A. Michalos (ed.): Encyclopedia of Quality of Life Research (Springer, Berlin).
Gerhard Medicus (2015). Being Human – Bridging the Gap between the Sciences of Body and Mind. Berlin: VWB
Oikkonen, Venla: Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives. London: Routledge, 2013.
External links
PsychTable.org Collaborative effort to catalog human psychological adaptations
What Is Evolutionary Psychology? by Clinical Evolutionary Psychologist Dale Glaebach.
Evolutionary Psychology – Approaches in Psychology
Academic societies
Human Behavior and Evolution Society; international society dedicated to using evolutionary theory to study human nature
The International Society for Human Ethology; promotes ethological perspectives on the study of humans worldwide
European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association an interdisciplinary society that supports the activities of European researchers with an interest in evolutionary accounts of human cognition, behavior and society
The Association for Politics and the Life Sciences; an international and interdisciplinary association of scholars, scientists, and policymakers concerned with evolutionary, genetic, and ecological knowledge and its bearing on political behavior, public policy and ethics.
Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law a scholarly association dedicated to fostering interdisciplinary exploration of issues at the intersection of law, biology, and evolutionary theory
The New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology aims to foster research and education into the interdisciplinary nexus of cognitive science and evolutionary studies
The NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society; regional society dedicated to encouraging scholarship and dialogue on the topic of evolutionary psychology
Feminist Evolutionary Psychology Society researchers that investigate the active role that females have had in human evolution
Journals
Evolutionary Psychology – free access online scientific journal
Evolution and Human Behavior – journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society
Evolutionary Psychological Science - An international, interdisciplinary forum for original research papers that address evolved psychology. Spans social and life sciences, anthropology, philosophy, criminology, law and the humanities.
Politics and the Life Sciences – an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal published by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences
Human Nature: An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective – advances the interdisciplinary investigation of the biological, social, and environmental factors that underlie human behavior. It focuses primarily on the functional unity in which these factors are continuously and mutually interactive. These include the evolutionary, biological, and sociological processes as they interact with human social behavior.
Biological Theory: Integrating Development, Evolution and Cognition – devoted to theoretical advances in the fields of biology and cognition, with an emphasis on the conceptual integration afforded by evolutionary and developmental approaches.
Evolutionary Anthropology
Behavioral and Brain Sciences – interdisciplinary articles in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral biology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy. About 30% of the articles have focused on evolutionary analyses of behavior.
Evolution and Development – research relevant to interface of evolutionary and developmental biology
The Evolutionary Review – Art, Science, and Culture
Videos
Brief video clip from the "Evolution" PBS Series
TED talk by Steven Pinker about his book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
RSA talk by evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban on modularity of mind, based on his book Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite
Richard Dawkins' lecture on natural selection and evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary Psychology – Steven Pinker & Frans de Waal Audio recording
Stone Age Minds: A conversation with evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
Margaret Mead and Samoa. Review of the nature versus nurture debate triggered by Mead's book "Coming of Age in Samoa."
"Evolutionary Psychology", In Our Time, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Janet Radcliffe Richards, Nicholas Humphrey and Steven Rose (Nov. 2, 2000)
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Excalibur () is the legendary sword of King Arthur, sometimes also attributed with magical powers or associated with the rightful sovereignty of Britain. It was associated with the Arthurian legend very early on. Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone (the proof of Arthur's lineage) are in some versions said to be different, though in other incarnations they are either the same or at least share their name. In Welsh, it is called Caledfwlch; in Cornish, Calesvol (in Modern Cornish: Kalesvolgh); in Breton, Kaledvoulc'h; and in Latin, Caliburnus. Several similar swords and other weapons also appear in this and other legends.
Forms and etymologies
The name Excalibur ultimately derives from the Welsh Caledfwlch (and Breton Kaledvoulc'h, Middle Cornish Calesvol), which is a compound of "hard" and "breach, cleft". Caledfwlch appears in several early Welsh works, including the prose tale Culhwch and Olwen (c. 11th–12th century). The name was later used in Welsh adaptations of foreign material such as the Bruts (chronicles), which were based on Geoffrey of Monmouth. It is often considered to be related to the phonetically similar Caladbolg, a sword borne by several figures from Irish mythology, although a borrowing of Caledfwlch from Irish Caladbolg has been considered unlikely by Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans. They suggest instead that both names "may have similarly arisen at a very early date as generic names for a sword". This sword then became exclusively the property of Arthur in the British tradition.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his Historia Regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, c. 1136), Latinised the name of Arthur's sword as Caliburnus (potentially influenced by the Medieval Latin spelling of Classical Latin , from Greek [] "steel"). Most Celticists consider Geoffrey's Caliburnus to be derivative of a lost Old Welsh text in which (Old Welsh ) had not yet been lenited to (Middle Welsh or ). In the late 15th/early 16th-century Middle Cornish play Beunans Ke, Arthur's sword is called Calesvol, which is etymologically an exact Middle Cornish cognate of the Welsh Caledfwlch. It is unclear if the name was borrowed from the Welsh (if so, it must have been an early loan, for phonological reasons), or represents an early, pan-Brittonic traditional name for Arthur's sword.
In Old French sources this then became Escalibor, Excalibor, and finally the familiar Excalibur. Geoffrey Gaimar, in his Old French L'Estoire des Engleis (1134-1140), mentions Arthur and his sword: "this Constantine was the nephew of Arthur, who had the sword Caliburc" (""). In Wace's Roman de Brut (c. 1150–1155), an Old French translation and versification of Geoffrey's Historia, the sword is called Calabrum, Callibourc, Chalabrun, and Calabrun (with variant spellings such as Chalabrum, Calibore, Callibor, Caliborne, Calliborc, and Escaliborc, found in various manuscripts of the Brut).
In Chrétien de Troyes' late 12th-century Old French Perceval, Arthur's knight Gawain carries the sword Escalibor and it is stated, "for at his belt hung Escalibor, the finest sword that there was, which sliced through iron as through wood" (). This statement was probably picked up by the author of the Estoire Merlin, or Vulgate Merlin, where the author (who was fond of fanciful folk etymologies) asserts that Escalibor "is a Hebrew name which means in French 'cuts iron, steel, and wood (; note that the word for "steel" here, achier, also means "blade" or "sword" and comes from medieval Latin , a derivative of "sharp", so there is no direct connection with Latin in this etymology). It is from this fanciful etymological musing that Thomas Malory got the notion that Excalibur meant "cut steel" (the name of it,' said the lady, 'is Excalibur, that is as moche to say, as Cut stele).
The sword in the stone and the sword in the lake
In Arthurian romance, a number of explanations are given for Arthur's possession of Excalibur. In Robert de Boron's Merlin, the first tale to mention the "sword in the stone" motif c. 1200, Arthur obtained the British throne by pulling a sword from an anvil sitting atop a stone that appeared in a churchyard on Christmas Eve. In this account, as foretold by Merlin, the act could not be performed except by "the true king", meaning the divinely appointed king or true heir of Uther Pendragon. The scene is set by different authors at either London (Londinium) or generally in Logres, and might have been inspired by a miracle attributed to the 11th-century Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester. As Malory related in his most famous English-language version of the Arthurian tales, the 15th-century Le Morte d'Arthur: "Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil, is rightwise king born of all England." After many of the gathered nobles try and fail to complete Merlin's challenge, the teenage Arthur (who up to this point had believed himself to be son of Sir Ector, not Uther's son, and went there as Sir Kay's squire) does this feat effortlessly by accident and then repeats it publicly. The identity of this sword as Excalibur is made explicit in the Prose Merlin, a part of the Lancelot-Grail cycle of French romances (the Vulgate Cycle).
Eventually, in the cycle's finale Vulgate Mort Artu, when Arthur is at the brink of death, he orders Griflet to cast Excalibur into the enchanted lake. After two failed attempts (as he felt such a great sword should not be thrown away), Griflet finally complies with the wounded king's request and a hand emerges from the lake to catch it. This tale becomes attached to Bedivere, instead of Griflet, in Malory and the English tradition. However, in the Post-Vulgate Cycle (and consequently Malory), Arthur breaks the Sword from the Stone while in combat against King Pellinore very early in his reign. On Merlin's advice, he then goes with him to be given Excalibur by a Lady of the Lake in exchange for a later boon for her (some time later, she arrives at Arthur's court to demand the head of Balin). Malory records both versions of the legend in his Le Morte d'Arthur, naming each sword as Excalibur.
Other roles and attributes
In Welsh legends, Arthur's sword is known as Caledfwlch. In Culhwch and Olwen, it is one of Arthur's most valuable possessions and is used by Arthur's warrior Llenlleawg the Irishman to kill the Irish king Diwrnach while stealing his magical cauldron. Though not named as Caledfwlch, Arthur's sword is described vividly in The Dream of Rhonabwy, one of the tales associated with the Mabinogion (as translated by Jeffrey Gantz): "Then they heard Cadwr Earl of Cornwall being summoned, and saw him rise with Arthur's sword in his hand, with a design of two chimeras on the golden hilt; when the sword was unsheathed what was seen from the mouths of the two chimeras was like two flames of fire, so dreadful that it was not easy for anyone to look."
Geoffrey's Historia is the first non-Welsh source to speak of the sword. Geoffrey says the sword was forged in Avalon and Latinises the name "Caledfwlch" as Caliburnus. When his influential pseudo-history made it to Continental Europe, writers altered the name further until it finally took on the popular form Excalibur (various spellings in the medieval Arthurian romance and chronicle tradition include: Calabrun, Calabrum, Calibourne, Callibourc, Calliborc, Calibourch, Escaliborc, and Escalibor). The legend was expanded upon in the Vulgate Cycle and in the Post-Vulgate Cycle which emerged in its wake. Both included the Prose Merlin, but the Post-Vulgate authors left out the Merlin continuation from the earlier cycle, choosing to add an original account of Arthur's early days including a new origin for Excalibur. In many versions, Excalibur's blade was engraved with phrases on opposite sides: "Take me up" and "Cast me away" (or similar). In addition, it said that when Excalibur was first drawn, in the first battle testing Arthur's sovereignty, its blade shined so bright it blinded his enemies. In some French works, such as Chrétien's Perceval and the Vulgate Lancelot, Excalibur is used also by Gawain, Arthur's nephew and one of his best knights. This is in contrast to most versions, where Excalibur belongs solely to Arthur.
In some tellings, Excalibur's scabbard was also said to have powers of its own, as any wounds received while wearing the scabbard would not bleed at all, thus preventing the wearer from ever bleeding to death in battle. For this reason, Merlin chides Arthur for preferring the sword over the scabbard, saying that the latter is the greater treasure. In the later romance tradition, including Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, the scabbard is stolen from Arthur by his half-sister Morgan le Fay in revenge for the death of her beloved Accolon slain by Arthur with Excalibur in a duel; it is then thrown by her into a lake and lost. This act later enables the death of Arthur, deprived of its magical protection, many years later in his final battle. In Malory's telling, the scabbard is never found again; in the Post-Vulgate, however, it is recovered and claimed by another fay, Marsique, who then briefly gives it to Gawain to help him fight Naborn (Mabon) the enchanter. Morgan also secretly makes at least one duplicate of Excalibur during the time when the sword is entrusted to her by Arthur earlier in the different French, Iberian and English variants of that story.
Excalibur as a relic
Historically, a sword identified as Excalibur (Caliburn) was supposedly discovered during the purported exhumation of Arthur's grave at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191. On 6 March 1191, after the Treaty of Messina, either this or another claimed Excalibur was given as a gift of goodwill by the English king Richard I of England (Richard the Lionheart) to his ally Tancred, King of Sicily. It was one of a series of Medieval English symbolic Arthurian acts, such as associating the crown won from the slain Welsh prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd with the crown of King Arthur.
Similar weapons
The challenge of drawing a sword from a stone (placed on the river just outside Camelot) also appears in the later Arthurian story of Galahad, whose achievement of the task indicates that he is destined to find the Holy Grail, as also foretold in Merlin's prophecies. This powerful yet cursed weapon, known as the Adventurous Sword among other names, has also come from Avalon; it is first stolen and wielded by Balin until his death while killing his own brother, then is briefly taken up by Galahad, and eventually is used by Lancelot to give his former friend Gawain a mortal wound in their long final duel. In Perlesvaus, Lancelot pulls other weapons from stone on two occasions. In the Post-Vulgate Merlin, Morgan creates the copies of Excalibur itself as well as of its scabbard.
In Welsh mythology, the Dyrnwyn ("White-Hilt"), one of the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain, is said to be a powerful sword belonging to Rhydderch Hael, one of the Three Generous Men of Britain mentioned in the Welsh Triads. When drawn by a worthy or well-born man, the entire blade would blaze with fire. Rhydderch was never reluctant to hand the weapon to anyone, hence his nickname Hael "the Generous", but the recipients, as soon as they had learned of its peculiar properties, always rejected the sword. There are other similar weapons described in other mythologies as well. Irish mythology mentions a weapon Caladbolg, the sword of Fergus mac Róich, which was also known for its incredible power and was carried by some of Ireland's greatest heroes. The name, which can also mean "hard cleft" in Irish, appears in the plural, caladbuilc, as a generic term for "great swords" in Togail Troi ("The Destruction of Troy"), a 10th-century Irish translation of the classical tale. A sword named Claíomh Solais, which is an Irish term meaning "sword of light", or "shining sword", appears in a number of orally transmitted Irish folk-tales. The Sword in the Stone has an analogue in some versions of the story of Sigurd, whose father, Sigmund, draws the sword Gram out of the tree Barnstokkr where it is embedded by the Norse god Odin. A sword in the stone legend is also associated with the 12th-century Italian Saint Galgano in the tale of "Tuscany's Excalibur".
Arthur's other weapons
Other weapons have been associated with Arthur. Welsh tradition also knew of a dagger named Carnwennan and a spear named Rhongomyniad that belonged to him. Carnwennan ("little white-hilt") first appears in Culhwch and Olwen, where Arthur uses it to slice the witch Orddu in half. Rhongomyniad ("spear" + "striker, slayer") is also mentioned in Culhwch, although only in passing; it appears as simply Ron ("spear") in Geoffrey's Historia. Geoffrey also names Arthur's shield as Pridwen; in Culhwch, however, Prydwen ("fair face") is the name of Arthur's ship while his shield is named Wynebgwrthucher ("face of evening").
In the Alliterative Morte Arthure, a Middle English poem, Clarent is the royal sword of peace meant for knighting and ceremonies as opposed to battle, which Mordred stole and then used to kill Arthur at Camlann. The Prose Lancelot of the Vulgate Cycle mentions a sword called Sequence (also Secace or Seure) as borrowed from Arthur by Lancelot.
See also
List of magical weapons
Notes
References
Citations
Sources
The Works of Sir Thomas Malory, Ed. Vinaver, Eugène, 3rd ed. Field, Rev. P. J. C. (1990). 3 vol. Oxford: Oxford University Press. , , .
Further reading
Lacy, N. J (ed). The New Arthurian Encyclopedia. (London: Garland. 1996). .
External links
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester: Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone
Fictional elements introduced in the 11th century
Arthurian legend
Fictional swords
Geoffrey of Monmouth
Medieval legends
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] |
Eli Whitney Jr. (December 8, 1765January 8, 1825) was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South.
Although Whitney himself believed that his invention would reduce the need for enslaved labor and help hasten the end of southern slavery, Whitney's invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States and prolonged the institution. Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost many profits in legal battles over patent infringement for the cotton gin. Thereafter, he turned his attention into securing contracts with the government in the manufacture of muskets for the newly formed United States Army. He continued making arms and inventing until his death in 1825.
Early life and education
Whitney was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, on December 8, 1765, the eldest child of Eli Whitney Sr., a prosperous farmer, and his wife Elizabeth Fay, also of Westborough.
The younger Eli was famous during his lifetime and after his death by the name "Eli Whitney", though he was technically Eli Whitney Jr. His son, born in 1820, also named Eli, was known during his lifetime and afterward by the name "Eli Whitney, Jr."
Whitney's mother, Elizabeth Fay, died in 1777, when he was 11. At age 14 he operated a profitable nail manufacturing operation in his father's workshop during the Revolutionary War.
Because his stepmother opposed his wish to attend college, Whitney worked as a farm laborer and school teacher to save money. He prepared for Yale at Leicester Academy (now Becker College) and under the tutelage of Rev. Elizur Goodrich of Durham, Connecticut, he entered in the fall of 1789 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1792. Whitney expected to study law but, finding himself short of funds, accepted an offer to go to South Carolina as a private tutor.
Instead of reaching his destination, he was convinced to visit Georgia. In the closing years of the 18th century, Georgia was a magnet for New Englanders seeking their fortunes (its Revolutionary-era governor had been Lyman Hall, a migrant from Connecticut). When he initially sailed for South Carolina, among his shipmates were the widow (Catherine Littlefield Greene) and family of the Revolutionary hero Gen. Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island. Mrs. Greene invited Whitney to visit her Georgia plantation, Mulberry Grove. Her plantation manager and husband-to-be was Phineas Miller, another Connecticut migrant and Yale graduate (class of 1785), who would become Whitney's business partner.
Career
Whitney is most famous for two innovations which came to have significant impacts on the United States in the mid-19th century: the cotton gin (1793) and his advocacy of interchangeable parts. In the South, the cotton gin revolutionized the way cotton was harvested and reinvigorated slavery. Conversely, in the North the adoption of interchangeable parts revolutionized the manufacturing industry, contributing greatly to the U.S. victory in the Civil War.
Cotton gin
The cotton gin is a mechanical device that removes the seeds from cotton, a process that had previously been extremely labor-intensive. The word gin is short for engine. While staying at Mulberry Grove, Whitney constructed several ingenious household devices which led Mrs Greene to introduce him to some businessmen who were discussing the desirability of a machine to
separate the short staple upland cotton from its seeds, work that was then done by hand at the rate of a pound of lint a day. In a few weeks Whitney produced a model. The cotton gin was a wooden drum stuck with hooks that pulled the cotton fibers through a mesh. The cotton seeds would not fit through the mesh and fell outside. Whitney occasionally told a story wherein he was pondering an improved method of seeding the cotton when he was inspired by observing a cat attempting to pull a chicken through a fence, and able to only pull through some of the feathers.
A single cotton gin could generate up to of cleaned cotton daily. This contributed to the economic development of the Southern United States, a prime cotton growing area; some historians believe that this invention allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable at a critical point in its development.
Whitney applied for the patent for his cotton gin on October 28, 1793, and received the patent (later numbered as X72) on March 14, 1794, but it was not validated until 1807. Whitney and his partner, Miller, did not intend to sell the gins. Rather, like the proprietors of grist and sawmills, they expected to charge farmers for cleaning their cotton – two-fifths of the value, paid in cotton. Resentment at this scheme, the mechanical simplicity of the device and the primitive state of patent law, made infringement inevitable. Whitney and Miller could not build enough gins to meet demand, so gins from other makers found ready sale. Ultimately, patent infringement lawsuits consumed the profits (one patent, later annulled, was granted in 1796 to Hogden Holmes for a gin which substituted circular saws for the spikes) and their cotton gin company went out of business in 1797. One oft-overlooked point is that there were drawbacks to Whitney's first design. There is significant evidence that the design flaws were solved by his sponsor, Mrs. Greene, but Whitney gave her no public credit or recognition.
After validation of the patent, the legislature of South Carolina voted $50,000 for the rights for that state, while North Carolina levied a license tax for five years, from which about $30,000 was realized. There is a claim that Tennessee paid, perhaps, $10,000.
While the cotton gin did not earn Whitney the fortune he had hoped for, it did give him fame. It has been argued by some historians that Whitney's cotton gin was an important if unintended cause of the American Civil War. After Whitney's invention, the plantation slavery industry was rejuvenated, eventually culminating in the Civil War.
The cotton gin transformed Southern agriculture and the national economy. Southern cotton found ready markets in Europe and in the burgeoning textile mills of New England. Cotton exports from the U.S. boomed after the cotton gin's appearance – from less than in 1793 to by 1810. Cotton was a staple that could be stored for long periods and shipped long distances, unlike most agricultural products. It became the U.S.'s chief export, representing over half the value of U.S. exports from 1820 to 1860.
Whitney believed that his cotton gin would reduce the need for enslaved labor and would help hasten the end of southern slavery. Paradoxically, the cotton gin, a labor-saving device, helped preserve and prolong slavery in the United States for another 70 years. Before the 1790s, slave labor was primarily employed in growing rice, tobacco, and indigo, none of which were especially profitable anymore. Neither was cotton, due to the difficulty of seed removal. But with the invention of the gin, growing cotton with slave labor became highly profitable – the chief source of wealth in the American South, and the basis of frontier settlement from Georgia to Texas. "King Cotton" became a dominant economic force, and slavery was sustained as a key institution of Southern society.
Interchangeable parts
Eli Whitney has often been incorrectly credited with inventing the idea of interchangeable parts, which he championed for years as a maker of muskets; however, the idea predated Whitney, and Whitney's role in it was one of promotion and popularizing, not invention. Successful implementation of the idea eluded Whitney until near the end of his life, occurring first in others' armories.
Attempts at interchangeability of parts can be traced back as far as the Punic Wars through both archaeological remains of boats now in Museo Archeologico Baglio Anselmi and contemporary written accounts. In modern times the idea developed over decades among many people. An early leader was Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, an 18th-century French artillerist who created a fair amount of standardization of artillery pieces, although not true interchangeability of parts. He inspired others, including Honoré Blanc and Louis de Tousard, to work further on the idea, and on shoulder weapons as well as artillery. In the 19th century these efforts produced the "armory system," or American system of manufacturing. Certain other New Englanders, including Captain John H. Hall and Simeon North, arrived at successful interchangeability before Whitney's armory did. The Whitney armory finally succeeded not long after his death in 1825.
The motives behind Whitney's acceptance of a contract to manufacture muskets in 1798 were mostly monetary. By the late 1790s, Whitney was on the verge of bankruptcy and the cotton gin litigation had left him deeply in debt. His New Haven cotton gin factory had burned to the ground, and litigation sapped his remaining resources. The French Revolution had ignited new conflicts between Great Britain, France, and the United States. The new American government, realizing the need to prepare for war, began to rearm. The War Department issued contracts for the manufacture of 10,000 muskets. Whitney, who had never made a gun in his life, obtained a contract in January 1798 to deliver 10,000 to 15,000 muskets in 1800. He had not mentioned interchangeable parts at that time. Ten months later, the Treasury Secretary, Oliver Wolcott, Jr., sent him a "foreign pamphlet on arms manufacturing techniques," possibly one of Honoré Blanc's reports, after which Whitney first began to talk about interchangeability.
In May 1798, Congress voted for legislation that would use eight hundred thousand dollars in order to pay for small arms and cannons in case war with France erupted. It offered a 5,000 dollar incentive with an additional 5,000 dollars once that money was exhausted for the person that was able to accurately produce arms for the government. Because the cotton gin had not brought Whitney the rewards he believed it promised, he accepted the offer. Although the contract was for one year, Whitney did not deliver the arms until 1809, using multiple excuses for the delay. Recently, historians have found that during 1801–1806, Whitney took the money and headed into South Carolina in order to profit from the cotton gin.
Although Whitney's demonstration of 1801 appeared to show the feasibility of creating interchangeable parts, Merritt Roe Smith concludes that it was "staged" and "duped government authorities" into believing that he had been successful. The charade gained him time and resources toward achieving that goal.
When the government complained that Whitney's price per musket compared unfavorably with those produced in government armories, he was able to calculate an actual price per musket by including fixed costs such as insurance and machinery, which the government had not accounted for. He thus made early contributions to both the concepts of cost accounting, and economic efficiency in manufacturing.
Milling machine
Machine tool historian Joseph W. Roe credited Whitney with inventing the first milling machine circa 1818. Subsequent work by other historians (Woodbury; Smith; Muir; Battison [cited by Baida]) suggests that Whitney was among a group of contemporaries all developing milling machines at about the same time (1814 to 1818), and that the others were more important to the innovation than Whitney was. (The machine that excited Roe may not have been built until 1825, after Whitney's death.) Therefore, no one person can properly be described as the inventor of the milling machine.
Later life and legacy
Despite his humble origins, Whitney was keenly aware of the value of social and political connections. In building his arms business, he took full advantage of the access that his status as a Yale alumnus gave him to other well-placed graduates, such as Oliver Wolcott, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury (class of 1778), and James Hillhouse, a New Haven developer and political leader.
His 1817 marriage to Henrietta Edwards, granddaughter of the famed evangelist Jonathan Edwards, daughter of Pierpont Edwards, head of the Democratic Party in Connecticut, and first cousin of Yale's president, Timothy Dwight, the state's leading Federalist, further tied him to Connecticut's ruling elite. In a business dependent on government contracts, such connections were essential to success.
Whitney died of prostate cancer on January 8, 1825, in New Haven, Connecticut, just a month after his 59th birthday. He left a widow and his four children behind. One of his offspring, Eli Whitney III (known as Eli Whitney Jr.), was instrumental in building New Haven, Connecticut's waterworks. During the course of his illness, he reportedly invented and constructed several devices to mechanically ease his pain.
The Eli Whitney Students Program, Yale University's admissions program for non-traditional students, is named in honor of Whitney, who not only began his studies there when he was 23, but also went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa in just three years.
See also
Whitney family
Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences
Eli Whitney Museum
References
Further reading
Battison, Edwin. (1960). "Eli Whitney and the Milling Machine." Smithsonian Journal of History I.
Cooper, Carolyn, & Lindsay, Merrill K. (1980). Eli Whitney and the Whitney Armory.
Whitneyville, CT: Eli Whitney Museum.
Dexter, Franklin B. (1911). "Eli Whitney." Yale Biographies and Annals, 1792–1805. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Company.
Hall, Karyl Lee Kibler, & Cooper, Carolyn. (1984). Windows on the Works: Industry on the Eli Whitney Site, 1798–1979.
Hamden, CT: Eli Whitney Museum
Lakwete, Angela. (2004). Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Smith, Merritt Roe. 1973. "John H. Hall, Simeon North, and the Milling Machine: The Nature of Innovation among Antebellum Arms Makers." Technology & Culture 14.
Woodbury, Robert S. (1960). "The Legend of Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts." Technology & Culture 1.
McL. Green, Constance – Edited by Oscar Handlin. (1956). Eli Whitney & The Birth of American Technology. Library of American Biography series.
External links
The Eli Whitney Museum
Eli Whitney Biography on at Whitney Research Group
Inventor of the Week: Eli Whitney (MIT)
Entry in New Georgia Encyclopedia
Photograph of house in which the Cotton Gin was invented, Wilkes County, Georgia, ca. 1910
Letter from Eli Whitney to his Father regarding his invention of the cotton gin, September 11, 1793
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Eli Whitney, Jr. regarding his cotton gin patent, November 16, 1793
Obituary for Eli Whitney, in Niles Weekly Register, January 25, 1825
Eli Whitney papers (MS 554). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.
1765 births
1825 deaths
American business theorists
Engineers from Massachusetts
18th-century American inventors
Burials at Grove Street Cemetery
American people of English descent
Deaths from cancer in Connecticut
Deaths from prostate cancer
Firearm designers
Textile workers
Machine tool builders
People from New Haven, Connecticut
People of the Industrial Revolution
People from Westborough, Massachusetts
Whitney family
Leicester Academy alumni
Yale College alumni
Hall of Fame for Great Americans inductees
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Elwyn Brooks White (July 11, 1899 – October 1, 1985) was an American writer. He was the author of several highly popular books for children, including Stuart Little (1945), Charlotte's Web (1952), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970). In a 2012 survey of School Library Journal readers, Charlotte's Web came in first in their poll of the top one hundred children's novels. In addition, he was a writer and contributing editor to The New Yorker magazine, and also a co-author of the English language style guide The Elements of Style.
Life
E.B. White was born in Mount Vernon, New York, the sixth and youngest child of Samuel Tilly White, the president of a piano firm, and Jessie Hart White, the daughter of Scottish-American painter William Hart. Elwyn's older brother Stanley Hart White, known as Stan, a professor of landscape architecture and the inventor of the vertical garden, taught E.B. White to read and to explore the natural world. Prior to attending college, White served in the United States Army during World War I. He then graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1921. He got the nickname "Andy" at Cornell, where tradition confers that moniker on any male student whose surname is White, after Cornell co-founder Andrew Dickson White. While at Cornell, he worked as editor of The Cornell Daily Sun with classmate Allison Danzig, who later became a sportswriter for The New York Times. White was also a member of the Aleph Samach and Quill and Dagger societies and Phi Gamma Delta ("Fiji") fraternity.
After graduation, White worked for the United Press (now United Press International) and the American Legion News Service in 1921 and 1922. From September 1922 to June 1923, he was a cub reporter for The Seattle Times. On one occasion, when White was stuck writing a story, a Times editor said, "Just say the words." He was fired from the Times and later wrote for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer before a stint in Alaska on a fireboat. He then worked for almost two years with the Frank Seaman advertising agency as a production assistant and copywriter before returning to New York City in 1924. When The New Yorker was founded in 1925, White submitted manuscripts to it. Katharine Angell, the literary editor, recommended to editor-in-chief and founder Harold Ross that White be hired as a staff writer. However, it took months to convince him to come to a meeting at the office and additional weeks to convince him to work on the premises. Eventually, he agreed to work in the office on Thursdays.
White was shy around women, claiming he had "too small a heart, too large a pen." But in 1929, after an affair which led to her divorce, White and Katherine Angell were married. They had a son, Joel White, a naval architect and boat builder, who later owned Brooklin Boat Yard in Brooklin, Maine. Katharine's son from her first marriage, Roger Angell, has spent decades as a fiction editor for The New Yorker and is well known as the magazine's baseball writer.
In her foreword to Charlotte's Web, Kate DiCamillo quotes White as saying, "All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world." White also loved animals, farms and farming implements, seasons, and weather formats.
James Thurber described White as a quiet man who disliked publicity and who, during his time at The New Yorker, would slip out of his office via the fire escape to a nearby branch of Schrafft's to avoid visitors whom he didn't know:
Later in life, White had Alzheimer's disease and died on October 1, 1985, at his farm home in North Brooklin, Maine. He is buried in the Brooklin Cemetery beside Katharine, who died in 1977.
Career
E.B. White published his first article in The New Yorker in 1925, then joined the staff in 1927 and continued to contribute for almost six decades. Best recognized for his essays and unsigned "Notes and Comment" pieces, he gradually became the magazine's most important contributor. From the beginning to the end of his career at The New Yorker, he frequently provided what the magazine calls "Newsbreaks" (short, witty comments on oddly worded printed items from many sources) under various categories such as "Block That Metaphor." He also was a columnist for Harper's Magazine from 1938 to 1943.
In 1949, White published Here Is New York, a short book based on an article he had been commissioned to write for Holiday. Editor Ted Patrick approached White about writing the essay telling him it would be fun. "Writing is never 'fun'", replied White. That article reflects the writer's appreciation of a city that provides its residents with both "the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy." It concludes with a dark note touching on the forces that could destroy the city that he loved. This prescient "love letter" to the city was re-published in 1999 on his centennial with an introduction by his stepson, Roger Angell.
In 1959, White edited and updated The Elements of Style. This handbook of grammatical and stylistic guidance for writers of American English was first written and published in 1918 by William Strunk Jr., one of White's professors at Cornell. White's reworking of the book was extremely well received, and later editions followed in 1972, 1979, and 1999. Maira Kalman illustrated an edition in 2005. That same year, a New York composer named Nico Muhly premiered a short opera based on the book. The volume is a standard tool for students and writers and remains required reading in many composition classes. The complete history of The Elements of Style is detailed in Mark Garvey's Stylized: A Slightly Obsessive History of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style.
In 1978, White won a special Pulitzer Prize citing "his letters, essays and the full body of his work". He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and honorary memberships in a variety of literary societies throughout the United States. The 1973 Oscar-nominated Canadian animated short The Family That Dwelt Apart is narrated by White and is based on his short story of the same name.
Children's books
In the late 1930s, White turned his hand to children's fiction on behalf of a niece, Janice Hart White. His first children's book, Stuart Little, was published in 1945, and Charlotte's Web followed in 1952. Stuart Little initially received a lukewarm welcome from the literary community. However, both books went on to receive high acclaim, and Charlotte's Web won a Newbery Honor from the American Library Association, though it lost out on winning the Newbery Medal to Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark.
White received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal from the U.S. professional children's librarians in 1970. It recognized his "substantial and lasting contributions to children's literature." That year, he was also the U.S. nominee and eventual runner-up for the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award, as he was again in 1976. Also, in 1970, White's third children's novel was published, The Trumpet of the Swan. In 1973 it won the Sequoyah Award from Oklahoma and the William Allen White Award from Kansas, both selected by students voting for their favorite book of the year. In 2012, the School Library Journal sponsored a survey of readers, which identified Charlotte's Web as the best children's novel ("fictional title for readers 9–12" years old). The librarian who conducted it said, "It is impossible to conduct a poll of this sort and expect [White's novel] to be anywhere but #1."
Awards and honors
1953 Newbery Medal for Charlotte's Web
1960 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal
1963 Presidential Medal of Freedom
1970 Laura Ingalls Wilder Award
1971 National Medal for Literature
1977 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, Letters of E.B. White
1978 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for Letters
Other
The E.B. White Read Aloud Award is given by The Association of Booksellers for Children (ABC) to honor books that its membership feel embodies the universal read-aloud standards that E.B. White's works created.
Bibliography
Books
Less than Nothing, or, The Life and Times of Sterling Finny (1927)
Ho Hum: Newsbreaks from the New Yorker (1931). Intro by E.B. White, and much of the text as well.
Alice Through the Cellophane, John Day (1933)
Every Day is Saturday, Harper (1934)
Quo Vadimus: or The Case for the Bicycle, Harper (1938)
A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941). Co-edited with Katherine S. White.
One Man's Meat (1942): A collection of his columns from Harper's Magazine
The Wild Flag: Editorials From The New Yorker On Federal World Government And Other Matters (1943)
Stuart Little (1945)
Here Is New York (1949)
Charlotte's Web (1952)
The Second Tree from the Corner (1954)
The Elements of Style (with William Strunk Jr.) (1959, republished 1972, 1979, 1999, 2005)
The Points of My Compass (1962)
The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)
Letters of E.B. White (1976)
Essays of E.B. White (1977)
Poems and Sketches of E.B. White (1981)
Writings from "The New Yorker" (1990)
In the Words of E.B. White (2011)
The Fox of Peapack
Farewell to Model T
An E.B. White Reader. Edited by William W. Watt and Robert W. Bradford.
Essays and reporting
References
External links
"E.B. White, The Art of the Essay No. 1", The Paris Review, Fall 1969 – interview by George Plimpton and Frank H. Crowther
(audio-video)
miNYstories based on Here Is New York
1899 births
1985 deaths
20th-century American essayists
20th-century American journalists
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American novelists
20th-century American poets
20th-century American short story writers
American children's writers
American cultural critics
American humorists
American letter writers
American male essayists
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American social commentators
Anthologists
Copywriters
Cornell University alumni
Deaths from Alzheimer's disease
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Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal winners
Neurological disease deaths in Maine
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People from Brooklin, Maine
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Pulitzer Prize winners
Seattle Post-Intelligencer people
The Seattle Times people
Social critics
Urban theorists
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Writers from Mount Vernon, New York
Writers of books about writing fiction
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Eridanus can refer to:
Rivers
Eridanos (mythology) (or Eridanus), a river in Greek mythology, somewhere in Central Europe, which was territory that Ancient Greeks knew only vaguely
The Po River, according to Roman word usage
Eridanos (Athens), a former river near Athens, now subterranean
Eridanos (geology), a former large river that flowed between forty million and seven hundred thousand years ago from Lapland to the North Sea through where the Baltic Sea is now
Astronomy
Eridanus (constellation), a southern constellation
Eridanus Cluster of galaxies in the constellation Eridanus
Eridanus II, a low-surface brightness dwarf galaxy in the constellation Eridanus
List of stars in Eridanus
Delta Eridani, a star
Eta Eridani, a star
Gamma Eridani, a star
Eridanus Supervoid
Miscellaneous
Éridan (rocket), a French rocket
Éridan-class minehunter, a class of French naval minehunters
Eridanosaurus, a rhinocerotid originally described as a crocodilian
USS Eridanus (AK-92), a ship of the United States Navy
Eridan Ampora, a character from the webcomic Homestuck. | [
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The Extended Industry Standard Architecture (in practice almost always shortened to EISA and frequently pronounced "eee-suh") is a bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers. It was announced in September 1988 by a consortium of PC clone vendors (the Gang of Nine) as an alternative to IBM's proprietary Micro Channel architecture (MCA) in its PS/2 series.
In comparison with the AT bus, which the Gang of Nine retroactively renamed to the ISA bus to avoid infringing IBM's trademark on its PC/AT computer, EISA is extended to 32 bits and allows more than one CPU to share the bus. The bus mastering support is also enhanced to provide access to 4 GB of memory. Unlike MCA, EISA can accept older XT and ISA boards — the lines and slots for EISA are a superset of ISA.
EISA was much favoured by manufacturers due to the proprietary nature of MCA, and even IBM produced some machines supporting it. It was somewhat expensive to implement (though not as much as MCA), so it never became particularly popular in desktop PCs. However, it was reasonably successful in the server market, as it was better suited to bandwidth-intensive tasks (such as disk access and networking). Most EISA cards produced were either SCSI or network cards. EISA was also available on some non-IBM-compatible machines such as the AlphaServer, HP 9000-D, SGI Indigo2 and MIPS Magnum.
By the time there was a strong market need for a bus of these speeds and capabilities for desktop computers, the VESA Local Bus and later PCI filled this niche, and EISA vanished into obscurity.
History
The original IBM PC included five 8-bit slots, running at the system clock speed of 4.77 MHz. The PC/AT, introduced in 1984, had three 8-bit slots and five 16-bit slots, all running at the system clock speed of 6 MHz in the earlier models and 8 MHz in the last version of the computer. The 16-bit slots were a superset of the 8-bit configuration, so most 8-bit cards were able to plug into a 16-bit slot (some cards used a "skirt" design that physically interfered with the extended portion of the slot) and continue to run in 8-bit mode. One of the key reasons for the success of the IBM PC (and the PC clones that followed it) was the active ecosystem of third-party expansion cards available for the machines. IBM was restricted from patenting the bus and widely published the bus specifications.
As the PC-clone industry continued to build momentum in the mid- to late-1980s, several problems with the bus began to be apparent. First, because the "AT slot" (as it was known at the time) was not managed by any central standards group, there was nothing to prevent a manufacturer from "pushing" the standard. One of the most common issues was that as PC clones became more common, PC manufacturers began increasing the processor speed to maintain a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, because the ISA bus was originally locked to the processor clock, this meant that some 286 machines had ISA buses that ran at 10, 12, or even 16 MHz. In fact, the first system to clock the ISA bus at 8 MHz was the turbo 8088 clones that clocked the processors at 8 MHz. This caused many issues with incompatibility, where a true IBM-compatible third-party card (designed for an 8 MHz or 4.77 MHz bus) might not work in a higher-speed system (or even worse, would work unreliably). Most PC makers eventually decoupled the slot clock from the system clock, but there was still no standards body to "police" the industry.
As companies like Dell modified the AT bus design, the architecture was so well entrenched that no single clone manufacturer had the leverage to create a standardized alternative, and there was no compelling reason for them to cooperate on a new standard. Because of this, when the first 386-based system (the Compaq Deskpro 386) hit the market in 1986, it still supported 16-bit slots. Other 386 PCs followed suit, and the AT (later ISA) bus remained a part of most systems even into the late 1990s.
Meanwhile, IBM began to worry that it was losing control of the industry it had created. In 1987, IBM released the PS/2 line of computers, which included the MCA bus. MCA included numerous enhancements over the 16-bit AT bus, including bus mastering, burst mode, software-configurable resources, and 32-bit capabilities. However, in an effort to reassert its dominant role, IBM patented the bus and placed stringent licensing and royalty policies on its use. A few manufacturers did produce licensed MCA machines (most notably, NCR), but overall the industry balked at IBM's restrictions.
Steve Gibson proposed that clone makers adopt NuBus. Instead, a group (the "Gang of Nine"), led by Compaq, created a new bus, which was named the Extended (or Enhanced) Industry Standard Architecture, or "EISA" (and the 16-bit bus became known as Industry Standard Architecture, or "ISA"). This provided virtually all of the technical advantages of MCA, while remaining compatible with existing 8-bit and 16-bit cards, and (most enticing to system and card makers) minimal licensing cost.
The EISA bus slot is a two-level staggered pin system, with the upper part of the slot corresponding to the standard ISA bus pin layout. The additional features of the EISA bus are implemented on the lower part of the slot connector, using thin traces inserted into the insulating gap of the upper / ISA card card edge connector. Additionally, the lower part of the bus has five keying notches, so an ISA card with unusually long traces cannot accidentally extend down into the lower part of the slot.
Intel introduced their first EISA chipset (and also their first chipset in the modern sense of the word) as the 82350 in September 1989. Intel introduced a lower-cost variant as the 82350DT, announced in April 1991; it began shipping in June of that year.
The first EISA computer announced was the HP Vectra 486 in October 1989. The first EISA computers to hit the market were the Compaq Deskpro 486 and the SystemPro. The SystemPro, being one of the first PC-style systems designed as a network server, was built from the ground up to take full advantage of the EISA bus. It included such features as multiprocessing, hardware RAID, and bus-mastering network cards.
One of the benefits to come out of the EISA standard was a final codification of the standard to which ISA slots and cards should be held (in particular, clock speed was fixed at an industry standard of 8.33 MHz). Thus, even systems that didn't use the EISA bus gained the advantage of having the ISA standardized, which contributed to its longevity.
The "Gang of Nine"
The Gang of Nine was the informal name given to the consortium of personal computer manufacturing companies that together created the EISA bus. Rival members generally acknowledged Compaq's leadership, with one stating in 1989 that within the Gang of Nine "when you have 10 people sit down before a table to write a letter to the president, someone has to write the letter. Compaq is sitting down at the typewriter". The members were:
AST Research, Inc.
Compaq Computer Corporation
Seiko Epson Corporation
Hewlett-Packard Company
NEC Corporation
Olivetti
Tandy Corporation
WYSE
Zenith Data Systems
Technical data
Although the MCA bus had a slight performance advantage over EISA (bus speed of 10 MHz, compared to 8.33 MHz), EISA contained almost all of the technological benefits that MCA boasted, including bus mastering, burst mode, software-configurable resources, and 32-bit data/address buses. These brought EISA nearly to par with MCA from a performance standpoint, and EISA easily defeated MCA in industry support.
EISA replaced the tedious jumper configuration common with ISA cards with software-based configuration. Every EISA system shipped with an EISA configuration utility; this was usually a slightly customized version of the standard utilities written by the EISA chipset makers. The user would boot into this utility, either from floppy disk or on a dedicated hard-drive partition. The utility software would detect all EISA cards in the system and could configure any hardware resources (interrupts, memory ports, etc.) on any EISA card (each EISA card would include a disk with information that described the available options on the card) or on the EISA system motherboard. The user could also enter information about ISA cards in the system, allowing the utility to automatically reconfigure EISA cards to avoid resource conflicts.
Similarly, Windows 95, with its Plug-and-Play capability, was not able to change the configuration of EISA cards, but it could detect the cards, read their configuration, and reconfigure Plug-and-Play hardware to avoid resource conflicts. Windows 95 would also automatically attempt to install appropriate drivers for detected EISA cards.
Industry acceptance
EISA's success was far from guaranteed. Many manufacturers, including those in the "Gang of Nine", researched the possibility of using MCA. For example, Compaq actually produced prototype DeskPro systems using the bus. However, these were never put into production, and when it was clear that MCA had lost, Compaq allowed its MCA license to expire (the license actually cost relatively little; the primary costs associated with MCA, and at which the industry revolted, were royalties to be paid per system shipped).
On the other hand, when it became clear to IBM that Micro Channel was dying, IBM licensed EISA for use in a few server systems.
See also
Industry Standard Architecture (ISA)
Micro Channel architecture (MCA)
NuBus
VESA Local Bus (VLB)
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI)
Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP)
PCI-X
PCI Express (PCIe)
List of device bandwidths
Amiga Zorro II
PC/104
CompactPCI
MiniPCI
PC card
Low Pin Count (LPC)
Universal Serial Bus
References
External links
The Intel EISA chipset explained
EISA bus technical summary
Intel EISA Controllers
Intel 82350 EISA chip family
Computer buses
IBM PC compatibles
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Edward Elmer Smith (May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965), publishing as E. E. Smith, Ph.D. and later as E. E. "Doc" Smith, was an American food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and science-fiction author, best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera.
Biography
Family and education
Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on May 2, 1890, to Fred Jay Smith and Caroline Mills Smith, both staunch Presbyterians of British ancestry. His mother was a teacher born in Michigan in February 1855; his father was a sailor, born in Maine in January 1855 to an English father. They moved to Spokane, Washington, the winter after Edward Elmer was born, where Mr. Smith was working as a contractor in 1900. In 1902, the family moved to Seneaquoteen, near the Pend Oreille River, in Kootenai County, Idaho. He had four siblings, Rachel M. born September 1882, Daniel M. born January 1884, Mary Elizabeth born February 1886 (all of whom were born in Michigan), and Walter E. born July 1891 in Washington. In 1910, Fred and Caroline Smith and their son Walter were living in the Markham Precinct of Bonner County, Idaho; Fred is listed in census records as a farmer.
Smith worked mainly as a manual laborer until he injured his wrist while fleeing from a fire at the age of 19. He attended the University of Idaho. (Many years later he would be installed in the 1984 Class of the University of Idaho Alumni Hall of Fame.) He entered its prep school in 1907, and graduated with two degrees in chemical engineering in 1914. He was president of the Chemistry Club, the Chess Club, and the Mandolin and Guitar Club, and captain of the Drill and Rifle Team; he also sang the bass lead in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His undergraduate thesis was Some Clays of Idaho, co-written with classmate Chester Fowler Smith, who died in California of tuberculosis the following year, after taking a teaching fellowship at Berkeley. Whether the two were related is not known.
On October 5, 1915, in Boise, Idaho he married Jeanne Craig MacDougall, the sister of his college roommate, Allen Scott (Scotty) MacDougall. (Her sister was named Clarissa MacLean MacDougall; the heroine of the Lensman novels would later be named Clarissa MacDougall.) Jeanne MacDougall was born in Glasgow, Scotland; her parents were Donald Scott MacDougall, a violinist, and Jessica Craig MacLean. Her father had moved to Boise when the children were young, and later sent for his family; he died while they were en route in 1905. Jeanne's mother, who remarried businessman and retired politician John F. Kessler in 1914<ref>Hawley, James F. A History of Idaho: Gem of the Mountains", page 868. S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1920. Full text available at Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=-t8UAAAAYAAJ&ie=ISO-8859-1&output=html</ref> worked at, and later owned, a boarding house on Ridenbaugh Street.
The Smiths had three children:
Roderick N., born June 3, 1918, in the District of Columbia, was employed as a design engineer at Lockheed Aircraft.
Verna Jean (later Verna Smith Trestrail), born August 25, 1920, in Michigan, was his literary executor until her death in 1994. (Her son Kim Trestrail is now the executor.) Robert A. Heinlein in part dedicated his 1982 novel Friday to Verna.
Clarissa M. (later Clarissa Wilcox), was born December 13, 1921, in Michigan.
Early chemical career and the beginning of Skylark
After college, Smith was a junior chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., developing standards for butter and for oysters, while studying food chemistry at George Washington University. During World War I, he "wanted to fly a Jenny, but chemists were too scarce. (Or were Jennies too valuable?)" He ended up being sent to the Commission for Relief in Belgium headed by Herbert Hoover. His draft card, partly illegible, seems to show that Smith requested exemption from military service, based on his wife's dependence and on his contribution to the war effort as a civilian chemist.
One evening in 1915, the Smiths were visiting a former classmate from the University of Idaho, Dr. Carl Garby (1890-1928)who had also moved to Washington, D.C. He lived nearby in the Seaton Place Apartments with his wife, Lee Hawkins Garby. A long discussion about journeys into outer space ensued, and it was suggested that Smith should write down his ideas and speculations as a story about interstellar travel. Although he was interested, Smith believed after some thought that some romantic elements would be required and he was uncomfortable with that.
Mrs. Garby offered to take care of the love interest and the romantic dialogue, and Smith decided to give it a try. The sources of inspirations for the main characters in the novel were themselves; the "Seatons" and "Cranes" were based on the Smiths and Garbys, respectively. About one third of The Skylark of Space was completed by the end of 1916, when Smith and Garby gradually abandoned work on it.
Smith earned his master's degree in chemistry from the George Washington University in 1917, studying under Dr. Charles E. Munroe., who Smith called "probably the greatest high-explosives man yet to live." Smith completed his PhD in chemical engineering in 1918, with a food engineering focus; his dissertation, The effect of bleaching with oxides of nitrogen upon the baking quality and commercial value of wheat flour, was published in 1919. (Warner and Fleischer give the title The Effect of the Oxides of Nitrogen upon the Carotin Molecule – C40H56, which is difficult to explain. Sam Moskowitz gives the degree date 1919, perhaps reflecting different dates for thesis submission, thesis defense, and degree certification.)
Writing Skylark
In 1919, Smith was hired as chief chemist for F. W. Stock & Sons of Hillsdale, Michigan, at one time the largest family-owned mill east of the Mississippi, working on doughnut mixes.
One evening late in 1919, after moving to Michigan, Smith was baby-sitting (presumably for Roderick) while his wife attended a movie; he resumed work on The Skylark of Space, finishing it in the spring of 1920."Doughnut Specialist Smith" says "It wasn't until 1919 that work really began ... Five years passed before acceptance by the first science-fiction magazine on the American market, and two more years elapsed before it was published." This is not consistent with other sources. He submitted it to many book publishers and magazines, spending more in postage than he would eventually receive for its publication. Bob Davis, editor of Argosy, sent an encouraging rejection letter in 1922, saying that he liked the novel personally, but that it was too far out for his readers. (According to Warner, but no other source, Smith began work on the sequel, Skylark Three, before the first book was accepted.) Finally, upon seeing the April 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, he submitted it to that magazine; it was accepted, initially for $75, later raised to $125. It was published as a three-part serial in the August to October 1928 issues and it was such a success that associate editor Sloane requested a sequel before the second installment had been published.
Mrs. Garby, whose husband died in 1928, was not interested in further collaboration, so Smith began work on Skylark Three alone. It was published as another three-part serial, in the August to October 1930 issues of Amazing, introduced as the cover story for August. (In 1930, the Smiths were living in Michigan, at 33 Rippon Avenue in Hillsdale.) This was as far as he had planned to take the Skylark series; it was praised in Amazings letter column, and he was paid ¾¢ per word, surpassing Amazings previous record of half a cent.
The early 1930s: between Skylark and Lensman
Smith then began work on what he intended as a new series, starting with Spacehounds of IPC, which he finished in the autumn of 1930. In this novel, he took pains to avoid the scientific impossibilities which had bothered some readers of the Skylark novels. Even in 1938, after he had written Galactic Patrol, Smith considered it his finest work; he later said of it, "This was really scientific fiction; not, like the Skylarks, pseudo-science"; and even at the end of his career, he considered it his only work of true science fiction. It was published in the July through September 1931 issues of Amazing, with Sloane making unauthorized changes. Fan letters in the magazine complained about the novel's containment within the solar system, and Sloane sided with the readers. So when Harry Bates, editor of Astounding Stories, offered Smith 2¢/word—payable on publication—for his next story, he agreed; this meant that it could not be a sequel to Spacehounds.This book would be Triplanetary, "in which scientific detail would not be bothered about, and in which his imagination would run riot." Indeed, characters within the story point out its psychological and scientific implausibilities, and sometimes even seem to suggest self-parody. At other times, they are conspicuously silent about obvious implausibilities.Costigan & Bradley's failure to object, when told of the Nevians' impending second raid on Tellus (Earth), that they could easily obtain iron without further destruction, February p. 88, p. 175. The January 1933 issue of Astounding announced that Triplanetary would appear in the March issue, and that issue's cover illustrated a scene from the story, but Astoundings financial difficulties prevented the story from appearing. Smith then submitted the manuscript to Wonder Stories, whose new editor, 17-year-old Charles D. Hornig, rejected it, later boasting about the rejection in a fanzine. He finally submitted it to Amazing, which published it beginning in January 1934, but for only half a cent a word. Shortly after it was accepted, F. Orlin Tremaine, the new editor of the revived Astounding, offered one cent a word for Triplanetary; when he learned that he was too late, he suggested a third Skylark novel instead.
In the winter of 1933–34, Smith worked on The Skylark of Valeron, but he felt that the story was getting out of control; he sent his first draft to Tremaine, with a distraught note asking for suggestions. Tremaine accepted the rough draft for $850, and announced it in the June 1934 issue, with a full-page editorial and a three-quarter-page advertisement. The novel was published in the August 1934 through February 1935 issues. Astounding's circulation rose by 10,000 for the first issue, and its two main competitors, Amazing and Wonder Stories, fell into financial difficulties, both skipping issues within a year.
The Lensman series
In January 1936, a time period where he was already an established science-fiction writer, he took a job for salary plus profit-sharing, as production manager at Dawn Donut Co. of Jackson, Michigan.Moskowitz p. 19, Warner. This initially entailed almost a year's worth of 18-hour days and seven-day workweeks. Individuals who knew Smith confirmed that he had a role in developing mixes for doughnuts and other pastries, but the contention that he developed the first process for making powdered sugar adhere to doughnuts cannot be substantiated. Smith was reportedly dislocated from his job at Dawn Donuts by prewar rationing in early 1940.
Smith had been contemplating writing a "space-police novel" since early 1927; once he had "the Lensmen's universe fairly well set up", he reviewed his science-fiction collection for "cops-and-robbers" stories. He cites Clinton Constantinescue's "War of the Universe" as a negative example, and Starzl and Williamson as positive ones. Tremaine responded extremely positively to a brief description of the idea.
Once Dawn Donuts became profitable in late 1936, Smith wrote an 85-page outline for what became the four core Lensman novels; in early 1937, Tremaine committed to buying them. Segmenting the story into four novels required considerable effort to avoid dangling loose ends; Smith cites Edgar Rice Burroughs as a negative example. After the outline was complete, he wrote a more detailed outline of Galactic Patrol, plus a detailed graph of its structure, with "peaks of emotional intensity and the valleys of characterization and background material." He notes, however, that he was never able to follow any of his outlines at all closely, as the "characters get away from me and do exactly as they damn please." After completing the rough draft of Galactic Patrol, he wrote the concluding chapter of the last book in the series, Children of the Lens. Galactic Patrol was published in the September 1937 through February 1938 issues of Astounding; unlike the revised book edition, it was not set in the same universe as Triplanetary.Gray Lensman, the fourth book in the series, appeared in Astoundings October 1939 through January 1940 issues. (Note that the frequent British spelling "grey" is simply a recurrent mistake, starting with the cover of the first installment; Moskowitz's usage, "The Grey Lensman", is even harder to justify.) Gray Lensman (and its cover illustration) was extremely well received. Campbell's editorial in the December issue suggested that the October issue was the best issue of Astounding ever, and Gray Lensman was first place in the Analytical Laboratory statistics "by a lightyear", with three runners-up in a distant tie for second place. The cover was also praised by readers in Brass Tacks, and Campbell noted, "We got a letter from E. E. Smith saying he and Hubert Rogers agreed on how Kinnison looked."
Smith was the guest of honor at Chicon I, the second World Science Fiction Convention, held in Chicago over Labor Day weekend 1940, giving a speech on the importance of science fiction fandom entitled "What Does This Convention Mean?" He attended the convention's masquerade as C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith, and met fans living near him in Michigan, who would later form the Galactic Roamers, which previewed and advised him on his future work.
After Pearl Harbor, Smith discovered he "was one year over age for reinstatement" into the US Army. Instead he worked on high explosives at the Kingsbury Ordnance Plant in La Port, Indiana, at first as a chemical engineer, but gradually worked his way up to chief. In late 1943 he became head of the Inspection Division, and was fired in early 1944. An extended segment in the novel version of Triplanetary, set during World War II, suggests intimate familiarity with explosives and munitions manufacturing. Some biographers cite as fact that, just as Smith's protagonist in this segment lost his job over failure to approve substandard munitions, Smith did as well.
Smith spent the next few years working on "light farm machinery and heavy tanks for Allis-Chalmers," after which he was hired as manager of the Cereal Mix Division of J. W. Allen & Co., where he worked until his professional retirement in 1957.
Retirement and late writing
After Smith retired, his wife and he lived in Clearwater, Florida, in the fall and winter, driving the smaller of their two trailers to Seaside, Oregon, each April, often stopping at science fiction conventions on the way. (Smith did not like to fly.) In 1963, he was presented the inaugural First Fandom Hall of Fame award at the 21st World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, D.C. Some of his biography is captured in an essay by Robert A. Heinlein, which was reprinted in the collection Expanded Universe in 1980. A more detailed, although allegedly error-ridden biography is in Sam Moskowitz's Seekers of Tomorrow.Robert Heinlein and Smith were friends. (Heinlein dedicated his 1958 novel Methuselah's Children "To Edward E. Smith, PhD".) Heinlein reported that E. E. Smith perhaps took his "unrealistic" heroes from life, citing as an example the extreme competence of the hero of Spacehounds of IPC. He reported that E. E. Smith was a large, blond, athletic, very intelligent, very gallant man, married to a remarkably beautiful, intelligent, red-haired woman named MacDougal (thus perhaps the prototypes of 'Kimball Kinnison' and 'Clarissa MacDougal'). In Heinlein's essay, he reports that he began to suspect Smith might be a sort of "superman" when he asked Smith for help in purchasing a car. Smith tested the car by driving it on a back road at illegally high speeds with their heads pressed tightly against the roof columns to listen for chassis squeaks by bone conduction—a process apparently improvised on the spot.
In his nonseries novels written after his professional retirement, Galaxy Primes, Subspace Explorers, and Subspace Encounter, E. E. Smith explores themes of telepathy and other mental abilities collectively called "psionics", and of the conflict between libertarian and socialistic/communistic influences in the colonization of other planets. Galaxy Primes was written after critics such as Groff Conklin and P. Schuyler Miller in the early '50s accused his fiction of being passé, and he made an attempt to do something more in line with the concepts about which Astounding editor John W. Campbell encouraged his writers to make stories. Despite this, it was rejected by Campbell, and it was eventually published by Amazing Stories in 1959. His late story "The Imperial Stars" (1964), featuring a troupe of circus performers involved in sabotage in a galactic empire, recaptured some of the atmosphere from his earlier works and was intended as the first in a new series, with outlines of later parts rumored to still exist. In fact, the Imperial Stars characters and concepts were continued by author Stephen Goldin as the "Family D'Alembert series". While the book covers indicate the series was written by Smith and Goldin together, Goldin only ever had Smith's original novella to expand upon.
The fourth Skylark novel, Skylark DuQuesne, ran in the June to October 1965 issues of If, beginning once again as the cover story. Editor Frederik Pohl introduced it with a one-page summary of the previous stories, which were all at least 30 years old.
Lord Tedric
Smith published two novelettes entitled "Tedric" in Other Worlds Science Fiction Stories (1953) and "Lord Tedric" in Universe Science Fiction (1954). These were almost completely forgotten until after Smith's death. In 1975, a compendium of Smith's works was published, entitled The Best of E. E. "Doc" Smith, containing these two short stories, excerpts from several of his major works, and another short story first published in Worlds of If in 1964 entitled "The Imperial Stars".
In Smith's original short stories, Tedric was a smith (both blacksmith and whitesmith) residing in a small town near a castle in a situation roughly equivalent to England of the 1200s. He received instruction in advanced metallurgy from a time-traveler who wanted to change the situation in his own time by modifying certain events of the past. From this instruction, he was able to build better suits of armor and help defeat the villains of the piece. Unlike Eklund's later novels based on these short stories, the original Tedric never left his own time or planet, and fought purely local enemies of his own time period.
A few years later and 13 years after Smith's death, Verna Smith arranged with Gordon Eklund to publish another novel of the same name about the same fictional character, introducing it as "a new series conceived by E. E. 'Doc' Smith". Eklund later went on to publish the other novels in the series, one or two under the pseudonym "E. E. 'Doc' Smith" or "E. E. Smith". The protagonist possesses heroic qualities similar to those of the heroes in Smith's original novels and can communicate with an extra-dimensional race of beings known as the Scientists, whose archenemy is Fra Villion, a mysterious character described as a dark knight, skilled in whip-sword combat, and evil genius behind the creation of a planetoid-sized "iron sphere" armed with a weapon capable of destroying planets. As a result, Smith is believed by many to be the unacknowledged progenitor of themes that would appear in Star Wars. In fact, however, these appear in the sequels written by others after Smith's death.
Critical opinion
Smith's novels are generally considered to be classic space operas, and he is sometimes called the first of the three "novas" of 20th-century science fiction (with Stanley G. Weinbaum and Robert A. Heinlein as the second and third novas).
Heinlein credited him for being his main influence:
I have learned from many writers—from Verne and Wells and Campbell and Sinclair Lewis, et al.—but I have learned more from you than from any of the others and perhaps more than for all the others put together...
Smith expressed a preference for inventing fictional technologies that were not strictly impossible (so far as the science of the day was aware) but highly unlikely: "the more highly improbable a concept is—short of being contrary to mathematics whose fundamental operations involve no neglect of infinitesimals—the better I like it" was his phrase.Lensman was one of five finalists when the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention judged Isaac Asimov's Foundation the Best All-Time Series.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Smith in 2004.
Extending the Lensman universeVortex Blasters (also known as Masters of the Vortex) is set in the same universe as the Lensman novels. It is an extension to the main storyline which takes place between Galactic Patrol and Children of the Lens, and introduces a different type of psionics from that used by the Lensmen. Spacehounds of IPC is not a part of the series, despite occasional erroneous statements to the contrary. (It is listed as a novel in the series in some paperback editions of the 1970s.)
Influence on science and the military
Smith was widely read by scientists and engineers from the 1930s into the 1970s. Literary precursors of ideas which arguably entered the military-scientific complex include SDI (Triplanetary), stealth (Gray Lensman), the OODA loop, C3-based warfare, and the AWACS (Gray Lensman).
An inarguable influence was described in a June 11, 1947, letter to Smith from John W. Campbell (the editor of Astounding, where much of the Lensman series was originally published). In it, Campbell relayed Captain Cal Laning's acknowledgment that he had used Smith's ideas for displaying the battlespace situation (called the "tank" in the stories) in the design of the United States Navy's ships' Combat Information Centers. "The entire set-up was taken specifically, directly, and consciously from the Directrix. In your story, you reached the situation the Navy was in—more communication channels than integration techniques to handle it. You proposed such an integrating technique and proved how advantageous it could be. You, sir, were 100% right. As the Japanese Navy—not the hypothetical Boskonian fleet—learned at an appalling cost."
One underlying theme of the later Lensman novels was the difficulty in maintaining military secrecy—as advanced capabilities are revealed, the opposing side can often duplicate them. This point was also discussed extensively by John Campbell in his letter to Smith. Also in the later Lensman novels, and particular after the "Battle of Klovia" broke the Boskonian's power base at the end of Second Stage Lensmen, the Boskonian forces and particularly Kandron of Onlo reverted to terroristic tactics to attempt to demoralize Civilization, thus providing an early literary glimpse into this modern problem of both law enforcement and military response. The use of "Vee-two" gas by the pirates attacking the Hyperion in Triplanetary (in both magazine and book appearances) also suggests anticipation of the terrorist uses of poison gases. (But note that Smith lived through WW I, when the use of poison gas on troops was well known to the populace; extending the assumption that pirates might use it if they could obtain it was no great extension of the present-day knowledge.)
The beginning of the story Skylark of Space describes in relative detail the protagonist's research into separation of platinum group residues, subsequent experiments involving electrolysis, and the discovery of a process evocative of cold fusion (over 50 years before Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann). He describes a nuclear process yielding large amounts of energy and producing only negligible radioactive waste—which then goes on to form the basis of the adventures in the Skylark books. Smith's general description of the process of discovery is highly evocative of Röntgen's descriptions of his discovery of the X-ray.
Another theme of the Skylark novels involves precursors of modern information technology. The humanoid aliens encountered in the first novel have developed a primitive technology called the "mechanical educator", which allows direct conversion of brain waves into intelligible thought for transmission to others or for electrical storage. By the third novel in the series, Skylark of Valeron, this technology has grown into an "Electronic Brain" which is capable of computation on all "bands" of energy—electromagnetism, gravity, and "tachyonic" energy and radiation bands included. This is itself derived from a discussion of reductionist atomic theory in the second novel, Skylark Three, which brings to mind modern quark and sub-quark theories of elementary particle physics.
Literary influences
In his 1947 essay "The Epic of Space", Smith listed (by last name only) authors he enjoyed reading: John W. Campbell, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt (specifically The Ship of Ishtar, The Moon Pool, The Snake Mother, and Dwellers in the Mirage, as well as the character John Kenton), C. L. Moore (specifically "Jirel of Joiry"), Roman Frederick Starzl, John Taine, A. E. van Vogt, Stanley G. Weinbaum (specifically "Tweerl"), and Jack Williamson. In a passage on his preparation for writing the Lensman novels, he notes that Clinton Constantinescu's "War of the Universe" was not a masterpiece,Clinton Constantinescu (1912–1999), later Clinton Constant, was a Romanian Canadian chemical engineer and a member of the American Astronomical Society and several other scientific associations . "War of the Universe", one of his forays into science fiction, depicted a grand multisided space melee using a great variety of superscience weapons, and involving various human races which developed independently of each other on many planets, as well as insectoid, bird-like, and termite-like creatures. A summary is provided on p. 83 of Everett Franklin Bleiler and Richard Bleiler's "Science-fiction: The Gernsback Years" but says that Starzl and Williamson were masters; this suggests that Starzl's Interplanetary Flying Patrol may have been an influence on Smith's Triplanetary Patrol, later the Galactic Patrol. The feeding of the Overlords of Delgon upon the life-force of their victims at the end of chapter five of Galactic Patrol seems a clear allusion to chapter 29 of The Moon Pool, Merritt's account of the Taithu and the power of love in chapters 29 and 34 also bear some resemblance to the end of Children of the Lens. Smith also mentions Edgar Rice Burroughs, complaining about loose ends at the end of one of his novels.
Smith acknowledges the help of the Galactic Roamers writers' workshop, plus E. Everett Evans, Ed Counts, an unnamed aeronautical engineer, Dr. James Enright, and Dr. Richard W. Dodson. Smith's daughter, Verna, lists the following authors as visitors to the Smith household in her youth: Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, Heinlein, Dave Kyle, Bob Tucker, Williamson, Pohl, Merritt, and the Galactic Roamers. Smith cites Bigelow's Theoretical Chemistry–Fundamentals as a justification for the possibility of the inertialess drive. Also, an extended reference is made to Rudyard Kipling's "Ballad of Boh Da Thone" in Gray Lensman (chapter 22, "Regeneration", in a conversation between Kinnison and MacDougall). Again in Gray Lensman, Smith quotes from Merritt's Dwellers in the Mirage, even name-checking the author:
Sam Moskowitz's biographical essay on Smith in Seekers of Tomorrow states that he regularly read Argosy magazine, and everything by H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Moskowitz also notes that Smith's "reading enthusiasms included poetry, philosophy, ancient and medieval history, and all of English literature". (Smith's grandson notes that he spoke, and sang, German.) The influence of these is not readily apparent, except in the Roman section of Triplanetary, and in the impeccable but convoluted grammar of Smith's narration. Some influence of 19th-century philosophy of language may be detectable in the account in Galactic Patrol of the Lens of Arisia as a universal translator, which is reminiscent of Frege's strong realism about Sinn, that is, thought or sense.
Both Moskowitz and Smith's daughter Verna Smith Trestrail report that Smith had a troubled relationship with John Campbell, the editor of Astounding. Smith's most successful works were published under Campbell, but the degree of influence is uncertain. The original outline for the Lensman series had been accepted by F. Orlin Tremaine, and Smith angered Campbell by showing loyalty to Tremaine at his new magazine, Comet, when he sold him "The Vortex Blaster" in 1941. Campbell's announcement of Children of the Lens, in 1947, was less than enthusiastic. Campbell later said that he published it only reluctantly, though he praised it privately, and bought little from Smith thereafter.
Derivative works and influence on popular culture
Randall Garrett wrote a parody entitled Backstage Lensman which Smith reportedly enjoyed. Harry Harrison also parodied Smith's work in the novel, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke's space battle in Earthlight was based on the attack on the Mardonalian fortress in chapter seven of Skylark Three.
Steve 'Slug' Russell wrote one of the first computer games, Spacewar!, with inspiration from the space battles from the Lensman series.
The Japanese Lensman anime is more an imitation of Star Wars than a translation of the Lensman novels. Efforts to print translations of the associated manga in the United States in the early 1990s without payment of royalties to the Smith family were successfully blocked in court by Verna Smith Trestrail with the help of several California science-fiction authors and fans.
In his biography, George Lucas reveals that the Lensman novels were a major influence on his youth. J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the science-fiction television series Babylon 5, also has acknowledged the influence of the Lensman books.
Superman creator Jerry Siegel was impressed, at an early age, with the optimistic vision of the future presented in Skylark of Space.
An attempt to create a feature film based on the Lensman series by Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment and Universal Studios began in 2008 with J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5, as writer, but in 2014 the project was scrapped because of budget limitations.
In her short "Pliocene Companion" book, author Julian May explained that a major character in her Exile series written in the early 1980s, Marc Remillard, was strongly influenced by Smith's villain character from Skylark DuQuesne, Marc DuQuesne. This was somewhat of a tribute to Smith. May had written an early SF work called Dune Roller in 1950, and had attended several Science Fiction Conventions in the early '50's, where she met and came to know Smith personally.
Fictional appearances
Smith himself appears as a character in the 2006 novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. The novel describes friendship and rivalry among pulp writers of the 1930s. He also appears as "Lensman Ted Smith" in the 1980 novel The Number of the Beast and as "Commander Ted Smith" in the 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, both by Robert A. Heinlein. It is also suggested that he was one of the inspirations for Heinlein's character Lazarus Long. Christopher Nuttall incorporates a fictional quote from “Edward E. Smith, Professor of Sociology” in his military science fiction book, “No Worse Enemy”.
Bibliography
Because he died in 1965, the works of E. E. Smith are now public domain in countries where the term of copyright lasts 50 years after the death of the author, or less; generally this does not include works first published posthumously. Works first published before 1923, are also public domain in the United States. Additionally, a number of the author's works have become public domain in the United States owing to non-renewal of copyright.
Lensman
Triplanetary (1948)
First Lensman (1950)
Galactic Patrol (1950)
Gray Lensman (1951)
Second Stage Lensmen (1953)
The Vortex Blaster (1960)
Children of the Lens (1954)
Skylark
The Skylark of Space (1946)
Skylark Three (1948)
Skylark of Valeron (1949)
Skylark DuQuesne (1966)
Subspace
Subspace Explorers (1965)
Subspace Encounter'' (1983)
References
External links
Skylark Three (original magazine version)
Spacehounds of IPC (original magazine version)
Some Clays of Idaho, Smith's bachelor's thesis, from the University of Idaho
1890 births
1965 deaths
American science fiction writers
Science Fiction Hall of Fame inductees
Writers from Boise, Idaho
People from Sheboygan, Wisconsin
People from Seaside, Oregon
Novelists from Wisconsin
University of Idaho alumni
Columbian College of Arts and Sciences alumni
American Presbyterians
20th-century American novelists
Pulp fiction writers
American male novelists
Novelists from Idaho
20th-century American male writers | [
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The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR; formally the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) is an international convention to protect human rights and political freedoms in Europe. Drafted in 1950 by the then newly formed Council of Europe, the convention entered into force on 3 September 1953. All Council of Europe member states are party to the Convention and new members are expected to ratify the convention at the earliest opportunity.
The Convention established the European Court of Human Rights (generally referred to by the initials ECtHR). Any person who feels their rights have been violated under the Convention by a state party can take a case to the Court. Judgments finding violations are binding on the States concerned and they are obliged to execute them. The Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe monitors the execution of judgements, particularly to ensure payments awarded by the Court appropriately compensate applicants for the damage they have sustained.
The Convention has several protocols, which amend the convention framework.
The Convention has had a significant influence on the law in Council of Europe member countries and is widely considered the most effective international treaty for human rights protection.
History
The European Convention on Human Rights has played an important role in the development and awareness of human rights in Europe.
The development of a regional system of human rights protections operating across Europe can be seen as a direct response to twin concerns. First, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the convention, drawing on the inspiration of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, can be seen as part of a wider response from the Allied powers in delivering a human rights agenda to prevent the most serious human rights violations which had occurred during the Second World War from happening again. Second, the Convention was a response to the growth of Stalinism in Central and Eastern Europe and designed to protect the member states of the Council of Europe from communist subversion. This, in part, explains the constant references to values and principles that are "necessary in a democratic society" throughout the Convention, despite the fact that such principles are not in any way defined within the convention itself.
From 7 to 10 May 1948, politicians including Winston Churchill, François Mitterrand and Konrad Adenauer, civil society representatives, academics, business leaders, trade unionists, and religious leaders convened the Congress of Europe in The Hague. At the end of the Congress, a declaration and following pledge to create the Convention was issued. The second and third Articles of the Pledge stated: "We desire a Charter of Human Rights guaranteeing liberty of thought, assembly and expression as well as right to form a political opposition. We desire a Court of Justice with adequate sanctions for the implementation of this Charter."
The Convention was drafted by the Council of Europe after the Second World War and Hague Congress. Over 100 parliamentarians from the twelve member states of the Council of Europe gathered in Strasbourg in the summer of 1949 for the first ever meeting of the Council's Consultative Assembly to draft a "charter of human rights" and to establish a court to enforce it. British MP and lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the Chair of the Assembly's Committee on Legal and Administrative Questions, was one of its leading members and guided the drafting of the Convention, based on an earlier draft produced by the European Movement. As a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, he had seen first-hand how international justice could be effectively applied. French former minister and Resistance fighter Pierre-Henri Teitgen submitted a report to the Assembly proposing a list of rights to be protected, selecting a number from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that had recently been agreed to in New York, and defining how the enforcing judicial mechanism might operate. After extensive debates, the Assembly sent its final proposal to the Council's Committee of Ministers, which convened a group of experts to draft the Convention itself.
The Convention was designed to incorporate a traditional civil liberties approach to securing "effective political democracy", from the strongest traditions in the United Kingdom, France and other member states of the fledgling Council of Europe, as said by Guido Raimondi, President of European Court of Human Rights:
The Convention was opened for signature on 4 November 1950 in Rome. It was ratified and entered into force on 3 September 1953. It is overseen and enforced by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and the Council of Europe. Until procedural reforms in the late 1990s, the Convention was also overseen by a European Commission on Human Rights.
Drafting
The Convention is drafted in broad terms, in a similar (albeit more modern) manner to the 1689 Scottish Claim of Right Act 1689, to the 1689 English Bill of Rights, the 1791 U.S. Bill of Rights, the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, or the first part of the German Basic Law. Statements of principle are, from a legal point of view, not determinative and require extensive interpretation by courts to bring out meaning in particular factual situations.
Convention articles
As amended by Protocol 11, the Convention consists of three parts. The main rights and freedoms are contained in Section I, which consists of Articles 2 to 18. Section II (Articles 19 to 51) sets up the Court and its rules of operation. Section III contains various concluding provisions.
Before the entry into force of Protocol 11, Section II (Article 19) set up the Commission and the Court, Sections III (Articles 20 to 37) and IV (Articles 38 to 59) included the high-level machinery for the operation of, respectively, the Commission and the Court, and Section V contained various concluding provisions.
Many of the Articles in Section I are structured in two paragraphs: the first sets out a basic right or freedom (such as Article 2(1) – the right to life) but the second contains various exclusions, exceptions or limitations on the basic right (such as Article 2(2) – which excepts certain uses of force leading to death).
Article 1 – respecting rights
Article 1 simply binds the signatory parties to secure the rights under the other Articles of the Convention "within their jurisdiction". In exceptional cases, "jurisdiction" may not be confined to a Contracting State's own national territory; the obligation to secure Convention rights then also extends to foreign territories, such as occupied land in which the State exercises effective control.
In Loizidou v Turkey, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that jurisdiction of member states to the convention extended to areas under that state's effective control as a result of military action.
Article 2 – life
Article 2 protects the right of every person to their life. The right to life extends only to human beings, not to animals, or to "legal persons" such as corporations. In Evans v United Kingdom, the Court ruled that the question of whether the right to life extends to a human embryo fell within a state's margin of appreciation. In Vo v France, the Court declined to extend the right to life to an unborn child, while stating that "it is neither desirable, nor even possible as matters stand, to answer in the abstract the question whether the unborn child is a person for the purposes of Article 2 of the Convention".
The Court has ruled that states have three main duties under Article 2:
a duty to refrain from unlawful killing,
a duty to investigate suspicious deaths, and
in certain circumstances, a positive duty to prevent foreseeable loss of life.
The first paragraph of the article contains an exception for lawful executions, although this exception has largely been superseded by Protocols 6 and 13. Protocol 6 prohibits the imposition of the death penalty in peacetime, while Protocol 13 extends the prohibition to all circumstances. (For more on Protocols 6 and 13, see below).
The second paragraph of Article 2 provides that death resulting from defending oneself or others, arresting a suspect or fugitive, or suppressing riots or insurrections, will not contravene the Article when the use of force involved is "no more than absolutely necessary".
Signatory states to the Convention can only derogate from the rights contained in Article 2 for deaths which result from lawful acts of war.
The European Court of Human Rights did not rule upon the right to life until 1995, when in McCann and Others v United Kingdom it ruled that the exception contained in the second paragraph does not constitute situations when it is permitted to kill, but situations where it is permitted to use force which might result in the deprivation of life.
Article 3 – torture
Article 3 prohibits torture and "inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". There are no exceptions or limitations on this right. This provision usually applies, apart from torture, to cases of severe police violence and poor conditions in detention.
The Court has emphasized the fundamental nature of Article 3 in holding that the prohibition is made in "absolute terms ... irrespective of a victim's conduct". The Court has also held that states cannot deport or extradite individuals who might be subjected to torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, in the recipient state.
The first case to examine Article 3 was the Greek case, which set an influential precedent. In Ireland v. United Kingdom (1979–1980) the Court ruled that the five techniques developed by the United Kingdom (wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, and deprivation of food and drink), as used against fourteen detainees in Northern Ireland by the United Kingdom were "inhuman and degrading" and breached the European Convention on Human Rights, but did not amount to "torture".
In Aksoy v. Turkey (1997) the Court found Turkey guilty of torture in 1996 in the case of a detainee who was suspended by his arms while his hands were tied behind his back.
Selmouni v. France (2000) the Court has appeared to be more open to finding states guilty of torture ruling that since the Convention is a "living instrument", treatment which it had previously characterized as inhuman or degrading treatment might in future be regarded as torture.
In 2014, after new information was uncovered that showed the decision to use the five techniques in Northern Ireland in 1971–1972 had been taken by British ministers, the Irish Government asked the European Court of Human Rights to review its judgement. In 2018, by six votes to one, the Court declined.
Article 4 – servitude
Article 4 prohibits slavery, servitude and forced labour but exempts labour:
done as a normal part of imprisonment,
in the form of compulsory military service or work done as an alternative by conscientious objectors,
required to be done during a state of emergency, and
considered to be a part of a person's normal "civic obligations".
Article 5 – liberty and security
Article 5 provides that everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. Liberty and security of the person are taken as a "compound" concept – security of the person has not been subject to separate interpretation by the Court.
Article 5 provides the right to liberty, subject only to lawful arrest or detention under certain other circumstances, such as arrest on reasonable suspicion of a crime or imprisonment in fulfilment of a sentence. The article also provides those arrested with the right to be informed, in a language they understand, of the reasons for the arrest and any charge they face, the right of prompt access to judicial proceedings to determine the legality of the arrest or detention, to trial within a reasonable time or release pending trial, and the right to compensation in the case of arrest or detention in violation of this article.
Assanidze v. Georgia, App. No. 71503/01 (Eur. Ct. H.R. 8 April 2004)
Article 6 – fair trial
Article 6 provides a detailed right to a fair trial, including the right to a public hearing before an independent and impartial tribunal within reasonable time, the presumption of innocence, and other minimum rights for those charged with a criminal offence (adequate time and facilities to prepare their defence, access to legal representation, right to examine witnesses against them or have them examined, right to the free assistance of an interpreter).
The majority of convention violations that the court finds today are excessive delays, in violation of the "reasonable time" requirement, in civil and criminal proceedings before national courts, mostly in Italy and France. Under the "independent tribunal" requirement, the court has ruled that military judges in Turkish state security courts are incompatible with Article 6. In compliance with this Article, Turkey has now adopted a law abolishing these courts.
Another significant set of violations concerns the "confrontation clause" of Article 6 (i.e. the right to examine witnesses or have them examined). In this respect, problems of compliance with Article 6 may arise when national laws allow the use in evidence of the testimonies of absent, anonymous and vulnerable witnesses.
Steel v. United Kingdom (1998) 28 EHRR 603
Assanidze v. Georgia [2004] ECHR 140
Othman (Abu Qatada) v. United Kingdom (2012) – Abu Qatada could not be deported to Jordan as that would be a violation of Article 6 "given the real risk of the admission of evidence obtained by torture". This was the first time the court ruled that such an expulsion would be a violation of Article 6.
Article 7 – retroactivity
Article 7 prohibits the retroactive criminalisation of acts and omissions. No person may be punished for an act that was not a criminal offence at the time of its commission. The article states that a criminal offence is one under either national or international law, which would permit a party to prosecute someone for a crime which was not illegal under domestic law at the time, so long as it was prohibited by international law. The Article also prohibits a heavier penalty being imposed than was applicable at the time when the criminal act was committed.
Article 7 incorporates the legal principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege (no crime, no penalty without law) into the convention.
Relevant cases are:
Kokkinakis v. Greece [1993] ECHR 20
S.A.S. v. France [2014] ECHR 69
Article 8 – privacy
Article 8 provides a right to respect for one's "private and family life, his home and his correspondence", subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society". This article clearly provides a right to be free of unlawful searches, but the Court has given the protection for "private and family life" that this article provides a broad interpretation, taking for instance that prohibition of private consensual homosexual acts violates this article. There have been cases discussing consensual familial sexual relationships, and how the criminalisation of this may violate this article. However, the ECHR still allows such familial sexual acts to be criminal. This may be compared to the jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court, which has also adopted a somewhat broad interpretation of the right to privacy. Furthermore, Article 8 sometimes comprises positive obligations: whereas classical human rights are formulated as prohibiting a State from interfering with rights, and thus not to do something (e.g. not to separate a family under family life protection), the effective enjoyment of such rights may also include an obligation for the State to become active, and to do something (e.g. to enforce access for a divorced parent to his/her child).
Notable cases:
Zakharov v. Russia [2015] EHCR 47143/06
Malone v. United Kingdom [1984] ECHR 10, (1984) 7 EHRR 14
Oliari and Others v. Italy (2015)
Article 9 – conscience and religion
Article 9 provides a right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This includes the freedom to change a religion or belief, and to manifest a religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance, subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society".
Relevant cases are:
Kokkinakis v. Greece [1993] ECHR 20
Universelles Leben e.V. v. Germany [1996] (app. no. 29745/96)
Buscarini and Others v. San Marino [1999] ECHR 7
Pichon and Sajous v. France [2001] ECHR 898
Leyla Şahin v. Turkey [2004] ECHR 299
Leela Förderkreis E.V. and Others v. Germany [2008] ECHR
Lautsi v. Italy [2011] ECHR 2412
S.A.S. v. France [2014] ECHR 695
Eweida v. United Kingdom [2013] ECHR 2013
Article 10 – expression
Article 10 provides the right to freedom of expression, subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society". This right includes the freedom to hold opinions, and to receive and impart information and ideas, but allows restrictions for:
interests of national security
territorial integrity or public safety
prevention of disorder or crime
protection of health or morals
protection of the reputation or the rights of others
preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence
maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary
Relevant cases are:
Lingens v. Austria (1986) 8 EHRR 407
The Observer and The Guardian v. United Kingdom (1991) 14 EHRR 153, the "Spycatcher" case.
Bowman v. United Kingdom [1998] ECHR 4, (1998) 26 EHRR 1, distributing vast quantities of anti-abortion material in contravention of election spending laws
Communist Party v. Turkey (1998) 26 EHRR 1211
Appleby v. United Kingdom (2003) 37 EHRR 38, protests in a private shopping centre
Article 11 – association
Article 11 protects the right to freedom of assembly and association, including the right to form trade unions, subject to certain restrictions that are "in accordance with law" and "necessary in a democratic society".
Vogt v. Germany (1995)
Yazar, Karatas, Aksoy and Hep v. Turkey (2003) 36 EHRR 59
Bączkowski v. Poland (2005)
Article 12 – marriage
Article 12 provides a right for women and men of marriageable age to marry and establish a family.
Despite a number of invitations, the Court has so far refused to apply the protections of this article to same-sex marriage. The Court has defended this on the grounds that the article was intended to apply only to different-sex marriage, and that a wide margin of appreciation must be granted to parties in this area.
In Goodwin v. United Kingdom the Court ruled that a law which still classified post-operative transsexual persons under their pre-operative sex violated article 12 as it meant that transsexual persons were unable to marry individuals of their post-operative opposite sex. This reversed an earlier ruling in Rees v. United Kingdom. This did not, however, alter the Court's understanding that Article 12 protects only different-sex couples.
The European Court of Human Rights ruled in Schalk and Kopf v. Austria that countries are not required to provide marriage licenses for same-sex couples; however, if a country allows same-sex couple marriage it must be done under the same conditions that opposite-sex couples marriage face, in order to prevent a breach of article 14 – the prohibition of discrimination. Additionally, the court ruled in the 2015 case of Oliari and Others v. Italy that states have a positive obligation to ensure there is a specific legal framework for the recognition and protection of same-sex couples.
Article 13 – effective remedy
Article 13 provides for the right for an effective remedy before national authorities for violations of rights under the Convention. The inability to obtain a remedy before a national court for an infringement of a Convention right is thus a free-standing and separately actionable infringement of the Convention.
Article 14 – discrimination
Article 14 contains a prohibition of discrimination. This prohibition is broad in some ways and narrow in others. It is broad in that it prohibits discrimination under a potentially unlimited number of grounds. While the article specifically prohibits discrimination based on "sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinions, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status", the last of these allows the court to extend to Article 14 protection to other grounds not specifically mentioned such as has been done regarding discrimination based on a person's sexual orientation.
At the same time, the article's protection is limited in that it only prohibits discrimination with respect to rights under the Convention. Thus, an applicant must prove discrimination in the enjoyment of a specific right that is guaranteed elsewhere in the Convention (e.g. discrimination based on sex – Article 14 – in the enjoyment of the right to freedom of expression – Article 10).
Protocol 12 extends this prohibition to cover discrimination in any legal right, even when that legal right is not protected under the Convention, so long as it is provided for in national law.
Article 15 – derogations
Article 15 allows contracting states to derogate from certain rights guaranteed by the Convention in a time of "war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation". Permissible derogations under article 15 must meet three substantive conditions:
there must be a public emergency threatening the life of the nation;
any measures taken in response must be "strictly required by the exigencies of the situation"; and
the measures taken in response to it must be in compliance with a state's other obligations under international law.
In addition to these substantive requirements, the derogation must be procedurally sound. There must be some formal announcement of the derogation and notice of the derogation and any measures adopted under it, and the ending of the derogation must be communicated to the Secretary-General of the Council of Europe.
As of 2016, eight member states had ever invoked derogations. The Court is quite permissive in accepting a state's derogations from the Convention but applies a higher degree of scrutiny in deciding whether measures taken by states under a derogation are, in the words of Article 15, "strictly required by the exigencies of the situation". Thus in A v United Kingdom, the Court dismissed a claim that a derogation lodged by the British government in response to the September 11 attacks was invalid, but went on to find that measures taken by the United Kingdom under that derogation were disproportionate.
Examples of such derogations include:
In the 1969 Greek case, the European Commission of Human Rights ruled that the derogation was invalid because the alleged Communist subversion did not pose a sufficient threat. This is the only time to date that the Convention system has rejected an attempted derogation.
Operation Demetrius—Internees arrested without trial pursuant to "Operation Demetrius" could not complain to the European Commission of Human Rights about breaches of Article 5 because on 27 June 1975, the UK lodged a notice with the Council of Europe declaring that there was a "public emergency within the meaning of Article 15(1) of the Convention".
Article 16 – foreign parties
Article 16 allows states to restrict the political activity of foreigners. The Court has ruled that European Union member states cannot consider the nationals of other member states to be aliens.
Article 17 – abuse of rights
Article 17 provides that no one may use the rights guaranteed by the Convention to seek the abolition or limitation of rights guaranteed in the Convention. This addresses instances where states seek to restrict a human right in the name of another human right, or where individuals rely on a human right to undermine other human rights (for example where an individual issues a death threat).
Communist Party of Germany v. the Federal Republic of Germany (1957), the Commission refused to consider the appeal by the Communist Party of Germany, stating that the communist doctrine advocated by them is incompatible with the convention, citing article 17's limitations on the rights to the extent necessarily to prevent their subversion by adherents of a totalitarian doctrine.
Article 18 – permitted restrictions
Article 18 provides that any limitations on the rights provided for in the Convention may be used only for the purpose for which they are provided. For example, Article 5, which guarantees the right to personal freedom, may be explicitly limited in order to bring a suspect before a judge. To use pre-trial detention as a means of intimidation of a person under a false pretext is, therefore, a limitation of right (to freedom) which does not serve an explicitly provided purpose (to be brought before a judge), and is therefore contrary to Article 18.
Convention protocols
, fifteen protocols to the Convention have been opened for signature. These can be divided into two main groups: those amending the framework of the convention system, and those expanding the rights that can be protected. The former require unanimous ratification by member states before coming into force, while the latter require a certain number of states to sign before coming into force.
Protocol 1
This Protocol contains three different rights which the signatories could not agree to place in the Convention itself. Monaco and Switzerland have signed but never ratified Protocol 1.
Article 1 – property
Article 1 ("A1P1") provides that "every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions". The European Court of Human Rights acknowledged a violation of the fair balance between the demands of the general interest of the community and the requirements of the protection of the individual's fundamental rights, also, in the uncertainty – for the owner – about the future of the property, and in the absence of an allowance.
Article 2 – education
Article 2 provides for the right not to be denied an education and the right for parents to have their children educated in accordance with their religious and other views. It does not however guarantee any particular level of education of any particular quality.
Although phrased in the Protocol as a negative right, in Şahin v. Turkey the Court ruled that:
Article 3 – elections
Article 3 provides for the right to elections performed by secret ballot, that are also free and that occur at regular intervals.
Matthews v. United Kingdom (1999) 28 EHRR 361
Protocol 4 – civil imprisonment, free movement, expulsion
Article 1 prohibits the imprisonment of people for inability to fulfil a contract. Article 2 provides for a right to freely move within a country once lawfully there and for a right to leave any country. Article 3 prohibits the expulsion of nationals and provides for the right of an individual to enter a country of their nationality. Article 4 prohibits the collective expulsion of foreigners.
Turkey and the United Kingdom have signed but never ratified Protocol 4. Greece and Switzerland have neither signed nor ratified this protocol.
The United Kingdom's failure to ratify this protocol is due to concerns over the interaction of Article 2 and Article 3 with British nationality law. Specifically, several classes of "British national" (such as British National (Overseas)) do not have the right of abode in the United Kingdom and are subject to immigration control there. In 2009, the UK government stated that it had no plans to ratify Protocol 4 because of concerns that those articles could be taken as conferring that right.
Protocol 6 – restriction of death penalty
Requires parties to restrict the application of the death penalty to times of war or "imminent threat of war".
Every Council of Europe member state has signed and ratified Protocol 6, except Russia, which has signed but not ratified.
Protocol 7 – crime and family
Article 1 provides for a right to fair procedures for lawfully resident foreigners facing expulsion.
Article 2 provides for the right to appeal in criminal matters.
Article 3 provides for compensation for the victims of miscarriages of justice.
Article 4 prohibits the re-trial of anyone who has already been finally acquitted or convicted of a particular offence (Double jeopardy).
Article 5 provides for equality between spouses.
Despite having signed the protocol more than thirty years ago Germany and the Netherlands have never ratified it. Turkey, which signed the protocol in 1985, ratified it in 2016, becoming the latest member state to do so. The United Kingdom has neither signed nor ratified the protocol.
Protocol 12 – discrimination
Applies the current expansive and indefinite grounds of prohibited discrimination in Article 14 to the exercise of any legal right and to the actions (including the obligations) of public authorities.
The Protocol entered into force on 1 April 2005 and has () been ratified by 20 member states. Several member states—Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Lithuania, Monaco, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—have not signed the protocol.
The United Kingdom government has declined to sign Protocol 12 on the basis that they believe the wording of protocol is too wide and would result in a flood of new cases testing the extent of the new provision. They believe that the phrase "rights set forth by law" might include international conventions to which the UK is not a party, and would result in incorporation of these instruments by stealth. It has been suggested that the protocol is therefore in a catch-22, since the UK will decline to either sign or ratify the protocol until the European Court of Human Rights has addressed the meaning of the provision, while the court is hindered in doing so by the lack of applications to the court concerning the protocol caused by the decisions of Europe's most populous states—including the UK—not to ratify the protocol. The UK government, nevertheless, stated in 2004 that it "agrees in principle that the ECHR should contain a provision against discrimination that is free-standing and not parasitic on the other Convention rights". The first judgment that found a violation of Protocol No. 12, Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina, was delivered in 2009.
Protocol 13 – complete abolition of death penalty
Protocol 13 provides for the total abolition of the death penalty. Currently all Council of Europe member states but three have ratified Protocol 13. Armenia has signed but not ratified the protocol. Russia and Azerbaijan have not signed it.
Procedural and institutional protocols
The Convention's provisions affecting institutional and procedural matters have been altered several times by means of protocols. These amendments have, with the exception of Protocol 2, amended the text of the convention. Protocol 2 did not amend the text of the convention as such but stipulated that it was to be treated as an integral part of the text. All of these protocols have required the unanimous ratification of all the member states of the Council of Europe to enter into force.
Protocol 11
Protocols 2, 3, 5, 8, 9 and 10 have now been superseded by Protocol 11 which entered into force on 1 November 1998. It established a fundamental change in the machinery of the convention. It abolished the Commission, allowing individuals to apply directly to the Court, which was given compulsory jurisdiction and altered the latter's structure. Previously states could ratify the Convention without accepting the jurisdiction of the Court of Human Rights. The protocol also abolished the judicial functions of the Committee of Ministers.
Protocol 14
Protocol 14 follows on from Protocol 11 in proposing to further improve the efficiency of the Court. It seeks to "filter" out cases that have less chance of succeeding along with those that are broadly similar to cases brought previously against the same member state. Furthermore, a case will not be considered admissible where an applicant has not suffered a "significant disadvantage". This latter ground can only be used when an examination of the application on the merits is not considered necessary and where the subject-matter of the application had already been considered by a national court.
A new mechanism was introduced by Protocol 14 to assist enforcement of judgements by the Committee of Ministers. The Committee can ask the Court for an interpretation of a judgement and can even bring a member state before the Court for non-compliance of a previous judgement against that state. Protocol 14 also allows for European Union accession to the Convention. The protocol has been ratified by every Council of Europe member state, Russia being last in February 2010. It entered into force on 1 June 2010.
A provisional Protocol 14bis had been opened for signature in 2009. Pending the ratification of Protocol 14 itself, 14bis was devised to allow the Court to implement revised procedures in respect of the states which have ratified it. It allowed single judges to reject manifestly inadmissible applications made against the states that have ratified the protocol. It also extended the competence of three-judge chambers to declare applications made against those states admissible and to decide on their merits where there already is a well-established case law of the Court. Now that all Council of Europe member states have ratified Protocol 14, Protocol 14bis has lost its raison d'être and according to its own terms ceased to have any effect when Protocol 14 entered into force on 1 June 2010.
See also
Strasbourg Observers
Capital punishment in Europe
Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union
European Social Charter
Human Rights Act 1998 for how the Convention has been incorporated into the law of the United Kingdom.
Human rights in Europe
Territorial scope of European Convention on Human Rights
European Convention on Human Rights Act 2003 Irish Act similar to the British Human Rights Act 1998.
International Institute of Human Rights
United Kingdom constitutional law
Notes
Further reading
Kälin W., Künzli J. (2019). The Law of International Human Rights Protection. .
External links
Official text of the European Convention on Human Rights
Protocols to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms
Database of European Human Rights Court (Strasbourg) judgments
Human rights instruments
Convention on Human Rights
Treaties concluded in 1950
Treaties entered into force in 1953
Treaties of Albania
Treaties of Andorra
Treaties of Armenia
Treaties of Austria
Treaties of Azerbaijan
Treaties of Belgium
Treaties of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Treaties of Bulgaria
Treaties of Croatia
Treaties of Cyprus
Treaties of the Czech Republic
Treaties of Denmark
Treaties of Estonia
Treaties of Finland
Treaties of France
Treaties of Georgia (country)
Treaties of West Germany
Treaties of Greece
Treaties of Hungary
Treaties of Iceland
Treaties of Ireland
Treaties of Italy
Treaties of Latvia
Treaties of Liechtenstein
Treaties of Lithuania
Treaties of Luxembourg
Treaties of Malta
Treaties of Moldova
Treaties of Monaco
Treaties of Montenegro
Treaties of the Netherlands
Treaties of Norway
Treaties of Poland
Treaties of Portugal
Treaties of Romania
Treaties of Russia
Treaties of San Marino
Treaties of Serbia and Montenegro
Treaties of Slovakia
Treaties of Slovenia
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Treaties of Sweden
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] |
JavaScript (), often abbreviated JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Over 97% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for web page behavior, often incorporating third-party libraries. All major web browsers have a dedicated JavaScript engine to execute the code on users' devices.
JavaScript is a high-level, often just-in-time compiled language that conforms to the ECMAScript standard. It has dynamic typing, prototype-based object-orientation, and first-class functions. It is multi-paradigm, supporting event-driven, functional, and imperative programming styles. It has application programming interfaces (APIs) for working with text, dates, regular expressions, standard data structures, and the Document Object Model (DOM).
The ECMAScript standard does not include any input/output (I/O), such as networking, storage, or graphics facilities. In practice, the web browser or other runtime system provides JavaScript APIs for I/O.
JavaScript engines were originally used only in web browsers, but are now core components of some servers and a variety of applications. The most popular runtime system for this usage is Node.js.
Although Java and JavaScript are similar in name, syntax, and respective standard libraries, the two languages are distinct and differ greatly in design.
History
Creation at Netscape
The first web browser with a graphical user interface, Mosaic, was released in 1993. Accessible to non-technical people, it played a prominent role in the rapid growth of the nascent World Wide Web. The lead developers of Mosaic then founded the Netscape corporation, which released a more polished browser, Netscape Navigator, in 1994. This quickly became the most-used.
During these formative years of the Web, web pages could only be static, lacking the capability for dynamic behavior after the page was loaded in the browser. There was a desire in the burgeoning web development scene to remove this limitation, so in 1995, Netscape decided to add a scripting language to Navigator. They pursued two routes to achieve this: collaborating with Sun Microsystems to embed the Java programming language, while also hiring Brendan Eich to embed the Scheme language.
Netscape management soon decided that the best option was for Eich to devise a new language, with syntax similar to Java and less like Scheme or other extant scripting languages. Although the new language and its interpreter implementation were called LiveScript when first shipped as part of a Navigator beta in September 1995, the name was changed to JavaScript for the official release in December.
The choice of the JavaScript name has caused confusion, implying that it is directly related to Java. At the time, the dot-com boom had begun and Java was the hot new language, so Eich considered the JavaScript name a marketing ploy by Netscape.
Adoption by Microsoft
Microsoft debuted Internet Explorer in 1995, leading to a browser war with Netscape. On the JavaScript front, Microsoft reverse-engineered the Navigator interpreter to create its own, called JScript.
JScript was first released in 1996, alongside initial support for CSS and extensions to HTML. Each of these implementations was noticeably different from their counterparts in Navigator. These differences made it difficult for developers to make their websites work well in both browsers, leading to widespread use of "best viewed in Netscape" and "best viewed in Internet Explorer" logos for several years.
The rise of JScript
In November 1996, Netscape submitted JavaScript to Ecma International, as the starting point for a standard specification that all browser vendors could conform to. This led to the official release of the first ECMAScript language specification in June 1997.
The standards process continued for a few years, with the release of ECMAScript 2 in June 1998 and ECMAScript 3 in December 1999. Work on ECMAScript 4 began in 2000.
Meanwhile, Microsoft gained an increasingly dominant position in the browser market. By the early 2000s, Internet Explorer's market share reached 95%. This meant that JScript became the de facto standard for client-side scripting on the Web.
Microsoft initially participated in the standards process and implemented some proposals in its JScript language, but eventually it stopped collaborating on Ecma work. Thus ECMAScript 4 was mothballed.
Growth and standardization
During the period of Internet Explorer dominance in the early 2000s, client-side scripting was stagnant. This started to change in 2004, when the successor of Netscape, Mozilla, released the Firefox browser. Firefox was well received by many, taking significant market share from Internet Explorer.
In 2005, Mozilla joined ECMA International, and work started on the ECMAScript for XML (E4X) standard. This led to Mozilla working jointly with Macromedia (later acquired by Adobe Systems), who were implementing E4X in their ActionScript 3 language, which was based on an ECMAScript 4 draft. The goal became standardizing ActionScript 3 as the new ECMAScript 4. To this end, Adobe Systems released the Tamarin implementation as an open source project. However, Tamarin and ActionScript 3 were too different from established client-side scripting, and without cooperation from Microsoft, ECMAScript 4 never reached fruition.
Meanwhile, very important developments were occurring in open-source communities not affiliated with ECMA work. In 2005, Jesse James Garrett released a white paper in which he coined the term Ajax and described a set of technologies, of which JavaScript was the backbone, to create web applications where data can be loaded in the background, avoiding the need for full page reloads. This sparked a renaissance period of JavaScript, spearheaded by open-source libraries and the communities that formed around them. Many new libraries were created, including jQuery, Prototype, Dojo Toolkit, and MooTools.
Google debuted its Chrome browser in 2008, with the V8 JavaScript engine that was faster than its competition. The key innovation was just-in-time compilation (JIT), so other browser vendors needed to overhaul their engines for JIT.
In July 2008, these disparate parties came together for a conference in Oslo. This led to the eventual agreement in early 2009 to combine all relevant work and drive the language forward. The result was the ECMAScript 5 standard, released in December 2009.
Reaching maturity
Ambitious work on the language continued for several years, culminating in an extensive collection of additions and refinements being formalized with the publication of ECMAScript 6 in 2015.
The creation of Node.js in 2009 by Ryan Dahl sparked a significant increase in the usage of JavaScript outside of web browsers. Node combines the V8 engine, an event loop, and I/O APIs, thereby providing a stand-alone JavaScript runtime system. As of 2018, Node had been used by millions of developers, and npm had the most modules of any package manager in the world.
The ECMAScript draft specification is currently maintained openly on GitHub, and editions are produced via regular annual snapshots. Potential revisions to the language are vetted through a comprehensive proposal process. Now, instead of edition numbers, developers check the status of upcoming features individually.
The current JavaScript ecosystem has many libraries and frameworks, established programming practices, and substantial usage of JavaScript outside of web browsers. Plus, with the rise of single-page applications and other JavaScript-heavy websites, several transpilers have been created to aid the development process.
Trademark
"JavaScript" is a trademark of Oracle Corporation in the United States.
Website client-side usage
JavaScript is the dominant client-side scripting language of the Web, with 97% of websites using it for this purpose. Scripts are embedded in or included from HTML documents and interact with the DOM. All major web browsers have a built-in JavaScript engine that executes the code on the user's device.
Examples of scripted behavior
Loading new web page content without reloading the page, via Ajax or a WebSocket. For example, users of social media can send and receive messages without leaving the current page.
Web page animations, such as fading objects in and out, resizing, and moving them.
Playing browser games.
Controlling the playback of streaming media.
Generating pop-up ads.
Validating input values of a web form before the data is sent to a web server.
Logging data about the user's behavior then sending it to a server. The website owner can use this data for analytics, ad tracking, and personalization.
Redirecting a user to another page.
Libraries and frameworks
Over 80% of websites use a third-party JavaScript library or web framework for their client-side scripting.
jQuery is by far the most popular library, used by over 75% of websites. Facebook created the React library for its website and later released it as open source; other sites, including Twitter, now use it. Likewise, the Angular framework created by Google for its websites, including YouTube and Gmail, is now an open source project used by others.
In contrast, the term "Vanilla JS" has been coined for websites not using any libraries or frameworks, instead relying entirely on standard JavaScript functionality.
Other usage
The use of JavaScript has expanded beyond its web browser roots. JavaScript engines are now embedded in a variety of other software systems, both for server-side website deployments and non-browser applications.
Initial attempts at promoting server-side JavaScript usage were Netscape Enterprise Server and Microsoft's Internet Information Services, but they were small niches. Server-side usage eventually started to grow in the late 2000s, with the creation of Node.js and other approaches.
Electron, Cordova, React Native, and other application frameworks have been used to create many applications with behavior implemented in JavaScript. Other non-browser applications include Adobe Acrobat support for scripting PDF documents and GNOME Shell extensions written in JavaScript.
JavaScript has recently begun to appear in some embedded systems, usually by leveraging Node.js.
Features
The following features are common to all conforming ECMAScript implementations unless explicitly specified otherwise.
Imperative and structured
JavaScript supports much of the structured programming syntax from C (e.g., if statements, while loops, switch statements, do while loops, etc.). One partial exception is scoping: originally JavaScript only had function scoping with var; then block scoping was added in ECMAScript 2015 with the keywords let and const. Like C, JavaScript makes a distinction between expressions and statements. One syntactic difference from C is automatic semicolon insertion, which allow semicolons (which terminate statements) to be omitted.
Weakly typed
JavaScript is weakly typed, which means certain types are implicitly cast depending on the operation used.
The binary + operator casts both operands to a string unless both operands are numbers. This is because the addition operator doubles as a concatenation operator
The binary - operator always casts both operands to a number
Both unary operators (+, -) always cast the operand to a number
Values are cast to strings like the following:
Strings are left as-is
Numbers are converted to their string representation
Arrays have their elements cast to strings after which they are joined by commas (,)
Other objects are converted to the string [object Object] where Object is the name of the constructor of the object
Values are cast to numbers by casting to strings and then casting the strings to numbers. These processes can be modified by defining toString and valueOf functions on the prototype for string and number casting respectively.
JavaScript has received criticism for the way it implements these conversions as the complexity of the rules can be mistaken for inconsistency. For example, when adding a number to a string, the number will be cast to a string before performing concatenation, but when subtracting a number from a string, the string is cast to a number before performing subtraction.
Often also mentioned is {} + [] resulting in 0 (number). This is misleading: the {} is interpreted as an empty code block instead of an empty object, and the empty array is cast to a number by the remaining unary + operator. If you wrap the expression in parentheses ({} + []) the curly brackets are interpreted as an empty object and the result of the expression is "[object Object]" as expected.
Dynamic
TypingJavaScript is dynamically typed like most other scripting languages. A type is associated with a value rather than an expression. For example, a variable initially bound to a number may be reassigned to a string. JavaScript supports various ways to test the type of objects, including duck typing.
Run-time evaluation JavaScript includes an eval function that can execute statements provided as strings at run-time.
Object-orientation (prototype-based)
Prototypal inheritance in JavaScript is described by Douglas Crockford as:
In JavaScript, an object is an associative array, augmented with a prototype (see below); each key provides the name for an object property, and there are two syntactical ways to specify such a name: dot notation (obj.x = 10) and bracket notation (obj['x'] = 10). A property may be added, rebound, or deleted at run-time. Most properties of an object (and any property that belongs to an object's prototype inheritance chain) can be enumerated using a for...in loop.
Prototypes JavaScript uses prototypes where many other object-oriented languages use classes for inheritance. It is possible to simulate many class-based features with prototypes in JavaScript.
Functions as object constructors Functions double as object constructors, along with their typical role. Prefixing a function call with new will create an instance of a prototype, inheriting properties and methods from the constructor (including properties from the Object prototype). ECMAScript 5 offers the Object.create method, allowing explicit creation of an instance without automatically inheriting from the Object prototype (older environments can assign the prototype to null). The constructor's prototype property determines the object used for the new object's internal prototype. New methods can be added by modifying the prototype of the function used as a constructor. JavaScript's built-in constructors, such as Array or Object, also have prototypes that can be modified. While it is possible to modify the Object prototype, it is generally considered bad practice because most objects in JavaScript will inherit methods and properties from the Object prototype, and they may not expect the prototype to be modified.
Functions as methods Unlike many object-oriented languages, there is no distinction between a function definition and a method definition. Rather, the distinction occurs during function calling; when a function is called as a method of an object, the function's local this keyword is bound to that object for that invocation.
Functional
A function is first-class; a function is considered to be an object. As such, a function may have properties and methods, such as .call() and .bind(). A nested function is a function defined within another function. It is created each time the outer function is invoked. In addition, each nested function forms a lexical closure: the lexical scope of the outer function (including any constant, local variable, or argument value) becomes part of the internal state of each inner function object, even after execution of the outer function concludes. JavaScript also supports anonymous functions.
Delegative
JavaScript supports implicit and explicit delegation.
Functions as roles (Traits and Mixins) JavaScript natively supports various function-based implementations of Role patterns like Traits and Mixins. Such a function defines additional behavior by at least one method bound to the this keyword within its function body. A Role then has to be delegated explicitly via call or apply to objects that need to feature additional behavior that is not shared via the prototype chain.
Object composition and inheritance Whereas explicit function-based delegation does cover composition in JavaScript, implicit delegation already happens every time the prototype chain is walked in order to, e.g., find a method that might be related to but is not directly owned by an object. Once the method is found it gets called within this object's context. Thus inheritance in JavaScript is covered by a delegation automatism that is bound to the prototype property of constructor functions.
Miscellaneous
JS is a zero-index language.
Run-time environmentJavaScript typically relies on a run-time environment (e.g., a web browser) to provide objects and methods by which scripts can interact with the environment (e.g., a web page DOM). These environments are single-threaded. JavaScript also relies on the run-time environment to provide the ability to include/import scripts (e.g., HTML <script> elements). This is not a language feature per se, but it is common in most JavaScript implementations. JavaScript processes messages from a queue one at a time. JavaScript calls a function associated with each new message, creating a call stack frame with the function's arguments and local variables. The call stack shrinks and grows based on the function's needs. When the call stack is empty upon function completion, JavaScript proceeds to the next message in the queue. This is called the event loop, described as "run to completion" because each message is fully processed before the next message is considered. However, the language's concurrency model describes the event loop as non-blocking: program input/output is performed using events and callback functions. This means, for instance, that JavaScript can process a mouse click while waiting for a database query to return information.
Variadic functions An indefinite number of parameters can be passed to a function. The function can access them through formal parameters and also through the local arguments object. Variadic functions can also be created by using the bind method.
Array and object literals Like many scripting languages, arrays and objects (associative arrays in other languages) can each be created with a succinct shortcut syntax. In fact, these literals form the basis of the JSON data format.
Regular expressions JavaScript also supports regular expressions in a manner similar to Perl, which provide a concise and powerful syntax for text manipulation that is more sophisticated than the built-in string functions.
Promises and Async/await JavaScript supports promises and Async/await for handling asynchronous operations. A built-in Promise object provides functionality for handling promises and associating handlers with an asynchronous action's eventual result. Recently, combinator methods were introduced in the JavaScript specification, which allows developers to combine multiple JavaScript promises and do operations based on different scenarios. The methods introduced are: Promise.race, Promise.all, Promise.allSettled and Promise.any. Async/await allows an asynchronous, non-blocking function to be structured in a way similar to an ordinary synchronous function. Asynchronous, non-blocking code can be written, with minimal overhead, structured similar to traditional synchronous, blocking code.
Vendor-specific extensions
Historically, some JavaScript engines supported these non-standard features:
conditional catch clauses (like Java)
array comprehensions and generator expressions (like Python)
concise function expressions (function(args) expr; this experimental syntax predated arrow functions)
ECMAScript for XML (E4X), an extension that adds native XML support to ECMAScript (unsupported in Firefox since version 21)
Syntax
Simple examples
Variables in JavaScript can be defined using either the var, let or const keywords.
// Declares a function-scoped variable named `x`, and implicitly assigns the
// special value `undefined` to it. Variables without value are automatically
// set to undefined.
var x;
// Variables can be manually set to `undefined` like so
var x2 = undefined;
// Declares a block-scoped variable named `y`, and implicitly sets it to
// `undefined`. The `let` keyword was introduced in ECMAScript 2015.
let y;
// Declares a block-scoped, un-reassignable variable named `z`, and sets it to
// a string literal. The `const` keyword was also introduced in ECMAScript 2015,
// and must be explicitly assigned to.
// The keyword `const` means constant, hence the variable cannot be reassigned
// as the value is `constant`.
const z = "this value cannot be reassigned!";
// Declares a variable named `myNumber`, and assigns a number literal (the value
// `2`) to it.
let myNumber = 2;
// Reassigns `myNumber`, setting it to a string literal (the value `"foo"`).
// JavaScript is a dynamically-typed language, so this is legal.
myNumber = "foo";
Note the comments in the example above, all of which were preceded with two forward slashes.
There is no built-in Input/output functionality in JavaScript; the run-time environment provides that. The ECMAScript specification in edition 5.1 mentions:
indeed, there are no provisions in this specification for input of external data or output of computed results.
However, most runtime environments have a console object that can be used to print output. Here is a minimalist Hello World program in JavaScript:
console.log("Hello World!");
A simple recursive function:
function factorial(n) {
if (n === 0)
return 1; // 0! = 1
return n * factorial(n - 1);
}
factorial(3); // returns 6
An anonymous function (or lambda):
function counter() {
let count = 0;
return function() {
return ++count;
};
}
let x = counter();
x(); // returns 1
x(); // returns 2
x(); // returns 3
This example shows that, in JavaScript, function closures capture their non-local variables by reference.
Arrow functions were first introduced in 6th Edition - ECMAScript 2015. They shorten the syntax for writing functions in JavaScript. Arrow functions are anonymous, so a variable is needed to refer to them in order to invoke them after their creation.
Example of arrow function:
// Arrow functions let us omit the `function` keyword.
// Here `long_example` points to an anonymous function value.
const long_example = (input1, input2) => {
console.log("Hello, World!");
const output = input1 + input2;
return output;
};
// If there are no braces, the arrow function simply returns the expression
// So here it's (input1 + input2)
const short_example = (input1, input2) => input1 + input2;
long_example(2, 3); // Prints "Hello, World!" and returns 5
short_example(2, 5); // Returns 7
// If an arrow function only has one parameter, the parentheses can be removed.
const no_parentheses = input => input + 2;
no_parentheses(3); // Returns 5
In JavaScript, objects are created in the same way as functions; this is known as a function object.
Object example:
function Ball(r) {
this.radius = r; // the "r" argument is local to the ball object
this.area = Math.PI * (r ** 2); // parentheses don't do anything but clarify
// objects can contain functions ("method")
this.show = function() {
drawCircle(this.radius); // references another function (that draws a circle)
};
}
let myBall = new Ball(5); // creates a new instance of the ball object with radius 5
myBall.radius++; // object properties can usually be modified from the outside
myBall.show(); // using the inherited "show" function
Variadic function demonstration (arguments is a special variable):
function sum() {
let x = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < arguments.length; ++i)
x += arguments[i];
return x;
}
sum(1, 2); // returns 3
sum(1, 2, 3); // returns 6
Immediately-invoked function expressions are often used to create closures. Closures allow gathering properties and methods in a namespace and making some of them private:
let counter = (function() {
let i = 0; // private property
return { // public methods
get: function() {
alert(i);
},
set: function(value) {
i = value;
},
increment: function() {
alert(++i);
}
};
})(); // module
counter.get(); // shows 0
counter.set(6);
counter.increment(); // shows 7
counter.increment(); // shows 8
Exporting and Importing modules in JavaScript
Export example:
/* mymodule.js */
// This function remains private, as it is not exported
let sum = (a, b) => {
return a + b;
}
// Export variables
export let name = 'Alice';
export let age = 23;
// Export named functions
export function add(num1, num2) {
return num1 + num2;
}
// Export class
export class Multiplication {
constructor(num1, num2) {
this.num1 = num1;
this.num2 = num2;
}
add() {
return sum(this.num1, this.num2);
}
}
Import example:
// Import one property
import { add } from './mymodule.js';
console.log(add(1, 2)); // 3
// Import multiple properties
import { name, age } from './mymodule.js';
console.log(name, age);
//> "Alice", 23
// Import all properties from a module
import * from './module.js'
console.log(name, age);
//> "Alice", 23
console.log(add(1,2));
//> 3
More advanced example
This sample code displays various JavaScript features.
/* Finds the lowest common multiple (LCM) of two numbers */
function LCMCalculator(x, y) { // constructor function
const checkInt = function(x) { // inner function
if (x % 1 !== 0)
throw new TypeError(x + "is not an integer"); // var a = mouseX
return x;
};
this.a = checkInt(x)
// semicolons ^^^^ are optional, a newline is enough
this.b = checkInt(y);
}
// The prototype of object instances created by a constructor is
// that constructor's "prototype" property.
LCMCalculator.prototype = { // object literal
constructor: LCMCalculator, // when reassigning a prototype, set the constructor property appropriately
gcd: function() { // method that calculates the greatest common divisor
// Euclidean algorithm:
let a = Math.abs(this.a), b = Math.abs(this.b), t;
if (a < b) {
// swap variables
// t = b; b = a; a = t;
[a, b] = [b, a]; // swap using destructuring assignment (ES6)
}
while (b !== 0) {
t = b;
b = a % b;
a = t;
}
// Only need to calculate GCD once, so "redefine" this method.
// (Actually not redefinition—it's defined on the instance itself,
// so that this.gcd refers to this "redefinition" instead of LCMCalculator.prototype.gcd.
// Note that this leads to a wrong result if the LCMCalculator object members "a" and/or "b" are altered afterwards.)
// Also, 'gcd' === "gcd", this['gcd'] === this.gcd
this['gcd'] = function() {
return a;
};
return a;
},
// Object property names can be specified by strings delimited by double (") or single (') quotes.
"lcm": function() {
// Variable names do not collide with object properties, e.g., |lcm| is not |this.lcm|.
// not using |this.a*this.b| to avoid FP precision issues
let lcm = this.a / this.gcd() * this.b;
// Only need to calculate lcm once, so "redefine" this method.
this.lcm = function() {
return lcm;
};
return lcm;
},
// Methods can also be declared using es6 syntax
toString() {
// Using both es6 template literals and the (+) operator to concatenate values
return `LCMCalculator: a = ${this.a}, b = ` + this.b;
}
};
// Define generic output function; this implementation only works for Web browsers
function output(x) {
document.body.appendChild(document.createTextNode(x));
document.body.appendChild(document.createElement('br'));
}
// Note: Array's map() and forEach() are defined in JavaScript 1.6.
// They are used here to demonstrate JavaScript's inherent functional nature.
[
[25, 55],
[21, 56],
[22, 58],
[28, 56]
].map(function(pair) { // array literal + mapping function
return new LCMCalculator(pair[0], pair[1]);
}).sort((a, b) => a.lcm() - b.lcm()) // sort with this comparative function; => is a shorthand form of a function, called "arrow function"
.forEach(printResult);
function printResult(obj) {
output(obj + ", gcd = " + obj.gcd() + ", lcm = " + obj.lcm());
}
The following output should be displayed in the browser window.
LCMCalculator: a = 28, b = 56, gcd = 28, lcm = 56
LCMCalculator: a = 21, b = 56, gcd = 7, lcm = 168
LCMCalculator: a = 25, b = 55, gcd = 5, lcm = 275
LCMCalculator: a = 22, b = 58, gcd = 2, lcm = 638
Security
JavaScript and the DOM provide the potential for malicious authors to deliver scripts to run on a client computer via the Web. Browser authors minimize this risk using two restrictions. First, scripts run in a sandbox in which they can only perform Web-related actions, not general-purpose programming tasks like creating files. Second, scripts are constrained by the same-origin policy: scripts from one Web site do not have access to information such as usernames, passwords, or cookies sent to another site. Most JavaScript-related security bugs are breaches of either the same origin policy or the sandbox.
There are subsets of general JavaScript—ADsafe, Secure ECMAScript (SES)—that provide greater levels of security, especially on code created by third parties (such as advertisements). Closure Toolkit is another project for safe embedding and isolation of third-party JavaScript and HTML.
Content Security Policy is the main intended method of ensuring that only trusted code is executed on a Web page.
Cross-site vulnerabilities
A common JavaScript-related security problem is cross-site scripting (XSS), a violation of the same-origin policy. XSS vulnerabilities occur when an attacker can cause a target Web site, such as an online banking website, to include a malicious script in the webpage presented to a victim. The script in this example can then access the banking application with the privileges of the victim, potentially disclosing secret information or transferring money without the victim's authorization. A solution to XSS vulnerabilities is to use HTML escaping whenever displaying untrusted data.
Some browsers include partial protection against reflected XSS attacks, in which the attacker provides a URL including malicious script. However, even users of those browsers are vulnerable to other XSS attacks, such as those where the malicious code is stored in a database. Only correct design of Web applications on the server-side can fully prevent XSS.
XSS vulnerabilities can also occur because of implementation mistakes by browser authors.
Another cross-site vulnerability is cross-site request forgery (CSRF). In CSRF, code on an attacker's site tricks the victim's browser into taking actions the user did not intend at a target site (like transferring money at a bank). When target sites rely solely on cookies for request authentication, requests originating from code on the attacker's site can carry the same valid login credentials of the initiating user. In general, the solution to CSRF is to require an authentication value in a hidden form field, and not only in the cookies, to authenticate any request that might have lasting effects. Checking the HTTP Referrer header can also help.
"JavaScript hijacking" is a type of CSRF attack in which a <script> tag on an attacker's site exploits a page on the victim's site that returns private information such as JSON or JavaScript. Possible solutions include:
requiring an authentication token in the POST and GET parameters for any response that returns private information.
Misplaced trust in the client
Developers of client-server applications must recognize that untrusted clients may be under the control of attackers. The application author cannot assume that their JavaScript code will run as intended (or at all) because any secret embedded in the code could be extracted by a determined adversary. Some implications are:
Web site authors cannot perfectly conceal how their JavaScript operates because the raw source code must be sent to the client. The code can be obfuscated, but obfuscation can be reverse-engineered.
JavaScript form validation only provides convenience for users, not security. If a site verifies that the user agreed to its terms of service, or filters invalid characters out of fields that should only contain numbers, it must do so on the server, not only the client.
Scripts can be selectively disabled, so JavaScript cannot be relied on to prevent operations such as right-clicking on an image to save it.
It is considered very bad practice to embed sensitive information such as passwords in JavaScript because it can be extracted by an attacker.
Misplaced trust in developers
Package management systems such as npm and Bower are popular with JavaScript developers. Such systems allow a developer to easily manage their program's dependencies upon other developers' program libraries. Developers trust that the maintainers of the libraries will keep them secure and up to date, but that is not always the case. A vulnerability has emerged because of this blind trust. Relied-upon libraries can have new releases that cause bugs or vulnerabilities to appear in all programs that rely upon the libraries. Inversely, a library can go unpatched with known vulnerabilities out in the wild. In a study done looking over a sample of 133k websites, researchers found 37% of the websites included a library with at least one known vulnerability. "The median lag between the oldest library version used on each website and the newest available version of that library is 1,177 days in ALEXA, and development of some libraries still in active use ceased years ago." Another possibility is that the maintainer of a library may remove the library entirely. This occurred in March 2016 when Azer Koçulu removed his repository from npm. This caused tens of thousands of programs and websites depending upon his libraries to break.
Browser and plugin coding errors
JavaScript provides an interface to a wide range of browser capabilities, some of which may have flaws such as buffer overflows. These flaws can allow attackers to write scripts that would run any code they wish on the user's system. This code is not by any means limited to another JavaScript application. For example, a buffer overrun exploit can allow an attacker to gain access to the operating system's API with superuser privileges.
These flaws have affected major browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
Plugins, such as video players, Adobe Flash, and the wide range of ActiveX controls enabled by default in Microsoft Internet Explorer, may also have flaws exploitable via JavaScript (such flaws have been exploited in the past).
In Windows Vista, Microsoft has attempted to contain the risks of bugs such as buffer overflows by running the Internet Explorer process with limited privileges. Google Chrome similarly confines its page renderers to their own "sandbox".
Sandbox implementation errors
Web browsers are capable of running JavaScript outside the sandbox, with the privileges necessary to, for example, create or delete files. Such privileges are not intended to be granted to code from the Web.
Incorrectly granting privileges to JavaScript from the Web has played a role in vulnerabilities in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. In Windows XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft demoted JScript's privileges in Internet Explorer.
Microsoft Windows allows JavaScript source files on a computer's hard drive to be launched as general-purpose, non-sandboxed programs (see: Windows Script Host). This makes JavaScript (like VBScript) a theoretically viable vector for a Trojan horse, although JavaScript Trojan horses are uncommon in practice.
Hardware vulnerabilities
In 2015, a JavaScript-based proof-of-concept implementation of a rowhammer attack was described in a paper by security researchers.
In 2017, a JavaScript-based attack via browser was demonstrated that could bypass ASLR. It's called "ASLR⊕Cache" or AnC.
In 2018, the paper that announced the Spectre attacks against Speculative Execution in Intel and other processors included a JavaScript implementation.
Development tools
Important tools have evolved with the language.
Every major web browser has built-in web development tools, including a JavaScript debugger.
Static program analysis tools, such as ESLint and JSLint, scan JavaScript code for conformance to a set of standards and guidelines.
Some browsers have built-in profilers. Stand-alone profiling libraries have also been created, such as benchmark.js and jsbench.
Many text editors have syntax highlighting support for JavaScript code.
Related technologies
Java
A common misconception is that JavaScript is the same as Java. Both indeed have a C-like syntax (the C language being their most immediate common ancestor language). They are also typically sandboxed (when used inside a browser), and JavaScript was designed with Java's syntax and standard library in mind. In particular, all Java keywords were reserved in original JavaScript, JavaScript's standard library follows Java's naming conventions, and JavaScript's and objects are based on classes from Java 1.0.
Java and JavaScript both first appeared in 1995, but Java was developed by James Gosling of Sun Microsystems and JavaScript by Brendan Eich of Netscape Communications.
The differences between the two languages are more prominent than their similarities. Java has static typing, while JavaScript's typing is dynamic. Java is loaded from compiled bytecode, while JavaScript is loaded as human-readable source code. Java's objects are class-based, while JavaScript's are prototype-based. Finally, Java did not support functional programming until Java 8, while JavaScript has done so from the beginning, being influenced by Scheme.
JSON
JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a general-purpose data interchange format that is defined as a subset of JavaScript's object literal syntax.
WebAssembly
Since 2017, web browsers have supported WebAssembly, a binary format that enables a JavaScript engine to execute performance-critical portions of web page scripts close to native speed. WebAssembly code runs in the same sandbox as regular JavaScript code.
asm.js is a subset of JavaScript that served as the forerunner of WebAssembly.
Transpilers
JavaScript is the dominant client-side language of the Web, and many websites are script-heavy. Thus transpilers have been created to convert code written in other languages, which can aid the development process.
References
Further reading
Flanagan, David. JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. 7th edition. Sebastopol, California: O'Reilly, 2020.
Haverbeke, Marijn. Eloquent JavaScript. 3rd edition. No Starch Press, 2018. 472 pages. .(download)
Zakas, Nicholas. Principles of Object-Oriented JavaScript, 1st edition. No Starch Press, 2014. 120 pages. .
External links
American inventions
Articles with example JavaScript code
Cross-platform software
Dynamically typed programming languages
Functional languages
Object-based programming languages
High-level programming languages
Programming languages created in 1995
Programming languages with an ISO standard
Prototype-based programming languages
Scripting languages
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The European Democrats were a loose association of conservative political parties in Europe. It was a political group in the European Parliament from 1979 until 1992, when it became a subgroup of the European People's Party–European Democrats (EPP-ED) group. The European Democrats continued to exist as a political group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) until 2014, when it became the European Conservatives Group.
European Democrats in the European Parliament
1979–1992
The European Democratic Group (ED) was formed on 17 July 1979 by British Conservative Party, Danish Conservative People's Party and other MEPs after their success in the 1979 elections. It supplanted the earlier European Conservative Group.
In the late seventies and early eighties, the ED was the third-largest political group in the European Parliament.
However, the group saw its membership fall sharply in the late 1980s, as many centre-right members moved to the rival European People's Party (EPP), dominated by the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), Italian Christian Democrats and the ideology of Christian democracy in general. The ED had been somewhat further from the political centre and less pro-European than the EPP. Largely isolated, even hardline eurosceptics like Margaret Thatcher conceded that the British Conservatives could not be effectively heard from such a peripheral group.
1992–1999
On 1 May 1992, the ED (now largely composed of UK Conservative Party members) dissolved, and its remaining members were accorded "associated party" status in the European People's Party Group; that is, being part of the parliamentary group without retaining actual membership in the EPP Europarty organisation. This was considered essential for the Conservatives, as the EPP was generally seen as quite favourable to European integration, a stance at odds with their core ideology. The Conservatives' relationship to the EPP would become a sore point in the following years, particularly for the eurosceptic general membership in Britain. Then-leader of the British Conservative Party William Hague hoped to put the issue to rest by negotiating a new arrangement in 1999 by which the EPP's parliamentary group would rebrand itself as the European People's Party–European Democrats (EPP-ED), with the "European Democrat" nomenclature returning after a seven-year hiatus. This was intended to nominally underscore the Conservatives' status apart from the rest of EPP, and it was hoped that with the coming enlargement of the European Union numerous newly involved right-wing parties, averse to the EPP proper for its perceived European federalism, would be willing to instead enter the ED subgroup, growing the overall alignment.
1999–2009
The arrangement proved to do little to appease opposition. Hague's successor, Iain Duncan Smith, made a concerted drive at one point to resurrect the European Democratic Group, but backed off when it became clear that Conservative MEPs would not move voluntarily. The hope that multiple Central and European parties would join ED also proved to be dubious, as only the Czech Civic Democratic Party took up the offer, with the remainder joining EPP proper or other groups such as Union for Europe of the Nations (UEN) or Independence and Democracy (IND/DEM). Meanwhile, the ED remained a more eurosceptic subgroup within the broader EPP-ED bloc that contributed slightly more than 10% of its total MEPs. It resisted the trend of incorporating as a European political party.
During the 2005 Conservative leadership contest, eventual winner David Cameron pledged to withdraw the Conservatives from the EPP-ED group, while opponent David Davis argued in a letter to the editor of The Daily Telegraph that the current ED arrangement allowed the Conservatives to maintain suitable distance from EPP while still having influence in the largest parliamentary grouping. Conservative/EPP-ED MEP Martin Callanan responded in that paper the following day:
The Czech Civic Democratic Party (ODS), the Law and Justice (PiS) of Poland and the Rally For France party were among the first to discuss forming a breakaway group under the Movement for European Reform. Sir Reg Empey, Leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) has committed his party thereunto Its position would be that the European Union should exist, but as a looser supranational organisation than at present, making the group less eurosceptic than the UEN and IND/DEM groups. Some members from the above parties founded a new organization, the Alliance for an Open Europe, in the midst of this debate, with broadly similar objectives.
Cameron initially intended to form the new group in 2006, though this aspiration had to be cancelled due to their main prospective partners, the ODS and PiS, being unable or unwilling to break away from their then-groupings; the new grouping was put on hiatus until the 2009 European elections. By then, new factors—including the collapse of the UEN group—made conditions for forming a new political grouping much more favourable. On 22 June 2009, the founder members of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, all signatories of the Prague Declaration announced that they were to leave the EPP-ED, and in virtue of that fact, the European Democrats movement. This announcement ended the 30-year existence of the European Democrats in the European Parliament.
Former member parties
The following political parties were associated with the European Democrats at some point:
European Democrats in PACE (Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe)
The European Democrat Group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe was founded as the Group of Independent Representatives in 1970 by British and Scandinavian members of PACE, having about 35–40 members from the UK, Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Turkey, Sweden and Switzerland. It adopted the European Democrats Group name in September 1980, later becoming the European Conservatives Group in 2014.
Sources
Political Groups of the European Parliament
Development of Political Groups in the European Parliament
Europe Politique
European Parliament MEP Archives
Democracy in the European Parliament
See also
Alliance for an Open Europe
Movement for European Reform
European People's Party–European Democrats
References
External links
European Democrats official website
European Democrat Group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
Former European Parliament party groups
Conservatism in Europe
European People's Party–European Democrats
Organizations established in 1979 | [
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The economy of Afghanistan has steadily improved in the last decade due to the return of a large number of wealthy expats, the modernization of the nation's agriculture sector, and the establishment of more trade routes with neighboring and regional countries. The billions of dollars in international assistance that came from expats and outside investors saw this increase when there was more political reliability after NATO became involved in Afghanistan's reconstruction. The nation's GDP (PPP) stands these days at about $70 billion with an exchange rate of $20 billion (2017), and the GDP per capita (PPP) is about $2,000. It imports over $6 billion worth of goods but exports about $1 billion worth of legal products, mainly fruits and nuts.
Despite holding over $1-3 trillion in proven untapped mineral deposits, Afghanistan remains one of the least developed countries in the world. Its unemployment rate is over 23% and about half of its population lives below the poverty line. Many of the unemployed men join the foreign-funded militant groups or the world of crime, particularly as smugglers. Afghanistan has long sought foreign investment in order to improve its economy.
Economic history
In the early modern period under the rule of kings Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901) and Habibullah Khan (1901–1919), a great deal of Afghan commerce was centrally controlled by the Afghan government. The Afghan monarchs were eager to develop the stature of government and the country's military capability, and so attempted to raise money by the imposition of state monopolies on the sale of commodities and high taxes. This slowed the long-term development of Afghanistan during that period. Western technologies and manufacturing methods were slowly introduced during these eras at the command of the Afghan ruler, but in general only according to the logistical requirements of the growing army. An emphasis was placed on the manufacture of weapons and other military material. This process was in the hands of a small number of Western experts invited to Kabul by the Afghan kings. Otherwise, it was not possible for outsiders, particularly westerners, to set up large-scale enterprises in Afghanistan during that period.
The first prominent plan to develop Afghanistan's economy in modern times was the Helmand Valley Authority project of 1952, modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority in the United States, which was expected to be of primary economic importance. Glenn Foster, an American contractor working in Afghanistan in the 1950s, stated this about the Afghan people:
Afghanistan began facing severe economic hardships during the 1979 Soviet invasion and ensuing civil war destroyed much of the country's limited infrastructure, and disrupted normal patterns of economic activity. Eventually, Afghanistan went from a traditional economy to a centrally planned economy up until 2002 when it was replaced by a free market economy. Gross domestic product has fallen substantially since the 1980s due to disruption of trade and transport as well as loss of labor and capital. Continuing internal strife severely hampered domestic efforts to rebuild the nation or provide ways for the international community to help.
According to the International Monetary Fund, the Afghan economy grew 20% in the fiscal year ending in March 2004, after expanding 30% in the previous 12 months. The growth was attributed to international aid and to the end of droughts. An estimated $100 billion of aid had entered the nation from 2002 to 2021. A GDP of $4 billion in fiscal year 2003 was recalculated by the IMF to $6.1 billion, after adding proceeds from opium production. Mean graduate pay was $0.56 per man-hour in 2010. The country expects to be self sufficient in wheat, rice, poultry and dairy production by 2026.
On November 2, 2021, the Taliban required that all economic transactions in Afghanistan use Afghanis and banned the use of all foreign currency.
Western nations suspended humanitarian aid to Afghanistan following the Taliban's takeover of the country in August 2021 and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund also halted payments. The Biden administration froze about $9 billion in assets belonging to the Afghan central banks, blocking the Taliban from accessing billions of dollars held in U.S. bank accounts. On 11 November 2021, the Human Rights Watch reported that Afghanistan is facing widespread famine due to collapsed economy and broken banking system.
Agriculture and livestock
Afghanistan produced in 2018:
3.6 million tons of wheat;
984 thousand tons of grape (18th largest world producer);
615 thousand tons of potato;
591 thousand tons of vegetable;
381 thousand tons of watermelon;
352 thousand tons of rice;
329 thousand tons of melon;
217 thousand tons of apple;
150 thousand tons of onion;
106 thousand tons of maize;
56 thousand tons of barley;
47 thousand tons of peach;
In addition to smaller productions of other agricultural products.
Afghanistan currently produces roughly 1.5 million tons of fresh fruits annually, which could be increased significantly. It is known for producing some of the finest fruits, especially pomegranates and grapes as well as sweet melons and mulberries. Other fruits grown in the country are apricots, apples, figs, peaches, cherries and strawberries. The number of farms are steadily increasing. Building and using modern greenhouses is also expanding throughout the country.
The northern and western Afghan provinces are known for pistachio cultivation. In recent years, farmers in the southern provinces have also begun cultivating pistachios. Provinces in the east of the country are famous for pine nuts. The northern and central provinces are also famous for almonds and walnuts. The Bamyan Province in central Afghanistan is known for growing superior quality potatoes, which produced 370,000 tons in 2020. Nangarhar and Kunar provinces are famous for lemons, oranges, olives, peanuts and dates. Cultivation of these products have spread to other provinces of the country. In recent years the government planted a small number of banana trees in Helmand Province.
Wheat and cereal production is Afghanistan's traditional agricultural mainstay. National wheat production in 2015 was 5 million tons. Afghanistan is nearing self-sufficiency in grain production. It requires an additional 1 million ton of wheat to become self-sufficient, which is predicted to be accomplished in 2020. The overall agricultural production sometimes declines following droughts.
Livestock in Afghanistan mainly include cattle, sheep, and goats. Poultry farming is widespread.
Arable land in Afghanistan was reported to be around 8 million hectares. Wheat production had stood at about 5 million tonnes in 2015, nurseries held 119,000 hectares of land, and grape production is at 615,000 tonnes. Almond production has jumped to 56,000 tons and cotton to 45,000 tonnes. In 2019, it was reported that about of land in Afghanistan is used to cultivate saffron.
According to the World Bank's report published in April 2019, Afghanistan's economy suffered from the consequences of a severe drought that affected the agriculture production in 2018. While the wheat production declined by 24%, milk production declined by 30%.
Fishing
Afghanistan is landlocked with no direct access to an ocean but it has a number of reservoirs, lakes, ponds, rivers and streams, which make it a suitable climate for fish farming. Historically, fish constituted a smaller part of the Afghan diet because of the unavailability of modern fish farms. Fishing only took place in the lakes and rivers, particularly in the Kunar, Amu and Helmand rivers. Consumption of fish has increased sharply due to the establishment of many fish farms. There are over 2,600 of them in the country. The largest one is at the Qargha, which supplies fish eggs to the other fish farms. Fish farming has also been launched in the Afghan-India Friendship Dam.
Forestry
According to a 2010 report, only about 2.1% (or 1,350,000 ha) of Afghanistan is forested. Some steps have been taken in recent years in planting trees in the urban areas across Afghanistan. Even the Taliban spiritual leader has recently called for planting more trees.
Trade and industry
Afghanistan's geographical location makes the country economically secured. This could play a major role in the future. Even its trade with other countries is steadily increasing with the establishment of more international transportation routes. One of these trade routes is the Lapis Lazuli corridor, which connects Afghanistan with Turkmenistan and ultimately ends somewhere in Europe. Other such trade routes connect Afghanistan with neighboring Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The country also has direct trade with India via air corridor. Its rail system is slowly expanding to connect Central Asia with Pakistan and Iran.
The Afghanistan–Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA) allows Afghan and Pakistani cargo trucks to transit goods within both nations. This revised US-sponsored APTTA agreement also allows Afghan trucks to transport exports to India via Pakistan up to the Wagah crossing point. There are at least 11 main international border crossings in Afghanistan. They include Abu Nasar Farahi in Farah Province, Aqina in Faryab Province, Hairatan in Balkh Province, Islam Qala in Herat Province, Sher Khan Bandar in Kunduz Province, Torghundi in Herat Province, Torkham in Nangarhar Province, Spin Boldak in Kandahar Province, and Zaranj in Nimruz Province. The country also has legal access to two major seaports in Pakistan, the Gwadar Port in Balochistan and the Port Qasim in Sindh. Afghanistan also has legal access to two major seaports in Iran, which include the Bandar Abbas and the Chabahar Port in the south of the country.
Trade in goods smuggled into Pakistan once constituted a major source of revenue for Afghanistan. Many of the goods that were smuggled into Pakistan have originally entered Afghanistan from Pakistan, where they fell under the 1965 APTTA. This permitted goods bound for Afghanistan to transit through Pakistani seaports free of duty. Once in Afghanistan, the goods were often immediately smuggled back into Pakistan over the porous border that the two countries share, often with the help of corrupt officials. Additionally, items declared as Afghanistan-bound were often prematurely offloaded from trucks and smuggled into Pakistani markets without paying requisite duty fees. This resulted in the creation of a thriving black market, with much of the illegal trading occurring openly, as was common in Peshawar's bustling Karkhano Market, which was widely regarded as a smuggler's bazaar.
Afghanistan is endowed with a wealth of natural resources, including extensive deposits of natural gas, petroleum, coal, marble, gold, copper, chromite, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious and semi-precious stones, and many rare earth elements. In 2006, a U.S. Geological Survey estimated that Afghanistan has as much as of natural gas, of oil and condensate reserves. According to a 2007 assessment, Afghanistan has significant amounts of undiscovered non-fuel mineral resources. Geologists also found indications of abundant deposits of colored stones and gemstones, including emerald, ruby, sapphire, garnet, lapis lazuli, kunzite, spinel, tourmaline and peridot.
In 2010, U.S. Pentagon officials along with American geologists have revealed the discovery of nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan. A memo from the Pentagon stated that Afghanistan could become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium". Some believe that the untapped minerals are worth up to $3 trillion. The Khanashin carbonatites in the Helmand Province of the country have an estimated 1 million metric tonnes of rare earth elements.
Afghanistan signed a copper deal with China (Metallurgical Corp. of China Ltd.) in 2008, which is to a large-scale project that involves the investment of $2.8 billion by China and an annual income of about $400 million to the Afghan government. The country's Ainak copper mine, located in Logar Province, is one of the biggest in the world. It is estimated to hold at least 11 million tonnes or US$33 billion worth of copper.
On October 5, 2018 in Washington, D.C., Afghan officials signed a 30-year contract with investment group Centar and its operating company, Afghan Gold and Minerals Co., to explore and develop a copper mining operation in Balkhab District in Sar-e Pol Province and to explore and develop a gold mining operation in Badakhshan Province. The copper contract involved a $56 million investment and the gold contract a $22 million investment.
The country's other recently announced treasure is the Hajigak iron ore mine, located west of Kabul and is believed to hold an estimated 1.8 billion to 2 billion metric tons of the mineral used to make steel. AFISCO, an Indian consortium of seven companies, led by the Steel Authority of India Limited (SAIL), and Canada's Kilo Goldmines Ltd are expected to jointly invest $14.6 billion in developing the Hajigak iron mine. The country has several coal mines but need to be modernized.
Afghanistan's important resource in the past has been natural gas, which was first tapped in 1967. During the 1980s, gas sales accounted for $300 million a year in export revenues (56% of the total). About 90% of these exports went to the Soviet Union to pay for imports and debts. However, during the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the natural gas fields were capped to prevent sabotage by criminals. Gas production has dropped from a high of per day in the 1980s to a low of about in 2001. Production of natural gas was restored during the Karzai administration in 2010.
In December 2011, Afghanistan signed an oil exploration contract with China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) for the development of three oil fields along the Amu Darya river. CNPC began Afghan oil production in late October 2012, with extracting of oil annually.
Economic development and recovery
Afghanistan embarked on a modest economic development program in the 1930s. The government founded banks; introduced paper money; established a university; expanded primary, secondary, and technical schools; and sent students abroad for education. In 1952 it created the Helmand Valley Authority to manage the economic development of the Helmand and Arghandab valleys through irrigation and land development, a scheme which remains one of the country's most important capital resources.
In 1956, the government promulgated the first in a long series of ambitious development plans. By the late 1970s, these had achieved only mixed results due to flaws in the planning process as well as inadequate funding and a shortage of the skilled managers and technicians needed for implementation.
Da Afghanistan Bank serves as the central bank of the nation. The "Afghani" (AFN) is the national currency, which has an exchange rate of nearly 95 Afghanis to 1 US dollar. There are over 16 different banks operating in the country, including Afghanistan International Bank, Kabul Bank, Azizi Bank, Pashtany Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, and First Micro Finance Bank. Cash is still widely used for most transactions. A new law on private investment provides three to seven-year tax holidays to eligible companies and a four-year exemption from exports tariffs and duties. According to a UN report in 2007, Afghanistan has received over $3.3 billion from its expatriate community in 2006. UN officials familiar with the issue said remittances to Afghanistan could have been more if the banking regulations are more convenient. Additionally, improvements to the business-enabling environment have resulted in more than $1.5 billion in telecom investment and created more than 100,000 jobs since 2003.
Afghanistan is a member of World Trade Organization, SAARC, ECO, OIC, and has an observer status in the SCO. It seeks to complete the so-called New Silk Road trade project, which is aimed to connecting South Asia with Central Asia and the Middle East. This way Afghanistan will be able to collect large fees from trade passing through the country, including from the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline. Foreign Minister Zalmai Rassoul has stated that the "goal is to achieve an Afghan economy whose growth is based on trade, private enterprise and investment". Experts believe that this will revolutionize the economy of the region.
As part of an attempt to modernize the city and boost the economy, a number of new high rise buildings are under construction by various developers. Some of the national development projects include the New Kabul City next to the capital, the Aino Mena in Kandahar, and the Ghazi Amanullah Khan City east of Jalalabad. Similar development projects are also found in Herat in the west, Mazar-e-Sharif in the north and in other cities.
Afghan handwoven rugs are one of the most popular products for exportation. Other products include hand crafted antique replicas as well as leather and furs. Afghanistan is the third largest exporter of cashmere. Afghanistan has no textile industry. The country imports roughly $500 million of textile goods from other countries. Afghanistan also lacks major international companies. This may explain why the country has high unemployment rate. As a competitor of the Coca-Cola Company, the Pepsi-Cola Company is said to be establishing itself in Afghanistan. This not only promotes foreign investment but also makes the country less dependent on imports from neighboring countries and helps provide employment opportunity to many Afghans.
In February 2019, it was reported that the World Bank granted $235 million to the government of Afghanistan for the country's development and growth. The acting Minister of Finance Humayon Qayoumi said that out of the total amount granted, $75 million will finance "the Tackling Afghanistan's Government HRM (Human Resource Management) and Institutional Reforms (TAGHIR) project, which will strengthen the capacity of selected line ministries. The grant also includes 25 million U.S. dollars from IDA (International Development Association) and 50 million U.S. dollars from ARTF (Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund)."
GDP growth in Afghanistan dropped to 1.8% in 2018 as compared to 2.9% in 2017, partially because of drought. It then recovered to 2.5% in 2019, and was predicted to rise to 3.0% in 2020.
The Ministry of Communications and Technology collected information from the perception of a producer (10 percent) of telecom services during the last four months(August 2021-January 17, 2022) about 1.5 billion Afghanis and entered to the government treasury
Tourism
Tourism in Afghanistan was at its peak in 1977. Many tourists from around the world came to visit Afghanistan, including from as far away as Europe and North America. All of that ended with the start of the April 1978 Saur Revolution. However, it is again gradually increasing despite the insecurity. Each year about 20,000 foreign tourists visit Afghanistan. Tourists should avoid areas where armed criminals operate in the name of Taliban.
The country has four international airports, including the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul; the Maulana Jalaluddin Balkhi International Airport in Mazar-i-Sharif; the Khwaja Abdullah Ansari International Airport in Herat; and the Ahmad Shah Baba International Airport in Kandahar. It also has several smaller airports throughout the country. The city of Kabul has many guest houses and hotels, including the Serena Hotel, the Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul, and the Safi Landmark Hotel. Small number of guest houses and hotels are also available in other cities such Kandahar, Herat, Mazar-i-Sharif, etc.
The following are some notable places in Afghanistan that tourists find worth visiting:
Bamyan
Band-e Amir National Park in Bamyan Province
Site of Buddhas of Bamyan
Fayzabad, Badakhshan
Kabul
Arg (Presidential Palace)
Chihil Sutun
Darulaman (Darul Aman Palace, Tajbeg Palace, Afghan Parliament, National Museum of Afghanistan, etc.)
Gardens of Babur
Paghman
Kandahar
Aino Mina (provides safe guesthouses/hotels and tour guides)
Shrine of the Cloak
Shrine of Baba Wali
Mausoleum of Mirwais Hotak
Herat
Great Mosque of Herat
Herat Citadel
Mazar-i-Sharif
Great Blue Mosque
Hairatan
National data
The following table shows the main economic indicators in 2002–2020 (with IMF staff estimtates in 2021–2026). Inflation below 5% is in green. The anual unemployment rate is extracted from the World Bank, althought the International Monetary Fund find them unreliable.
Gross national saving: 22.7% of GDP (2017)
GDP - composition by sector:
agriculture: 23%
industry: 21.1%
services: 55.9%
note: data excludes opium production
GDP - composition by end use:
household consumption: 81.6% (2016)
government consumption: 12% (2016)
investment in fixed capital: 17.2% (2016)
investment in inventories: 30% (2016)
exports of goods and services: 6.7% (2016)
imports of goods and services: -47.6% (2016)
Ease of Doing Business Index scores:
Overall score: 44.1 (2020)
Starting a Business score: 92 (2020)
Trading score: 30.6 (2020)
Enforcement score: 31.8 (2020)
Household income or consumption by percentage share:
lowest 10%: 3.8%
highest 10%: 24% (2008)
Agriculture - products: wheat, milk, grapes, vegetables, potatoes, watermelons, melons, rice, onions, apples
Industries: small-scale production of bricks, textiles, soap, furniture, shoes, fertilizer, apparel, food-products, non-alcoholic beverages, mineral water, cement; handwoven carpets; natural gas, coal, copper
Industrial production growth rate: -1.9% (2016)country comparison to the world: 181
Labor force: 8.478 million (2017)
country comparison to the world: 58
Labor force - by occupation: agriculture 44.3%, industry 18.1%, services 37.6% (2017)
Population below poverty line: 54.5% (2017)
Budget:
revenues: 2.276 billion (2017)
expenditures: 5.328 billion
Taxes and other revenues: 11.2% (of GDP) (2017)
country comparison to the world: 210
Exports: $784 million (2017)
country comparison to the world: 169
Exports - commodities: gold, grapes, opium, fruits and nuts, insect resins, cotton, handwoven carpets, soapstone, scrap metal (2019)
Exports - partners: United Arab Emirates 45%, Pakistan 24%, India 22%, China 1% (2019)
Imports: $7.616 billion (2017)
country comparison to the world: 119
Imports - commodities: wheat flours, broadcasting equipment, refined petroleum, rolled tobacco, aircraft parts, synthetic fabrics (2019)
Imports - partners: United Arab Emirates 23%, Pakistan 17%, India 13%, China 9%, United States 9%, Uzbekistan 7%, Kazakhstan 6% (2019)
Reserves of foreign exchange and gold: $7.187 billion (2017)
country comparison to the world: 85
Current account balance: $1.014 billion (2017)
country comparison to the world: 49
Currency: Afghani (AFN)
Exchange rates: Afghanis (AFN) per US dollar - 68.3 = $1
57.25 (2013)
46.45 (2010)
Fiscal year: 21 December - 20 December
Energy in Afghanistan
Energy in Afghanistan is provided by hydropower followed by fossil fuel and solar power. According to Da Afghanistan Breshna Sherkat (DABS), approximately 35% of Afghanistan's population has access to electricity. This covers the major cities in the country. Many rural areas do not have access to 24-hour electricity but this should change after the major CASA-1000 project is completed.
Afghanistan currently generates over 600 megawatts (MW) of electricity from its several hydroelectric plants as well as using fossil fuel and solar panels. Over 670 MW more is imported from neighboring Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Due to the large influx of expats from neighboring Pakistan and Iran, Afghanistan may require as much as 7,000 MW of electricity in the coming years. The Afghan National Development Strategy has identified renewable energy alternatives, such as wind and solar energy, as a high value power source to develop. As a result, a number of solar and wind farms have been established, with more currently under development.
See also
Afghanistan Accession to World Trade Organization
References
External links
The World Bank In Afghanistan
Asian Development Bank - Afghanistan and ADB
FAO in Afghanistan
Afghan Agriculture (information resource site maintained by UC Davis and USDA)
World Trade Organization member economies | [
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Ezekiel (; Yəḥezqēʾl ; in the Septuagint written in ) is the central protagonist of the Book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible.
In Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Ezekiel is acknowledged as a Hebrew prophet. In Judaism and Christianity, he is also viewed as the 6th-century BCE author of the Book of Ezekiel, which reveals prophecies regarding the destruction of Jerusalem, and the restoration to the land of Israel.
The name Ezekiel means "God is strong" or "God strengthens".
In the Bible
The author of the Book of Ezekiel presents himself as Ezekiel, the son of Buzi, born into a priestly (kohen) lineage. Apart from identifying himself, the author gives a date for the first divine encounter which he presents: "in the thirtieth year". Ezekiel describes his calling to be a prophet by going into great detail about his encounter with God and four "living creatures" with four wheels that stayed beside the creatures. For the next five years he incessantly prophesied and acted out the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple, which was met with some opposition. However, Ezekiel and his contemporaries like Jeremiah, another prophet who was living in Jerusalem at that time, witnessed the fulfilment of their prophecies with the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonians.
Living in Babylon
According to the Bible, Ezekiel and his wife lived during the Babylonian captivity on the banks of the Chebar River, in Tel Abib, with other exiles from Judah. There is no mention of him having any offspring.
Chronology
Ezekiel's "thirtieth year" is given as the fifth year of the exile of Judah's king Jehoiachin by the Babylonians, counting the years after the exile in 598 BCE, that is from 597 to 593 BCE. The last recorded prophecy of Ezekiel dates to April 571 BCE, sixteen years after the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE. On the basis of dates given in the Book of Ezekiel, his span of prophecies can be calculated to have occurred over the course of about 22 years, starting in 593 BCE.
The Aramaic Targum on Ezekiel 1:1 and the 2nd-century rabbinic work Seder Olam Rabba (chapter 26) both say that Ezekiel's vision came "in the thirtieth year after Josiah was presented with a Book of the Law discovered in the Temple", the latter taking place about the time of Josiah's reforms in 622 BCE, shortly after the call of Jeremiah to prophetic ministry around 626 BCE. If the "thirtieth year" of Ezekiel 1:1 instead refers to Ezekiel's age, then he was born around 622 BCE and was fifty years old when he had his final vision.
Extrabiblical traditions
Jewish tradition
According to Jewish tradition, Ezekiel did not write his own book, the Book of Ezekiel, but rather his prophecies were collected and written by the Men of the Great Assembly.
Ezekiel, like Jeremiah, is said by Talmud and Midrash to have been a descendant of Joshua by his marriage with the proselyte and former prostitute Rahab. Some statements found in rabbinic literature posit that Ezekiel was the son of Jeremiah, who was (also) called "Buzi" because he was despised by the Jews.
Ezekiel was said to be already active as a prophet while in the Land of Israel, and he retained this gift when he was exiled with Jehoiachin and the nobles of the country to Babylon. Josephus claims that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylonia's armies exiled three thousand Jews from Judah, after deposing King Jehoiakim in 598 BCE.
Rava states in the Babylonian Talmud that although Ezekiel describes the appearance of the throne of God (merkabah), this is not because he had seen more than the prophet Isaiah, but rather because the latter was more accustomed to such visions; for the relation of the two prophets is that of a courtier to a peasant, the latter of whom would always describe a royal court more floridly than the former, to whom such things would be familiar. Ezekiel, like all the other prophets, has beheld only a blurred reflection of the divine majesty, just as a poor mirror reflects objects only imperfectly.
According to the midrash Canticles Rabbah, it was Ezekiel whom the three pious men, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (also called Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Bible) asked for advice as to whether they should resist Nebuchadnezzar's command and choose death by fire rather than worship his idol. At first God revealed to the prophet that they could not hope for a miraculous rescue; whereupon the prophet was greatly grieved, since these three men constituted the "remnant of Judah". But after they had left the house of the prophet, fully determined to sacrifice their lives to God, Ezekiel received this revelation: "Thou dost believe indeed that I will abandon them. That shall not happen; but do thou let them carry out their intention according to their pious dictates, and tell them nothing".
Christian tradition
Ezekiel is commemorated as a saint in the liturgical calendar of the Eastern Orthodox Church—and those Eastern Catholic Churches which follow the Byzantine Rite—on July 21 (for those churches which use the traditional Julian Calendar, July 21 falls on August 5 of the modern Gregorian Calendar). Ezekiel is commemorated on August 28 on the Calendar of Saints of the Armenian Apostolic Church, and on April 10 in the Roman Martyrology.
Certain Lutheran churches also celebrate his commemoration on July 21.
Saint Bonaventure interpreted Ezekiel's statement about the "closed gate" as a prophecy of the Incarnation: the "gate" signifying the Virgin Mary and the "prince" referring to Jesus. This is one of the readings at Vespers on Great Feasts of the Theotokos in the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic Churches. This imagery is also found in the traditional Catholic Christmas hymn "Gaudete" and in a saying by Bonaventure, quoted by Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori: "No one can enter Heaven unless by Mary, as though through a door." The imagery provides the basis for the concept that God gave Mary to humanity as the "Gate of Heaven" (thence the dedication of churches and convents to the Porta Coeli), an idea also laid out in the Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen) prayer.
John B. Taylor credits the subject with imparting the Biblical understanding of the nature of God.
Islamic tradition
Ezekiel (; "Hazqiyal") is recognized as a prophet in Islamic tradition. Although not mentioned by name in the Quran, Muslim scholars, both classical and modern have included Ezekiel in lists of the prophets of Islam.
The Quran mentions a prophet called Dhū al-Kifl (). Although Dhu al-Kifl's identity is disputed, he is often identified with Ezekiel. Carsten Niebuhr, in his Reisebeschreibung nach Arabian, says he visited Al Kifl in Iraq, midway between Najaf and Hilla and said Kifl was the Arabic form of Ezekiel. He further explained in his book that Ezekiel's Tomb was present in Al Kifl and that the Jews came to it on pilgrimage. The name "Dhu al-Kifl" means "Possessor of the Double" or "Possesor of the Fold" ( dhū "possessor of, owner of" and al-kifl "double, folded"). Some Islamic scholars have likened Ezekiel's mission to the description of Dhu al-Kifl. When the exile, monarchy, and state were annihilated, a political and national life was no longer possible. In the absence of a worldly foundation it became necessary to build a spiritual one and Ezekiel performed this mission by observing the signs of the time and deducing his doctrines from them. In conformity with the two parts of his book, his personality and his preaching are alike twofold.
Regardless of the identification of Dhu al-Kifl with Ezekiel, Muslims have viewed Ezekiel as a prophet. Ezekiel appears in all Muslim collections of Stories of the Prophets. Muslim exegesis further lists Ezekiel's father as Buzi (Budhi) and Ezekiel is given the title ibn al-‘ajūz, denoting "son of the old (man)", as his parents are supposed to have been very old when he was born. A tradition, which resembles that of Hannah and Samuel in the Hebrew Bible, states that Ezekiel's mother prayed to God in old age for the birth of an offspring and was given Ezekiel as a gift from God.
Bibliography
Ibn Kutayba, K. al-Ma'arif ed. S. Ukasha, 51
Tabari, History of the Prophets and Kings, 2, 53–54
Tabari, Tafsir, V, 266 (old ed. ii, 365)
Masudi, Murudj, i, 103ff.
K. al-Badwa l-tarikh, iii, 4/5 and 98/100, Ezechiel
Abdullah Yusuf Ali, Holy Qur'an: Translation and Commentary, Note. 2473 (cf. index: Ezekiel)
Emil Heller Henning III, "Ezekiel's Temple: A Scriptural Framework Illustrating the Covenant of Grace", 2012.
Purported tombs
Al Kifl
The tomb of Ezekiel is a structure located in modern-day south Iraq near Kefil, believed to be the final resting place of Ezekiel. It has been a place of pilgrimage to both Muslims and Jews alike. After the Jewish exodus from Iraq, Jewish activity in the tomb ceased, although a disused synagogue remains in place.
Ergani
A tomb in the Ergani district of Diyarbakır Province, Turkey is also believed to be the resting place of prophet Ezekiel. It is located 5 km from the city centre on a hill, revered and visited by the local Muslims, called Makam Dağı.
See also
Apocryphon of Ezekiel
Pseudo-Ezekiel
List of names referring to El
Notes
References
Further reading
Kugler, Gili, The Cruel Theology of Ezekiel 20
External links
Prophet Ezekiel Orthodox icon and synaxarion
6th-century BC writers
Angelic visionaries
Christian saints from the Old Testament
People whose existence is disputed
Prophets in Christianity
Prophets of the Hebrew Bible
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Espagnole sauce () is a basic brown sauce, and is one of Auguste Escoffier's five mother sauces of classic French cooking. Escoffier popularized the recipe, and his version is still followed today.
Espagnole has a strong taste, and is rarely used directly on food. As a mother sauce, it serves as the starting point for many derivatives, such as sauce africaine, sauce bigarade, sauce bourguignonne, sauce aux champignons, sauce charcutière, sauce chasseur, sauce chevreuil, and demi-glace. Hundreds of other derivatives are in the classical French repertoire.
Escoffier included a recipe for a Lenten espagnole sauce, using fish stock and mushrooms, in Le Guide culinaire, but doubted its necessity.
Preparation
The basic method of making espagnole is to prepare a very dark brown roux, to which brown stock (stock made from simmering roasted bones, meats and aromatics) is added, along with roasted bones, pieces of beef, vegetables, brown sugar and various seasonings. This blend is allowed to slowly reduce while being frequently skimmed. The classic recipe calls for additional veal stock to be added as the liquid gradually reduces, but today, water is generally used instead. Tomato paste or pureed tomatoes are added towards the end of the process, and the sauce is further reduced.
Another version can be made with white stock and butter by adding onion, ham, red pepper, celery, cayenne pepper and parsley, with flour as thickener.
Etymology
Espagnole is the French word for "Spanish", but the sauce's origin story is argued by French cooks. According to Louis Diat, the creator of vichyssoise and the author of the classic Gourmet's Basic French Cookbook:
In Kettner's Book of the Table, published in 1877, an entirely different explanation is given:
The name "Kettner" in the title refers to Auguste Kettner, former chef to Napoleon III, who emigrated to England and in 1867 opened a restaurant in Soho, Kettner's, one of the oldest restaurants in London.
See also
Brown sauce
Demi-glace
References
External links
The Cook's Decameron from Project Gutenberg
Emeril Lagasse's recipe at emerils.com
Brown sauces
French sauces
Mother sauces
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Edward Vincent Sullivan (September 28, 1901 – October 13, 1974) was an American television personality, impresario, sports and entertainment reporter, and syndicated columnist for the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate. He was the creator and host of the television variety program The Toast of the Town, which in 1955 was renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. Broadcast from 1948 to 1971, it set a record as the longest-running variety show in US broadcast history. "It was, by almost any measure, the last great TV show," said television critic David Hinckley. "It's one of our fondest, dearest pop culture memories."
Sullivan was a broadcasting pioneer during the early years of American television. As critic David Bianculli wrote, "Before MTV, Sullivan presented rock acts. Before Bravo, he presented jazz and classical music and theater. Before the Comedy Channel, even before there was The Tonight Show, Sullivan discovered, anointed and popularized young comedians. Before there were 500 channels, before there was cable, Ed Sullivan was where the choice was. From the start, he was indeed 'the Toast of the Town'." In 1996, Sullivan was ranked number 50 on TV Guide'''s "50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time".
Early life and career
Edward Vincent Sullivan was born on September 28, 1901, in Harlem, New York City: the son of Elizabeth F. (née Smith) and Peter Arthur Sullivan, a customs house employee. He grew up in Port Chester, New York, where the family lived in a small red brick home at 53 Washington Street. He was of Irish descent. The entire family loved music, and someone was always playing the piano or singing. A phonograph was a prized possession; the family loved playing all types of records on it. Sullivan was a gifted athlete in high school, earning 12 athletic letters at Port Chester High School. He played halfback in football; he was a guard in basketball; in track he was a sprinter. With the baseball team, Sullivan was catcher and team captain and he led the team to several championships. Baseball made an impression on him that would affect his career as well as the culture of America. Sullivan noted that, in the state of New York, integration was taken for granted in high school sports: "When we went up into Connecticut, we ran into clubs that had Negro players. In those days this was accepted as commonplace; and so, my instinctive antagonism years later to any theory that a Negro wasn't a worthy opponent or was an inferior person. It was just as simple as that."
Sullivan landed his first job at The Port Chester Daily Item: a local newspaper for which he had written sports news while in high school and then joined the paper full-time after graduation. In 1919, he joined The Hartford Post. The newspaper folded in his first week there, but he landed another job on The New York Evening Mail as a sports reporter. After The Evening Mail closed in 1923, he bounced through a series of news jobs with The Associated Press, The Philadelphia Bulletin, The Morning World, The Morning Telegraph, The New York Bulletin and The Leader. Finally, in 1927, Sullivan joined The Evening Graphic: first as a sports writer and then as a sports editor. In 1929, when Walter Winchell moved to The Daily Mirror, Sullivan was made its Broadway columnist. He left the Graphic for the city's largest tabloid: the New York Daily News. His column, "Little Old New York", concentrated on Broadway shows and gossip, as Winchell's had; and, like Winchell, he did show-business news broadcasts on radio. Again echoing Winchell, Sullivan took on yet another medium in 1933 by writing and starring in the film Mr. Broadway, which has him guiding the audience around New York nightspots to meet entertainers and celebrities. Sullivan soon became a powerful starmaker in the entertainment world himself, becoming one of Winchell's main rivals, setting the El Morocco nightclub in New York as his unofficial headquarters against Winchell's seat of power at the nearby Stork Club. Sullivan continued writing for The News throughout his broadcasting career, and his popularity long outlived Winchell's. In the late 60's, however, Sullivan praised Winchell's legacy in a magazine interview, leading to a major reconciliation between the longtime adversaries.
Throughout his career as a columnist, Sullivan had dabbled in entertainment—producing vaudeville shows with which he appeared as master of ceremonies in the 1920s and 1930s, directing a radio program over the original WABC (now WCBS), and organizing benefit reviews for various causes.
Radio
In 1941, Sullivan was host of the Summer Silver Theater, a variety program on CBS, with Will Bradley as bandleader and a guest star featured each week.
Television
In 1948, producer Marlo Lewis convinced the CBS network to hire Sullivan to do a weekly Sunday-night TV variety show, Toast of the Town, which later became The Ed Sullivan Show. Debuting in June 1948, the show was originally broadcast from the Maxine Elliott Theatre on West 39th Street in New York City. In January 1953, it moved to CBS-TV Studio 50, at 1697 Broadway (at 53rd Street) in New York City, which in 1967 was renamed the Ed Sullivan Theater (and was later the home of the Late Show with David Letterman and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert). From 1936 to 1950, Studio 50 was a CBS Radio playhouse. Before that it was variously known as Manhattan Theatre, Billy Rose's Music Hall, and Hammerstein's Theatre (it was built in 1927 by Arthur Hammerstein).
Television critics gave the new show and its host poor reviews. Harriet Van Horne alleged that "he got where he is not by having a personality, but by having no personality." (The host wrote to the critic, "Dear Miss Van Horne: You bitch. Sincerely, Ed Sullivan.") Sullivan had little acting ability; in 1967, 20 years after his show's debut, Time magazine asked, "What exactly is Ed Sullivan's talent?" His mannerisms on camera were so awkward that some viewers believed the host suffered from Bell's palsy. Time in 1955 stated that Sullivan resembled
"Yet," the magazine concluded, "instead of frightening children, Ed Sullivan charms the whole family." Sullivan appeared to the audience as an average guy who brought the great acts of show business to their home televisions. "Ed Sullivan will last", comedian Fred Allen said, "as long as someone else has talent." Frequent guest Alan King said, "Ed does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else in television." A typical show would feature a vaudeville act (acrobats, jugglers, magicians, etc.), one or two popular comedians, a singing star, a hot jukebox favorite, a figure from the legitimate theater, and for the kids, a visit with puppet "Topo Gigio, the little Italian mouse", or a popular athlete. The bill was often international in scope, with many European performers augmenting the American artists.
Sullivan had a healthy sense of humor about himself and permitted—even encouraged—impersonators such as John Byner, Frank Gorshin, Rich Little, and especially Will Jordan, to imitate him on his show. Johnny Carson also did a fair impression, and even Joan Rivers imitated Sullivan's unique posture. The impressionists exaggerated his stiffness, raised shoulders, and nasal tenor phrasing, along with some of his commonly used introductions, such as "And now, right here on our stage...", "For all you youngsters out there...", and "a really big shew" (his pronunciation of the word "show"). The latter phrase was in fact in the exclusive domain of his impressionists, as Sullivan never actually spoke the phrase "really big show" in the opening introduction of any episode in the entire history of the series. Will Jordan portrayed Sullivan in the films I Wanna Hold Your Hand, The Buddy Holly Story, The Doors, Mr. Saturday Night, Down with Love, and in the 1979 TV movie Elvis.
Sullivan played himself parodying his mannerisms as directed by Jerry Lewis in Lewis' 1964 film The Patsy.
Sullivan inspired a song in the musical Bye Bye Birdie, and in 1963, appeared as himself in the film.
In 1954, Sullivan was a co-host on a memorable TV musical special, General Foods 25th Anniversary Show: A Salute to Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Legacy
Sullivan was quoted as saying "In the conduct of my own show, I've never asked a performer his religion, his race or his politics. Performers are engaged on the basis of their abilities. I believe that this is another quality of our show that has helped win it a wide and loyal audience." Although he was wary of Elvis Presley's "bad boy" image, and initially said that he would never book him, Presley became too big a name to ignore; in 1956, Sullivan signed him for three appearances. In August 1956, Sullivan was injured in an automobile accident near his country home in Southbury, Connecticut, and missed Presley's first appearance on September 9. Charles Laughton wound up introducing Presley on the Sullivan hour. When Ed returned to the show, audiences noticed a change in his voice. After Sullivan got to know Presley personally, he made amends by telling his audience, "This is a real decent, fine boy."
Sullivan's failure to scoop the TV industry with Presley made him determined to get the next big sensation first. In November 1963, while in Heathrow Airport, Sullivan witnessed Beatlemania firsthand as the band returned from Sweden and the terminal was overrun by screaming teens. At first Sullivan was reluctant to book the Beatles because the band did not have a commercially successful single released in the US at the time, but at the behest of a friend, legendary impresario Sid Bernstein, Sullivan signed the group. Their initial Sullivan show appearance on February 9, 1964, was the most-watched program in TV history to that point. The Beatles appeared three more times in person, and submitted filmed performances afterwards. The Dave Clark Five, who claimed a "cleaner" image than the Beatles, made 13 appearances on the show, more than any other UK group.
Unlike many shows of the time, Sullivan asked that most musical acts perform their music live, rather than lip-synching to their recordings. Examination of performances shows that exceptions were made, as when a microphone could not be placed close enough to a performer for technical reasons. An example was B.J. Thomas' 1969 performance of "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", in which actual water was sprinkled on him as a special effect. In 1969, Sullivan presented the Jackson 5 with their first single "I Want You Back", which ousted the B.J. Thomas song from the top spot of Billboard's pop charts.
Sullivan had an appreciation for African American talent. According to biographer Gerald Nachman, "Most TV variety shows welcomed 'acceptable' black superstars like Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey and Sammy Davis Jr. ... but in the early 1950s, long before it was fashionable, Sullivan was presenting the much more obscure black entertainers he had enjoyed in Harlem on his uptown rounds— legends like Peg Leg Bates, Pigmeat Markham and Tim Moore ... strangers to white America." He hosted pioneering TV appearances by Bo Diddley, the Platters, Brook Benton, Jackie Wilson, Fats Domino, and numerous Motown acts, including the Supremes, who appeared 17 times. As the critic John Leonard wrote, "There wasn't an important black artist who didn't appear on Ed's show."
He defied pressure to exclude African American entertainers, and to avoid interacting with them when they did appear. "Sullivan had to fend off his hard-won sponsor, Ford's Lincoln dealers, after kissing Pearl Bailey on the cheek and daring to shake Nat King Cole's hand," Nachman wrote. According to biographer Jerry Bowles, "Sullivan once had a Ford executive thrown out of the theatre when he suggested that Sullivan stop booking so many black acts. And a dealer in Cleveland told him 'We realize that you got to have niggers on your show. But do you have to put your arm around Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson at the end of his dance?' Sullivan had to be physically restrained from beating the man to a pulp." Sullivan later raised money to help pay for Robinson's funeral. "As a Catholic, it was inevitable that I would despise intolerance, because Catholics suffered more than their share of it," he told an interviewer. "As I grew up, the causes of minorities were part and parcel of me. Negroes and Jews were the minority causes closest at hand. I need no urging to take a plunge in and help."
At a time when television had not yet embraced Country and Western music, Sullivan featured Nashville performers on his program. This, in turn, paved the way for shows such as Hee Haw, and variety shows hosted by Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, and other country singers.
The Canadian comedy duo Wayne & Shuster made the most appearances of any act throughout the show's run, 67 appearances between 1958 and 1969.
Sullivan appeared as himself on other television programs, including an April 1958 episode of the Howard Duff and Ida Lupino CBS situation comedy Mr. Adams and Eve. On September 14, 1958, Sullivan appeared on What's My Line? as a mystery guest, and showed his comedic side by donning a rubber mask. In 1961, Sullivan was asked by CBS to fill in for an ailing Red Skelton on The Red Skelton Show. Sullivan took Skelton's roles in the various comedy sketches; Skelton's hobo character "Freddie the Freeloader" was renamed "Eddie the Freeloader."
Personality
Sullivan was quick to take offense if he felt that he had been crossed, and he could hold a grudge for a long time. As he told biographer Gerald Nachman, "I'm a pop-off. I flare up, then I go around apologizing." "Armed with an Irish temper and thin skin," wrote Nachman, "Ed brought to his feuds a hunger for combat fed by his coverage of, and devotion to, boxing." Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Jackie Mason, and Jim Morrison were parties to some of Sullivan's most storied conflicts.
For his second Sullivan appearance in 1955, Bo Diddley planned to sing his namesake hit, "Bo Diddley", but Sullivan told him to perform Tennessee Ernie Ford's song "Sixteen Tons". "That would have been the end of my career right there," Diddley told his biographer, so he sang "Bo Diddley" anyway. Sullivan was enraged: "You're the first black boy that ever double-crossed me on the show," Diddley quoted him as saying. "We didn't have much to do with each other after that." Later, Diddley resented that Elvis Presley, whom he accused of copying his revolutionary style and beat, received the attention and accolades on Sullivan's show that he felt were rightfully his. "I am owed," he said, "and I never got paid." "He might have," wrote Nachman, "had things gone smoother with Sullivan."
Buddy Holly and the Crickets first appeared on the Sullivan show in 1957 to an enthusiastic response. For their second appearance in January 1958, Sullivan considered the lyrics of their chosen number "Oh, Boy!" too suggestive, and ordered Holly to substitute another song. Holly responded that he had already told his hometown friends in Texas that he would be singing "Oh, Boy!" for them. Sullivan, unaccustomed to having his instructions questioned, angrily repeated them, but Holly refused to back down. Later, when the band was slow to respond to a summons to the rehearsal stage, Sullivan commented, "I guess the Crickets are not too excited to be on The Ed Sullivan Show." Holly, still annoyed by Sullivan's attitude, replied, "I hope they're damn more excited than I am." Sullivan retaliated by cutting them from two numbers to one, then mispronounced Holly's name during the introduction. He also saw to it that Holly's guitar amplifier volume was barely audible, except during his guitar solo. Nevertheless, the band was so well-received that Sullivan was forced to invite them back; Holly responded that Sullivan did not have enough money. Archival photographs taken during the appearance show Holly smirking and ignoring a visibly angry Sullivan.
During Jackie Mason's October 1964 performance on a show that had been shortened by ten minutes due to an address by President Lyndon Johnson, Sullivan—on-stage but off-camera—signaled Mason that he had two minutes left by holding up two fingers. Sullivan's signal distracted the studio audience, and to television viewers unaware of the circumstances, it seemed as though Mason's jokes were falling flat. Mason, in a bid to regain the audience's attention, cried, "I'm getting fingers here!" and made his own frantic hand gesture: "Here's a finger for you!" Videotapes of the incident are inconclusive as to whether Mason's upswept hand (which was just off-camera) was intended to be an indecent gesture, but Sullivan was convinced that it was, and banned Mason from future appearances on the program. Mason later insisted that he did not know what the "middle finger" meant, and that he did not make the gesture anyway. In September 1965, Sullivan—who, according to Mason, was "deeply apologetic"—brought Mason on the show for a "surprise grand reunion". "He said they were old pals," Nachman wrote, "news to Mason, who never got a repeat invitation." Mason added that his earning power "...was cut right in half after that. I never really worked my way back until I opened on Broadway in 1986."
When the Byrds performed on December 12, 1965, David Crosby got into a shouting match with the show's director. They were never asked to return.
Sullivan decided that "Girl, we couldn't get much higher", from the Doors' signature song "Light My Fire", was too overt a reference to drug use, and directed that the lyric be changed to "Girl, we couldn't get much better" for the group's September 1967 appearance. The band members "nodded their assent", according to Doors biographer Ben Fong-Torres, then sang the song as written. After the broadcast, producer Bob Precht told the group, "Mr. Sullivan wanted you for six more shows, but you'll never work the Ed Sullivan Show again." Jim Morrison replied, "Hey, man, we just did the Ed Sullivan Show."
The Rolling Stones famously capitulated during their fifth appearance on the show, in 1967, when Mick Jagger was told to change the titular lyric of "Let's Spend the Night Together" to "Let's spend some time together". "But Jagger prevailed," wrote Nachman, by deliberately calling attention to the censorship, rolling his eyes, mugging, and drawing out the word "t-i-i-i-me" as he sang the revised lyric. Sullivan was angered by the insubordination, but the Stones did make one additional appearance on the show, in 1969.
Moe Howard of the Three Stooges recalled in 1975 that Sullivan had a memory problem of sorts: "Ed was a very nice man, but for a showman, quite forgetful. On our first appearance, he introduced us as the Three Ritz Brothers. He got out of it by adding, 'who look more like the Three Stooges to me'." Joe DeRita, who worked with the Stooges after 1959, had commented that Sullivan had a personality "like the bottom of a bird cage."
Diana Ross, who was very fond of Sullivan, later recalled Sullivan's forgetfulness during the many occasions the Supremes performed on his show. In a 1995 appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman (taped in the Ed Sullivan Theater), Ross stated, "he could never remember our names. He called us 'the girls'."
In a 1990 press conference, Paul McCartney recalled meeting Sullivan again in the early 1970s. Sullivan apparently had no idea who McCartney was. McCartney tried to remind Sullivan that he was one of the Beatles, but Sullivan obviously could not remember, and nodding and smiling, simply shook McCartney's hand and left. In an interview with Howard Stern around 2012, Joan Rivers said that Sullivan had been suffering from dementia toward the end of his life.
Politics
Sullivan, like many American entertainers, was pulled into the Cold War anticommunism of the late 1940s and 1950s. Tap dancer Paul Draper's scheduled January 1950 appearance on Toast of the Town met with opposition from Hester McCullough, an activist in the hunt for "subversives". Branding Draper a Communist Party "sympathizer", she demanded that Sullivan's lead sponsor, the Ford Motor Company, cancel Draper's appearance. Draper denied the charge, and appeared on the show as scheduled. Ford received over a thousand angry letters and telegrams, and Sullivan was obliged to promise Ford's advertising agency, Kenyon & Eckhardt, that he would avoid controversial guests going forward. Draper was forced to move to Europe to earn a living.
After the Draper incident, Sullivan began to work closely with Theodore Kirkpatrick of the anti-Communist Counterattack newsletter. He would consult Kirkpatrick if any questions came up regarding a potential guest's political leanings. Sullivan wrote in his June 21, 1950, Daily News column that "Kirkpatrick has sat in my living room on several occasions and listened attentively to performers eager to secure a certification of loyalty."
Cold War repercussions manifested in a different way when Bob Dylan was booked to appear in May 1963. His chosen song was "Talkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues", which poked fun at the ultraconservative John Birch Society and its tendency to see Communist conspiracies in many situations. No concern was voiced by anyone, including Sullivan, during rehearsals; but on the day of the broadcast, CBS's Standards and Practices department rejected the song, fearing that lyrics equating the Society's views with those of Adolf Hitler might trigger a defamation lawsuit. Dylan was offered the opportunity to perform a different song, but he responded that if he could not sing the number of his choice, he would rather not appear at all. The story generated widespread media attention in the days that followed; Sullivan denounced the network's decision in published interviews.
Sullivan butted heads with Standards and Practices on other occasions, as well. In 1956, Ingrid Bergman—who had been living in "exile" in Europe since 1950 in the wake of her scandalous love affair with director Roberto Rossellini while they were both married—was planning a return to Hollywood as the star of Anastasia. Sullivan, confident that the American public would welcome her back, invited her to appear on his show and flew to Europe to film an interview with Bergman, Yul Brynner, and Helen Hayes on the Anastasia set. When he arrived back in New York, Standards and Practices informed Sullivan that under no circumstances would Bergman be permitted to appear on the show, either live or on film. Sullivan's prediction later proved correct, as Bergman won her second Academy Award for her portrayal, as well as the forgiveness of her fans.
Personal life
Sullivan was engaged to champion swimmer Sybil Bauer, but she died of cancer in 1927 at the age of 23. In 1926, Sullivan met and began dating Sylvia Weinstein. Weinstein tried to tell her Jewish family she was dating a man named Ed Solomon, but her brother figured out she meant Ed Sullivan. With both families strongly opposed to a Catholic–Jewish marriage, the affair was on-again-off-again for three years. They were finally married on April 28, 1930, in a City Hall ceremony, and 8 months later Sylvia gave birth to Elizabeth ("Betty"), named after Sullivan's mother, who had died that year. The Sullivans rented a suite of rooms at the Hotel Delmonico in 1944 after living at the Hotel Astor on Times Square for many years. Sullivan rented a suite next door to the family suite, which he used as an office until The Ed Sullivan Show was canceled in 1971. Sullivan was in the habit of calling his wife after every program to get her immediate critique.
The Sullivans were always "on the town", eating out five nights a week at some of the trendiest clubs and restaurants, including the Stork Club, Danny's Hide-A-Way and Jimmy Kelly's. Sullivan socialized with the rich and famous, was friends with U.S. Presidents and was given audiences with several Popes. In 1952, Betty Sullivan married the Ed Sullivan Show's producer, Bob Precht. From the Prechts, Ed had five grandchildren—Robert Edward, Carla Elizabeth, Vincent Henry, Andrew Sullivan and Margo Elizabeth. The Sullivan and Precht families were very close; Betty died on June 7, 2014, aged 83.
Later years and death
In the fall of 1965, CBS began televising its weekly programs in color. Although the Sullivan show was seen live in the Central and Eastern time zones, it was taped for airing in the Pacific and Mountain time zones. Excerpts have been released on home video, and posted on the official Ed Sullivan Show YouTube Channel.
By 1971, the show's ratings had plummeted. In an effort to refresh its lineup, CBS canceled the program in March 1971, along with some of its other long running shows throughout the 1970–1971 season (later known as the rural purge). Angered, Sullivan refused to host three more months of scheduled shows. They were replaced by reruns and a final program without him aired in June. He remained with the network in various other capacities and hosted a 25th anniversary special in June 1973.
In early September 1974, Sullivan was diagnosed with an advanced stage of esophageal cancer. Doctors gave him very little time to live, and the family chose to keep the diagnosis secret from him. Sullivan, believing his ailment to be yet another complication from a long-standing battle with gastric ulcers, died five weeks later on October 13, 1974, at New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, two weeks after his 73rd birthday. His funeral was attended by 3,000 at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, on a cold, rainy day. Sullivan is interred in a crypt at the Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York.
Sullivan has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6101 Hollywood Blvd.
References
Cited sources
Further reading
Leonard, John, The Ed Sullivan Age, American Heritage, May/June 1997, Volume 48, Issue 3
Nachman, Gerald, Ed Sullivan, December 18, 2006.
Barthelme, Donald, "And Now Let's Hear It for the Ed Sullivan Show!" in Guilty Pleasures'', Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974
External links
The Official Ed Sullivan Show Website
Ed Sullivan Papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.
Ed Sullivan Documentary
1901 births
1974 deaths
20th-century American journalists
American male journalists
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American non-fiction writers
American gossip columnists
American people of Irish descent
Burials at Ferncliff Cemetery
Deaths from cancer in New York (state)
Deaths from esophageal cancer
Journalists from New York City
New York Daily News people
People from Port Chester, New York
Radio personalities from New York City
Television personalities from New York City
Writers from Manhattan | [
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In integral calculus, an elliptic integral is one of a number of related functions defined as the value of certain integrals. Originally, they arose in connection with the problem of finding the arc length of an ellipse and were first studied by Giulio Fagnano and Leonhard Euler (). Modern mathematics defines an "elliptic integral" as any function which can be expressed in the form
where is a rational function of its two arguments, is a polynomial of degree 3 or 4 with no repeated roots, and is a constant.
In general, integrals in this form cannot be expressed in terms of elementary functions. Exceptions to this general rule are when has repeated roots, or when contains no odd powers of . However, with the appropriate reduction formula, every elliptic integral can be brought into a form that involves integrals over rational functions and the three Legendre canonical forms (i.e. the elliptic integrals of the first, second and third kind).
Besides the Legendre form given below, the elliptic integrals may also be expressed in Carlson symmetric form. Additional insight into the theory of the elliptic integral may be gained through the study of the Schwarz–Christoffel mapping. Historically, elliptic functions were discovered as inverse functions of elliptic integrals.
Argument notation
Incomplete elliptic integrals are functions of two arguments; complete elliptic integrals are functions of a single argument. These arguments are expressed in a variety of different but equivalent ways (they give the same elliptic integral). Most texts adhere to a canonical naming scheme, using the following naming conventions.
For expressing one argument:
, the modular angle
, the elliptic modulus or eccentricity
, the parameter
Each of the above three quantities is completely determined by any of the others (given that they are non-negative). Thus, they can be used interchangeably.
The other argument can likewise be expressed as , the amplitude, or as or , where and is one of the Jacobian elliptic functions.
Specifying the value of any one of these quantities determines the others. Note that also depends on . Some additional relationships involving include
The latter is sometimes called the delta amplitude and written as . Sometimes the literature also refers to the complementary parameter, the complementary modulus, or the complementary modular angle. These are further defined in the article on quarter periods.
In this notation, the use of a vertical bar as delimiter indicates that the argument following it is the "parameter" (as defined above), while the backslash indicates that it is the modular angle. The use of a semicolon implies that the argument preceding it is the sine of the amplitude:
This potentially confusing use of different argument delimiters is traditional in elliptic integrals and much of the notation is compatible with that used in the reference book by Abramowitz and Stegun and that used in the integral tables by Gradshteyn and Ryzhik.
There are still other conventions for the notation of elliptic integrals employed in the literature. The notation with interchanged arguments, , is often encountered; and similarly for the integral of the second kind. Abramowitz and Stegun substitute the integral of the first kind, , for the argument in their definition of the integrals of the second and third kinds, unless this argument is followed by a vertical bar: i.e. for . Moreover, their complete integrals employ the parameter as argument in place of the modulus , i.e. rather than . And the integral of the third kind defined by Gradshteyn and Ryzhik, , puts the amplitude first and not the "characteristic" .
Thus one must be careful with the notation when using these functions, because various reputable references and software packages use different conventions in the definitions of the elliptic functions. For example, Wolfram's Mathematica software and Wolfram Alpha define the complete elliptic integral of the first kind in terms of the parameter , instead of the elliptic modulus .
Incomplete elliptic integral of the first kind
The incomplete elliptic integral of the first kind is defined as
This is the trigonometric form of the integral; substituting and , one obtains the Legendre normal form:
Equivalently, in terms of the amplitude and modular angle one has:
With one has:
demonstrating that this Jacobian elliptic function is a simple inverse of the incomplete elliptic integral of the first kind.
The incomplete elliptic integral of the first kind has following addition theorem:
The elliptic modulus can be transformed that way:
Incomplete elliptic integral of the second kind
The incomplete elliptic integral of the second kind in trigonometric form is
Substituting and , one obtains the Legendre normal form:
Equivalently, in terms of the amplitude and modular angle:
Relations with the Jacobi elliptic functions include
The meridian arc length from the equator to latitude is written in terms of :
where is the semi-major axis, and is the eccentricity.
The incomplete elliptic integral of the second kind has following addition theorem:
The elliptic modulus can be transformed that way:
Incomplete elliptic integral of the third kind
The incomplete elliptic integral of the third kind is
or
The number is called the characteristic and can take on any value, independently of the other arguments. Note though that the value is infinite, for any .
A relation with the Jacobian elliptic functions is
The meridian arc length from the equator to latitude is also related to a special case of :
Complete elliptic integral of the first kind
Elliptic Integrals are said to be 'complete' when the amplitude and therefore . The complete elliptic integral of the first kind may thus be defined as
or more compactly in terms of the incomplete integral of the first kind as
It can be expressed as a power series
where is the Legendre polynomials, which is equivalent to
where denotes the double factorial. In terms of the Gauss hypergeometric function, the complete elliptic integral of the first kind can be expressed as
The complete elliptic integral of the first kind is sometimes called the quarter period. It can be computed very efficiently in terms of the arithmetic–geometric mean:
See for details.
Therefore the modulus can be transformed that way:
This expression is valid for all and 0 ≤ k ≤ 1:
Relation to the gamma function
If and (where is the modular lambda function), then is expressible in closed form in terms of the gamma function. For example, and give, respectively,
More generally, the condition that be in an imaginary quadratic field is sufficient. For instance, if , then and
Relation to Jacobi theta function
The relation to Jacobi's theta function is given by
where the nome is
Asymptotic expressions
This approximation has a relative precision better than for . Keeping only the first two terms is correct to 0.01 precision for .
Differential equation
The differential equation for the elliptic integral of the first kind is
A second solution to this equation is . This solution satisfies the relation
Continued fraction
A continued fraction expansion is:
where the nome is .
Complete elliptic integral of the second kind
The complete elliptic integral of the second kind is defined as
or more compactly in terms of the incomplete integral of the second kind as
For an ellipse with semi-major axis and semi-minor axis and eccentricity , the complete elliptic integral of the second kind is equal to one quarter of the circumference of the ellipse measured in units of the semi-major axis . In other words:
The complete elliptic integral of the second kind can be expressed as a power series
which is equivalent to
In terms of the Gauss hypergeometric function, the complete elliptic integral of the second kind can be expressed as
The modulus can be transformed that way:
Computation
Like the integral of the first kind, the complete elliptic integral of the second kind can be computed very efficiently using the arithmetic–geometric mean .
Define sequences and , where , and the recurrence relations , hold. Furthermore, define . By definition,
Also, . Then
In practice, the arithmetic-geometric mean would simply be computed up to some limit. This formula converges quadratically for all . To speed up computation further, the relation can be used.
Furthermore, if and (where is the modular lambda function), then is expressible in closed form in terms of and hence can be computed without the need for the term. For example, and give, respectively,
Derivative and differential equation
A second solution to this equation is .
Complete elliptic integral of the third kind
The complete elliptic integral of the third kind can be defined as
Note that sometimes the elliptic integral of the third kind is defined with an inverse sign for the characteristic ,
Just like the complete elliptic integrals of the first and second kind, the complete elliptic integral of the third kind can be computed very efficiently using the arithmetic-geometric mean .
Partial derivatives
Functional relations
Legendre's relation:
See also
Elliptic curve
Schwarz–Christoffel mapping
Carlson symmetric form
Jacobi's elliptic functions
Weierstrass's elliptic functions
Jacobi theta function
Ramanujan theta function
Arithmetic–geometric mean
Pendulum period
Meridian arc
References
Notes
Other
External links
Eric W. Weisstein, "Elliptic Integral" (Mathworld)
Matlab code for elliptic integrals evaluation by elliptic project
Rational Approximations for Complete Elliptic Integrals (Exstrom Laboratories)
A Brief History of Elliptic Integral Addition Theorems
Elliptic functions
Special hypergeometric functions | [
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] |
In grammar, the ergative case (abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that identifies the noun as the agent of a transitive verb in ergative–absolutive languages.
Characteristics
In such languages, the ergative case is typically marked (most salient), while the absolutive case is unmarked. Recent work in case theory has vigorously supported the idea that the ergative case identifies the agent (the intentful performer of an action) of a verb (Woolford 2004).
In Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) for example, the ergative case is used to mark subjects of transitive verbs and possessors of nouns. This syncretism with the genitive is commonly referred to as the relative case.
Nez Perce has a three-way nominal case system with both ergative (-nim) and accusative (-ne) plus an absolute (unmarked) case for intransitive subjects: hipáayna qíiwn ‘the old man arrived’; hipáayna wewúkiye ‘the elk arrived’; wewúkiyene péexne qíiwnim ‘the old man saw an elk’.
Sahaptin has an ergative noun case (with suffix -nɨm) that is limited to transitive constructions only when the direct object is 1st or 2nd person: iwapáatayaaš łmámanɨm ‘the old woman helped me’; paanáy iwapáataya łmáma ‘the old woman helped him/her’ (direct); páwapaataya łmámayin ‘the old woman helped him/her’ (inverse).
Other languages that use the ergative case are Georgian, Chechen, and other Caucasian languages, Mayan languages, Mixe–Zoque languages, Wagiman and other Australian Aboriginal languages as well as Basque, Burushaski and Tibetan. Among all Indo-European languages only, Yaghnobi, Kurdish language varieties (including Kurmanji, Zazaki and Sorani) and Pashto from Iranian languages and Hindi/Urdu, along with some other Indo-Aryan languages are ergative.
The ergative case is also a feature of some constructed languages such as Na'vi, Ithkuil and Black Speech.
See also
Antipassive voice
Ergative-absolutive language
Morphosyntactic alignment
Volition (linguistics)
Citations
References
Woolford, Ellen. "Lexical Case, Inherent Case, and Argument Structure". Feb 2005.
"Glossary of linguistic terms by Eugene E. Loos. 2003
Grammatical cases | [
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EastEnders is a British soap opera created by Julia Smith and Tony Holland which has been broadcast on BBC One since 1985. Set in Albert Square in the East End of London in the fictional borough of Walford, the programme follows the stories of local residents and their families as they go about their daily lives. Initially there were two 30-minute episodes per week, later increasing to three, but since 2001, episodes have been broadcast on every weekday except Wednesday (outside of special occasions). The three-month suspension of production in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, led to broadcasts of the show being reduced to two 30-minute episodes per week, and eventually, the show going on a transmission break. Restrictions to filming resulted in the programme returning to transmission, with four 20-minute episodes per week resuming on 7 September 2020. In February 2022, the programme confirmed that the Friday broadcast would be retired and that from 7 March 2022, the show would be broadcasting every weekday except Friday, thus making it the first time in the show's history that the programme will air on Wednesday on a permanent basis.
Within eight months of the show's original launch, it had reached the number one spot in BARB's TV ratings and has consistently remained among the top rated series in Britain. In 2013, the average audience share for an episode was around 30 per cent. Today, EastEnders remains a significant programme in terms of the BBC's success and audience share. It has also been important in the history of British television drama, tackling many subjects that are considered to be controversial or taboo in British culture, and portraying a social life previously unseen on UK mainstream television.
, EastEnders has won ten BAFTA Awards and the Inside Soap Award for Best Soap for 14 years running (from 1997 to 2012), as well as twelve National Television Awards for Most Popular Serial Drama and 11 awards for Best British Soap at The British Soap Awards. It has also won 13 TV Quick and TV Choice Awards for Best Soap, six TRIC Awards for Soap of The Year, four Royal Television Society Awards for Best Continuing Drama and has been inducted into the Rose d'Or Hall of Fame.
History
Conception and preparations for broadcast
In March 1983, under two years before EastEnders first episode was broadcast, the show was a vague idea in the mind of a handful of BBC executives, who decided that what BBC1 needed was a popular bi-weekly drama series that would attract the kind of mass audiences that ITV was getting with Coronation Street. The first people to whom David Reid, then head of series and serials, turned were Julia Smith and Tony Holland, a well established producer/script editor team who had first worked together on Z-Cars. The outline that Reid presented was vague: two episodes a week, 52 weeks a year. After the concept was put to them on 14 March 1983, Smith and Holland then went about putting their ideas down on paper; they decided it would be set in the East End of London. Granada Television gave Smith unrestricted access to the Coronation Street production for a month so that she could get a sense how a continuing drama was produced.
There was anxiety at first that the viewing public would not accept a new soap set in the south of England, though research commissioned by lead figures in the BBC revealed that southerners would accept a northern soap, northerners would accept a southern soap and those from the Midlands, as Julia Smith herself pointed out, did not mind where it was set as long as it was somewhere else. This was the beginning of a close and continuing association between EastEnders and audience research, which, though commonplace today, was something of a revolution in practice.
The show's creators were both Londoners, but when they researched Victorian squares, they found massive changes in areas they thought they knew well. However, delving further into the East End of London, they found exactly what they had been searching for: a real East End spirit—an inward-looking quality, a distrust of strangers and authority figures, a sense of territory and community that the creators summed up as "Hurt one of us and you hurt us all".
When developing EastEnders, both Smith and Holland looked at influential models like Coronation Street, but they found that it offered a rather outdated and nostalgic view of working-class life. Only after EastEnders began, and featured the characters of Tony Carpenter and Kelvin Carpenter, did Coronation Street start to feature black characters, for example. They came to the conclusion that Coronation Street had grown old with its audience, and that EastEnders would have to attract a younger, more socially extensive audience, ensuring that it had the longevity to retain it for many years thereafter. They also looked at Brookside but found there was a lack of central meeting points for the characters, making it difficult for the writers to intertwine different storylines, so EastEnders was set in Albert Square.
A previous UK soap set in an East End market was ATV's Market in Honey Lane between 1967 and 1969. However this show, which graduated from one showing a week to two in three separate series (the latter series being shown in different time slots across the ITV network) was very different in style and approach from EastEnders. The British Film Institute described Market in Honey Lane thus: "It was not an earth-shaking programme, and certainly not pioneering in any revolutionary ideas in technique and production, but simply proposed itself to the casual viewer as a mildly pleasant affair."
The target launch date was originally January 1985. Smith and Holland had eleven months in which to write, cast and shoot the whole thing. However, in February 1984, they did not even have a title or a place to film. Both Smith and Holland were unhappy about the January 1985 launch date, favouring November or even September 1984 when seasonal audiences would be higher, but the BBC stayed firm, and Smith and Holland had to concede that, with the massive task of getting the Elstree Studios operational, January was the most realistic date. However, this was later to be changed to February.
The project had a number of working titles—Square Dance, Round the Square, Round the Houses, London Pride and East 8. It was the latter that stuck (E8 is the postcode for Hackney) in the early months of creative process. However, the show was renamed after many casting agents mistakenly thought the show was to be called Estate, and the fictional postcode E20 was created, instead of using E8. Julia Smith came up with the name Eastenders after she and Holland had spent months telephoning theatrical agents and asking "Do you have any real East Enders on your books?" However, Smith thought "Eastenders" "looked ugly written down" and was "hard to say", so decided to capitalise the second 'e'.
Initial character creation and casting
After they decided on the filming location of BBC Elstree Centre in Hertfordshire, Smith and Holland set about creating the 23 characters needed, in just 14 days. They took a holiday in Playa de los Pocillos, Lanzarote, and started to create the characters. Holland created the Beale and Fowler family, drawing on his own background. His mother, Ethel Holland, was one of four sisters raised in Walthamstow. Her eldest sister, Lou, had married a man named Albert Beale and had two children, named Peter and Pauline. These family members were the basis for Lou Beale, Pete Beale and Pauline Fowler. Holland also created Pauline's unemployed husband Arthur Fowler, their children Mark and Michelle, Pete's wife Kathy and their son Ian. Smith used her personal memories of East End residents she met when researching Victorian squares. Ethel Skinner was based on an old woman she met in a pub, with ill-fitting false teeth, and a "face to rival a neon sign", holding a Yorkshire Terrier in one hand and a pint of Guinness in the other.
Other characters created included Jewish doctor Harold Legg, the Anglo-Cypriot Osman family (Ali, Sue and baby Hassan), black father and son Tony and Kelvin Carpenter, single mother Mary Smith and Bangladeshi couple Saeed and Naima Jeffery. Jack, Pearl and Tracey Watts were created to bring "flash, trash, and melodrama" to the Square (they were later renamed Den, Angie and Sharon). The characters of Andy O'Brien and Debbie Wilkins were created to show a modern couple with outwardly mobile pretensions, and Lofty Holloway to show an outsider; someone who did not fit in with other residents. It was decided that he would be a former soldier, as Holland's personal experiences of ex-soldiers were that they had trouble fitting into society after being in the army. When they compared the characters they had created, Smith and Holland realised they had created a cross-section of East End residents. The Beale and Fowler family represented the old families of the East End, who had always been there. The Osmans, Jefferys and Carpenters represented the more modern diverse ethnic community of the East End. Debbie, Andy and Mary represented more modern-day individuals.
Once they had decided on their 23 characters, they returned to London for a meeting with the BBC. Everyone agreed that EastEnders would be tough, violent on occasion, funny and sharp—set in Margaret Thatcher's Britain—and it would start with a bang (namely the death of Reg Cox). They decided that none of their existing characters were wicked enough to have killed Reg, so a 24th character, Nick Cotton was added to the line-up. He was a racist thug, who often tried to lead other young characters astray. When all the characters had been created, Smith and Holland set about casting the actors, which also involved the input of lead director Matthew Robinson, who supervised auditions with the other directors at the outset, Vivienne Cozens and Peter Edwards.
Final preparations
Through the next few months, the set was growing rapidly at Elstree, and a composer and designer had been commissioned to create the title sequence. Simon May wrote the theme music and Alan Jeapes created the visuals. The visual images were taken from an aircraft flying over the East End of London at 1000 feet. Approximately 800 photographs were taken and pieced together to create one big image. The credits were later updated when the Millennium Dome was built.
The launch was delayed until February 1985 due to a delay in the chat show Wogan, that was to be a part of the major revamp in BBC1's schedules. Smith was uneasy about the late start as EastEnders no longer had the winter months to build up a loyal following before the summer ratings lull. The press were invited to Elstree to meet the cast and see the lot, and stories immediately started circulating about the show, about a rivalry with ITV (who were launching their own market-based soap, Albion Market) and about the private lives of the cast. Anticipation and rumour grew in equal measure until the first transmission at 7p.m. on 19 February 1985. Both Holland and Smith could not watch; they both instead returned to the place where it all began, Albertine's Wine Bar on Wood Lane. The next day, viewing figures were confirmed at 17million. The reviews were largely favourable, although, after three weeks on air, BBC1's early evening share had returned to the pre-EastEnders figure of seven million, though EastEnders then climbed to highs of up to 23million later on in the year. Following the launch, both group discussions and telephone surveys were conducted to test audience reaction to early episodes. Detailed reactions were taken after six months and since then regular monitoring was conducted.
1980s broadcast history
Press coverage of EastEnders, which was already intense, went into overdrive once the show was broadcast. With public interest so high, the media began investigating the private lives of the show's popular stars. Within days, a scandalous headline appeared – "EASTENDERS STAR IS A KILLER". This referred to Leslie Grantham, and his prison sentence for the murder of a taxi driver in an attempted robbery nearly 20 years earlier. This shocking tell-all style set the tone for relations between Albert Square and the press for the next 20 years.
The show's first episode attracted some 17million viewers, and it continued to attract high viewing figures from then on. By Christmas 1985, the tabloids could not get enough of the soap. 'Exclusives' about EastEnders storylines and the actors on the show became a staple of tabloid buyers’ daily reading.
In 1987 the show featured the first same-sex kiss on a British soap, when Colin Russell (Michael Cashman) kissed boyfriend Barry Clarke on the forehead. This was followed in January 1989, less than a year after legislation came into effect in the UK prohibiting the 'promotion of homosexuality' by local authorities, by the first on-the-mouth gay kiss in a British soap when Colin kissed a new character, Guido Smith (Nicholas Donovan), an episode that was watched by 17 million people.
Writer Colin Brake suggested that 1989 was a year of big change for EastEnders, both behind the cameras and in front of them. Original production designer, Keith Harris, left the show, and Holland and Smith both decided that the time had come to move on too; their final contribution coinciding with the exit of one of EastEnders''' most successful characters, Den Watts (Leslie Grantham). Producer Mike Gibbon was given the task of running the show and he enlisted the most experienced writers to take over the storylining of the programme, including Charlie Humphreys, Jane Hollowood and Tony McHale.
According to Brake, the departure of two of the soap's most popular characters, Den and Angie Watts (Anita Dobson), left a void in the programme, which needed to be filled. In addition, several other long-running characters left the show that year including Sue and Ali Osman (Sandy Ratcliff and Nejdet Salih) and their family; Donna Ludlow (Matilda Ziegler); Carmel Jackson (Judith Jacob) and Colin Russell (Michael Cashman). Brake indicated that the production team decided that 1989 was to be a year of change in Walford, commenting, "it was almost as if Walford itself was making a fresh start".
By the end of 1989 EastEnders had acquired a new executive producer, Michael Ferguson, who had previously been a successful producer on ITV's The Bill. Brake suggested that Ferguson was responsible for bringing in a new sense of vitality and creating a programme that was more in touch with the real world than it had been over the previous year.
Changes in the 1990s
A new era began in 1990 with the introduction of Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden) and Grant Mitchell (Ross Kemp)—the Mitchell brothers—successful characters who would go on to dominate the soap thereafter. As the new production team cleared the way for new characters and a new direction, all of the characters introduced under Gibbon were axed from the show at the start of the year. Ferguson introduced other characters and was responsible for storylines including HIV, Alzheimer's disease and murder. After a successful revamp of the soap, Ferguson decided to leave EastEnders in July 1991. Ferguson was succeeded by both Leonard Lewis and Helen Greaves who initially shared the role as Executive Producer for EastEnders. Lewis and Greaves formulated a new regime for EastEnders, giving the writers of the serial more authority in storyline progression, with the script department providing "guidance rather than prescriptive episode storylines". By the end of 1992, Greaves left and Lewis became executive and series producer. He left EastEnders in 1994 after the BBC controllers demanded an extra episode a week, taking its weekly airtime from 60 to 90 minutes. Lewis felt that producing an hour of "reasonable quality drama" a week was the maximum that any broadcasting system could generate without loss of integrity. Having set up the transition to the new schedule, the first trio of episodes—dubbed The Vic siege—marked Lewis's departure from the programme. Barbara Emile then became the Executive Producer of EastEnders,"John Yorke – The New EE Boss ", Walford Gazette. Retrieved 11 November 2007. remaining with EastEnders until early 1995. She was succeeded by Corinne Hollingworth.
Hollingworth's contributions to the soap were awarded in 1997 when EastEnders won the BAFTA for Best Drama Series. Hollingworth shared the award with the next Executive Producer, Jane Harris. Harris was responsible for the critically panned Ireland episodes and Cindy Beale's attempted assassination of Ian Beale, which brought in an audience of 23 million in 1996, roughly four million more than Coronation Street."WHAT A LOAD OF PORK PIES; Ireland's full of drunkards, dimwits and donkeys according to EastEnders", The Mirror. Retrieved 18 July 2007. In 1998 Matthew Robinson was appointed as the Executive Producer of EastEnders. During his reign, EastEnders won the BAFTA for "Best Soap" in consecutive years 1999 and 2000 and many other awards. Robinson also earned tabloid soubriquet "Axeman of Albert Square" after sacking a large number of characters in one hit, and several more thereafter. In their place, Robinson introduced new long-running characters including Melanie Healy, Jamie Mitchell, Lisa Shaw, Steve Owen and Billy Mitchell.
2000s
John Yorke became the Executive Producer of EastEnders in 2000. Yorke was given the task of introducing the soap's fourth weekly episode. He axed the majority of the Di Marco family and helped introduce popular characters such as the Slater family. As what Mal Young described as "two of EastEnders' most successful years", Yorke was responsible for highly rated storylines such as "Who Shot Phil?", Ethel Skinner's death, Jim Branning and Dot Cotton's marriage, Trevor Morgan's domestic abuse of his wife Little Mo Morgan, and Kat Slater's revelation to her daughter Zoe Slater that she was her mother.
In 2002, Louise Berridge succeeded Yorke as the Executive Producer. During her time at EastEnders, Berridge introduced popular characters such as Alfie Moon, Dennis Rickman, Chrissie Watts, Jane Beale, Stacey Slater and the critically panned Indian Ferreira family.
Berridge was responsible for some ratings success stories, such as Alfie and Kat Slater's relationship, Janine Butcher getting her comeuppance, Trevor Morgan and Jamie Mitchell's death storylines and the return of one of the greatest soap icons, Den Watts, who had been presumed dead for 14 years. His return in late 2003 was watched by over 16 million viewers, putting EastEnders back at number one in the rating war with the Coronation Street. However, other storylines, such as one about a kidney transplant involving the Ferreiras, were not well received, and although Den Watts's return proved to be a ratings success, the British press branded the plot unrealistic and felt that it questioned the show's credibility. A severe press backlash followed after Den's actor, Leslie Grantham, was outed in an internet sex scandal, which coincided with a swift decline in viewer ratings. The scandal led to Grantham's departure from the soap, but the occasion was used to mark the 20th anniversary of EastEnders, with an episode showing Den's murder at the Queen Vic pub.
On 21 September 2004, Berridge quit as executive producer of EastEnders following continued criticism of the show. Kathleen Hutchison was swiftly appointed as the Executive Producer of EastEnders, and was tasked with quickly turning the fortunes of the soap. During her time at the soap Hutchison axed multiple characters, and reportedly ordered the rewriting of numerous scripts. Newspapers reported on employee dissatisfaction with Hutchison's tenure at EastEnders. In January 2005, Hutchison left the soap and John Yorke (who by this time, was the BBC Controller of Continuing Drama Series) took total control of the show himself and became acting Executive Producer for a short period, before appointing Kate Harwood to the role. Harwood stayed at EastEnders for 20 months before being promoted by the BBC. The highly anticipated return of Ross Kemp as Grant Mitchell in October 2005 proved to be a sudden major ratings success, with the first two episodes consolidating to ratings of 13.21 to 13.34 million viewers."Kemp's EastEnders return extended", BBC. URL last accessed on 24 February 2007. On Friday 11 November 2005, EastEnders was the first British drama to feature a two-minute silence. This episode later went on to win the British Soap Award for 'Best Single Episode'. In October 2006, Diederick Santer took over as Executive Producer of EastEnders. He introduced several characters to the show, including ethnic minority and homosexual characters to make the show 'feel more 21st Century'. Santer also reintroduced past and popular characters to the programme.
On 2 March 2007, BBC signed a deal with Google to put videos on YouTube. A behind the scenes video of EastEnders, hosted by Matt Di Angelo, who played Deano Wicks on the show, was put on the site the same day, and was followed by another on 6 March 2007. In April 2007, EastEnders became available to view on mobile phones, via 3G technology, for 3, Vodafone and Orange customers. On 21 April 2007, the BBC launched a new advertising campaign using the slogan "There's more to EastEnders". The first television advert showed Dot Branning with a refugee baby, Tomas, whom she took in under the pretence of being her grandson. The second and third featured Stacey Slater and Dawn Swann, respectively."Eastenders – Rob and Dawn", YouTube. Retrieved 29 April 2007. There have also been adverts in magazines and on radio.
In 2009, producers introduced a limit on the number of speaking parts in each episode due to budget cuts, with an average of 16 characters per episode. The decision was criticised by Martin McGrath of Equity, who said: "Trying to produce quality TV on the cheap is doomed to fail." The BBC responded by saying they had been working that way for some time and it had not affected the quality of the show.
2010s
From 4 February 2010, CGI was used in the show for the first time, with the addition of computer-generated trains.EastEnders celebrated its 25th anniversary on 19 February 2010. Santer came up with several plans to mark the occasion, including the show's first episode to be broadcast live, the second wedding between Ricky Butcher and Bianca Jackson and the return of Bianca's relatives, mother Carol Jackson, and siblings Robbie Jackson, Sonia Fowler and Billie Jackson. He told entertainment website Digital Spy, "It's really important that the feel of the week is active and exciting and not too reflective. There'll be those moments for some of our longer-serving characters that briefly reflect on themselves and how they've changed. The characters don't know that it's the 25th anniversary of anything, so it'd be absurd to contrive too many situations in which they're reflective on the past. The main engine of that week is great stories that'll get people talking." The live episode featured the death of Bradley Branning (Charlie Clements) at the conclusion of the "Who Killed Archie?" storyline, which saw Bradley's wife Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner) reveal that she was the murderer. Viewing figures peaked at 16.6 million, which was the highest viewed episode in seven years. Other events to mark the anniversary were a spin-off DVD, EastEnders: Last Tango in Walford, and an Internet spin-off, EastEnders: E20.
Santer officially left EastEnders in March 2010, and was replaced by Bryan Kirkwood. Kirkwood's first signing was the reintroduction of characters Alfie Moon (Shane Richie) and Kat Moon (Jessie Wallace), and his first new character was Vanessa Gold, played by Zöe Lucker. In April and May 2010, Kirkwood axed eight characters from the show, Barbara Windsor left her role of Peggy Mitchell, which left a hole in the show, which Kirkwood decided to fill by bringing back Kat and Alfie, which he said would "herald the new era of EastEnders." EastEnders started broadcasting in high definition on 25 December 2010. Old sets had to be rebuilt, so The Queen Victoria set was burnt down in a storyline (and in reality) to facilitate this.
In November 2011, a storyline showed character Billy Mitchell, played by Perry Fenwick, selected to be a torch bearer for the 2012 Summer Olympics. In reality, Fenwick carried the torch through the setting of Albert Square, with live footage shown in the episode on 23 July 2012. This was the second live broadcast of EastEnders. In 2012, Kirkwood chose to leave his role as executive producer and was replaced by Lorraine Newman. The show lost many of its significant characters during this period. Newman stepped down as executive producer after 16 months in the job in 2013 after the soap was criticised for its boring storylines and its lowest-ever figures pointing at around 4.8 million. Dominic Treadwell-Collins was appointed as the new executive producer on 19 August 2013 and was credited on 9 December. He axed multiple characters from the show and introduced the extended Carter family. He also introduced a long-running storyline, "Who Killed Lucy Beale?", which peaked during the show's 30th anniversary in 2015 with a week of live episodes. Treadwell-Collins announced his departure from EastEnders on 18 February 2016.
Sean O'Connor, former EastEnders series story producer and then-editor on radio soap opera The Archers, was announced to be taking over the role. Treadwell-Collins left on 6 May and O'Connor's first credited episode was broadcast on 11 July Although O'Connor's first credited episode aired in July, his own creative work was not seen onscreen until late September. Additionally, Oliver Kent was brought in as the Head of Continuing Drama Series for BBC Scripted Studios, meaning that Kent would oversee EastEnders along with O'Connor. O'Connor's approach to the show was to have a firmer focus on realism, which he said was being "true to EastEnders DNA and [finding] a way of capturing what it would be like if Julia Smith and Tony Holland were making the show now." He said that "EastEnders has always had a distinctly different tone from the other soaps but over time we've diluted our unique selling point. I think we need to be ourselves and go back to the origins of the show and what made it successful in the first place. It should be entertaining but it should also be informative—that's part of our unique BBC compact with the audience. It shouldn't just be a distraction from your own life, it should be an exploration of the life shared by the audience and the characters." O'Connor planned to stay with EastEnders until the end of 2017, but announced his departure on 23 June 2017 with immediate effect, saying he wanted to concentrate on a career in film. John Yorke returned as a temporary executive consultant. Kent said, "John Yorke is a Walford legend and I am thrilled that he will be joining us for a short period to oversee the show and to help us build on Sean's legacy while we recruit a long-term successor." Yorke initially returned for three months but his contract was later extended.
In July 2018, a special episode was aired as part of a knife crime storyline. This episode, which showed the funeral of Shakil Kazemi (Shaheen Jafargholi) interspersed with real people talking about their true-life experiences of knife crime.
On 8 August 2018, it was announced that Kate Oates, who has previously been a producer on the ITV soap operas Emmerdale and Coronation Street, would become Senior Executive Producer of EastEnders, as well of Holby City and Casualty. Oates began her role in October, and continued to work with Yorke until the end of the year to "ensure a smooth handover". It was also announced that Oates was looking for an Executive Producer to work under her. Jon Sen was announced on 10 December 2018 to be taking on the role of executive producer.
In late 2016, popularity and viewership of EastEnders began to decline, with viewers criticising the storylines during the O'Connor reign, such as the killing of the Mitchell sisters and a storyline centred around the local bin collection. Although, since Yorke and Oates' reigns, opinions towards the storylines have become more favourable, with storylines such as Ruby Allen’s (Louisa Lytton) sexual consent, which featured a special episode which "broke new ground" and knife crime, both of which have created "vital" discussions. The soap won the award for Best Continuing Drama at the 2019 British Academy Television Awards; its first high-profile award since 2016. However, in June 2019, EastEnders suffered its lowest ever ratings of 2.4 million due to its airing at 7 pm because of the BBC's coverage of the 2019 FIFA Women's World Cup. As of 2019, the soap is one of the most watched series on BBC iPlayer and averages around 5 million viewers per episode. The soap enjoyed a record-breaking year on the streaming platform in 2019, with viewers requesting to stream or download the show 234 million times, up 10% on 2018. The Christmas Day episode in 2019 became EastEnders biggest ever episode on BBC iPlayer, with 2.14 million viewer requests.
2020s
In February 2020, EastEnders celebrated its 35th anniversary with a stunt on the River Thames leading to the death of Dennis Rickman Jr (Bleu Landau).
It was announced on 18 March 2020 that production had been suspended on EastEnders and other BBC Studios continuing dramas in light of new government guidelines following the COVID-19 pandemic, and that broadcast of the show would be reduced to two 30-minute episodes per week, broadcast on Mondays and Tuesdays, respectively. A spokesperson confirmed that the decision was made to reduce transmission so that EastEnders could remain on-screen for longer. Two months later, Charlotte Moore, the director of content at the BBC, announced plans for a return to production. She confirmed that EastEnders would return to filming during June 2020 and that there would be a transmission break between episodes filmed before and after production paused. When production recommences, social distancing measures will be utilised and the show's cast will be required to do their own hair and make-up, which is normally done by a make-up artist.
It was announced on 3 June 2020 that EastEnders would go on a transmission break following the broadcast of episode 6124 on 16 June. A behind-the-scenes show, EastEnders: Secrets From The Square, will air in the show's place during the transmission break and is hosted by television personality Stacey Dooley. The first episode of the week features exclusive interviews with the show's cast, while the second episode will be a repeat of "iconic" episodes of the show. Beginning on 22 June 2020, Dooley interviews two cast members together in the show's restaurant set while observing social distancing measures. Kate Phillips, the controller of BBC Entertainment, explained that EastEnders: Secrets From The Square would be the "perfect opportunity to celebrate the show" in the absence of the show. Jon Sen, the show's executive producer, expressed his excitement at the new series, dubbing it "a unique opportunity to see from the cast themselves just what it is like to be part of EastEnders". The EastEnders: Iconic Episodes series consisted of 9 episodes: Den & Angie, Sharongate, Amira & Syed's Wedding (Part 2), Walford Pride, Pat & Peggy, Who Killed Lucy Beale? 30th Anniversary, Max & Stacey, Shirley Confesses and Pat & Frank's Affair.
Plans for the show's return to transmission were announced on 12 June 2020. It was confirmed that after the transmission break, the show would temporarily broadcast four 20-minute episodes per week, until it can return to its normal output. Sen explained that the challenges in production and filming of the show has led to the show's reduced output, but also stated that the crew had been "trialling techniques, filming methods and new ways of working" to prepare the show for its return. Filming recommenced on 29 June, with episodes airing from 7 September 2020.
On 9 April 2021, following the death of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the episode of EastEnders that was due to be aired that night was postponed along with the final of Masterchef. In May 2021, it was announced that from 14 June 2021, boxsets of episodes would be uploaded to BBC iPlayer each Monday for three weeks. Executive producer Sen explained that the bi-annual scheduling conflicts that the UEFA European Championship and the FIFA World Cup cause to the soap, premiering four episodes on the streaming service would be beneficial for fans of the show who want to watch at their own chosen pace. Sen also confirmed that the episodes will still air on BBC One throughout the week. The release of these boxsets was extended for a further five weeks, due to similar impacts caused by the 2020 Summer Olympics.
On 12 October 2021, it was announced that EastEnders would partake in a special week-long crossover event involving multiple British soaps to promote the topic of climate change ahead of the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference. During the week, beginning from 1 November, a social media clip featuring Maria Connor from Coronation Street was featured on the programme while Cindy Cunningham from Hollyoaks was also referenced. Similar clips featuring the show's own characters (Bailey Baker and Peter Beale) were featured on Doctors and Emmerdale during the week.
Setting
The central focus of EastEnders is the fictional Victorian square Albert Square in the fictional London Borough of Walford. In the show's narrative, Albert Square is a 19th-century street, named after Prince Albert (1819–1861), the husband of Queen Victoria (1819–1901, reigned 1837–1901). Thus, central to Albert Square is The Queen Victoria Public House (also known as The Queen Vic or The Vic). The show's producers based the square's design on Fassett Square in Dalston. There is also a market close to Fassett Square at Ridley Road. The postcode for the area, E8, was one of the working titles for the series. The name Walford is both a street in Dalston where Tony Holland lived and a blend of Walthamstow and Stratford—the areas of Greater London where the creators were born. Other parts of the Square and set interiors are based on other locations. The bridge is based upon one near BBC Television Centre which carries the Hammersmith & City tube line over Wood Lane W12, the Queen Vic on the former College Park Hotel pub in Willesden at the end of Scrubs Lane at the junction with Harrow Road NW10 just a couple of miles from BBC Television Centre.
Walford East is a fictional tube station for Walford, and a tube map that was first seen on air in 1996 showed Walford East between Bow Road and West Ham, in the actual location of Bromley-by-Bow on the District and Hammersmith & City lines.
Walford has the postal district of E20. It was named as if Walford were part of the actual E postcode area which covers much of east London, the E standing for Eastern. E20 was entirely fictional when it was created, as London East postal districts stopped at E18 at the time. The show's creators opted for E20 instead of E19 as it was thought to sound better.
In March 2011, Royal Mail allocated the E20 postal district to the 2012 Olympic Park. In September 2011, the postcode for Albert Square was revealed in an episode as E20 6PQ.
Characters EastEnders is built around the idea of relationships and strong families, with each character having a place in the community. This theme encompasses the whole Square, making the entire community a family of sorts, prey to upsets and conflict, but pulling together in times of trouble. Co-creator Tony Holland was from a large East End family, and such families have typified EastEnders. The first central family was the combination of the Fowler family, consisting of Pauline Fowler (Wendy Richard), her husband Arthur (Bill Treacher), and teenage children Mark (David Scarboro/Todd Carty) and Michelle (Susan Tully). Pauline's family, the Beales, consisted of Pauline's twin brother Pete Beale (Peter Dean), his wife Kathy (Gillian Taylforth) and their teenage son Ian (Adam Woodyatt). Pauline and Pete's domineering mother Lou Beale (Anna Wing) lived with Pauline and her family. Holland drew on the names of his own family for the characters.
The Watts and Mitchell families have been central to many notable EastEnders storylines, the show having been dominated by the Watts in the 1980s, with the 1990s focusing on the Mitchells. The early 2000s saw a shift in attention towards the newly introduced female Slater clan, before a renewal of emphasis upon the restored Watts family beginning in 2003. Since 2006, EastEnders has largely been dominated by the Mitchell, Ahmed and Branning families, though the early 2010s also saw a renewed focus on the Moon family, and, from 2013 onwards, on the Carters. In 2016, the Fowlers were revived and merged with the Slaters, with Martin Fowler (James Bye) marrying Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner). The Taylor family were introduced in 2017 and have since been central to the show's main storylines. Key people involved in the production of EastEnders have stressed how important the idea of strong families is to the programme.EastEnders has an emphasis on strong family matriarchs, with examples including Pauline Fowler (Wendy Richard) and Peggy Mitchell (Barbara Windsor), helping to attract a female audience. John Yorke, then the BBC's head of drama production, put this down to Tony Holland's "gay sensibility, which showed a love for strong women". The matriarchal role is one that has been seen in various reincarnations since the programme's inception, often depicted as the centre of the family unit. The original matriarch was Lou Beale (Anna Wing), though later examples include Mo Harris (Laila Morse), Pat Butcher (Pam St Clement), Zainab Masood (Nina Wadia), Cora Cross (Ann Mitchell), Kathy Beale (Gillian Taylforth), Jean Slater (Gillian Wright), and Suki Panesar (Balvinder Sopal). These characters are often seen as being loud and interfering but most importantly, responsible for the well-being of the family and usually stressing the importance of family.
The show often includes strong, brassy, long-suffering women who exhibit diva-like behaviour and stoically battle through an array of tragedy and misfortune. Such characters include Angie Watts (Anita Dobson), Kathy Beale (Gillian Taylforth), Sharon Watts (Letitia Dean), Pat Butcher (Pam St Clement), Kat Slater (Jessie Wallace), Denise Fox (Diane Parish), Tanya Branning (Jo Joyner) and Linda Carter (Kellie Bright). Conversely there are female characters who handle tragedy less well, depicted as eternal victims and endless sufferers, who include Ronnie Mitchell (Samantha Womack), Little Mo Mitchell (Kacey Ainsworth), Laura Beale (Hannah Waterman), Sue Osman (Sandy Ratcliff), Lisa Fowler (Lucy Benjamin) and Mel Owen (Tamzin Outhwaite). The 'tart with a heart' is another recurring character. Often their promiscuity masks a hidden vulnerability and a desire to be loved. Such characters have included Pat Butcher (Pam St Clement) (though in her latter years, this changed), Tiffany Mitchell (Martine McCutcheon), Kat Slater (Jessie Wallace), Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner), Dawn Swann (Kara Tointon), Roxy Mitchell (Rita Simons), Whitney Dean (Shona McGarty) and Lauren Branning (Jacqueline Jossa).
A gender balance in the show is maintained via the inclusion of various "macho" male personalities such as Mick Carter (Danny Dyer), Phil Mitchell (Steve McFadden), Grant Mitchell (Ross Kemp), Dennis Rickman (Nigel Harman), Jack Branning (Scott Maslen) and Max Branning (Jake Wood), "bad boys" such as Den Watts (Leslie Grantham), Sean Slater (Robert Kazinsky), Michael Moon (Steve John Shepherd) and Vincent Hubbard (Richard Blackwood), and "heartthrobs" such as Simon Wicks (Nick Berry), Jamie Mitchell (Jack Ryder), Dennis Rickman (Nigel Harman), Joey Branning (David Witts), Kush Kazemi (Davood Ghadami) and Keanu Taylor (Danny Walters). Another recurring male character type is the smartly dressed businessman, often involved in gang culture and crime and seen as a local authority figure. Examples include Steve Owen (Martin Kemp), Jack Dalton (Hywel Bennett), Andy Hunter (Michael Higgs), Johnny Allen (Billy Murray) and Derek Branning (Jamie Foreman). Following criticism aimed at the show's over-emphasis on "gangsters" in 2005, such characters have been significantly reduced. Another recurring male character seen in EastEnders is the 'loser' or 'soft touch', males often comically under the thumb of their female counterparts, which have included Arthur Fowler (Bill Treacher), Ricky Butcher (Sid Owen), Garry Hobbs (Ricky Groves), Lofty Holloway (Tom Watt) and Billy Mitchell (Perry Fenwick). Other recurring character types that have appeared throughout the serial are "cheeky-chappies" Pete Beale (Peter Dean), Alfie Moon (Shane Richie), Garry Hobbs (Ricky Groves) and Kush Kazemi (Davood Ghadami), "lost girls" such as Mary Smith (Linda Davidson), Donna Ludlow (Matilda Ziegler), Mandy Salter (Nicola Stapleton) and Hayley Slater (Katie Jarvis), delinquents such as Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner), Jay Brown (Jamie Borthwick), Lola Pearce (Danielle Harold), Bobby Beale (Eliot Carrington/Clay Milner Russell) and Keegan Baker (Zack Morris), "villains" such as Nick Cotton (John Altman), Trevor Morgan (Alex Ferns), May Wright (Amanda Drew), Yusef Khan (Ace Bhatti), Archie Mitchell (Larry Lamb), Dean Wicks (Matt Di Angelo) and Stuart Highway (Ricky Champ), "bitches" such as Cindy Beale (Michelle Collins), Janine Butcher (Charlie Brooks), Sam Mitchell (Danniella Westbrook), Lucy Beale (Melissa Suffield/Hetti Bywater), Abi Branning (Lorna Fitzgerald), Babe Smith (Annette Badland) and Louise Mitchell (Tilly Keeper), "brawlers" or "fighters" such as Bianca Jackson (Patsy Palmer), Kat Slater (Jessie Wallace), Chelsea Fox (Tiana Benjamin), Dawn Swann (Kara Tointon), Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner) and Karen Taylor (Lorraine Stanley), and cockney "wide boys" or "wheeler dealers" such as Frank Butcher (Mike Reid), Alfie Moon (Shane Richie), Kevin Wicks (Phil Daniels), Darren Miller (Charlie G. Hawkins), Fatboy (Ricky Norwood) and Jay Brown (Jamie Borthwick).
Over the years EastEnders has typically featured a number of elderly residents, who are used to show vulnerability, nostalgia, stalwart-like attributes and are sometimes used for comedic purposes. The original elderly residents included Lou Beale (Anna Wing), Ethel Skinner (Gretchen Franklin) and Dot Cotton (June Brown). Over the years they have been joined by the likes of Mo Butcher (Edna Doré), Jules Tavernier (Tommy Eytle), Marge Green (Pat Coombs), Nellie Ellis (Elizabeth Kelly), Jim Branning (John Bardon), Charlie Slater (Derek Martin), Mo Harris (Laila Morse), Patrick Trueman (Rudolph Walker), Cora Cross (Ann Mitchell), Les Coker (Roger Sloman), Rose Cotton (Polly Perkins), Pam Coker (Lin Blakley), Stan Carter (Timothy West), Babe Smith (Annette Badland), Claudette Hubbard (Ellen Thomas), Sylvie Carter (Linda Marlowe), Ted Murray (Christopher Timothy), Joyce Murray (Maggie Steed), Arshad Ahmed (Madhav Sharma), Mariam Ahmed (Indira Joshi) and Vi Highway (Gwen Taylor). The programme has more recently included a higher number of teenagers and successful young adults in a bid to capture the younger television audience. This has spurred criticism, most notably from the actress Anna Wing, who portrayed Lou Beale in the show. She commented, "I don't want to be disloyal, but I think you need a few mature people in a soap because they give it backbone and body... if all the main people are young it gets a bit thin and inexperienced. It gets too lightweight."EastEnders has been known to feature a 'comedy double-act', originally demonstrated with the characters of Dot and Ethel, whose friendship was one of the serial's most enduring. Other examples include Paul Priestly (Mark Thrippleton) and Trevor Short (Phil McDermott), In 1989 especially, characters were brought in who were deliberately conceived as comic or light-hearted. Such characters included Julie Cooper (Louise Plowright)—a brassy maneater; Marge Green—a batty older lady played by veteran comedy actress Pat Coombs; Trevor Short (Phil McDermott)—the "village idiot"; his friend, northern heartbreaker Paul Priestly (Mark Thrippleton); wheeler-dealer Vince Johnson (Hepburn Graham) and Laurie Bates (Gary Powell), who became Pete Beale's (Peter Dean) sparring partner. The majority of EastEnders characters are working-class. Middle-class characters do occasionally become regulars, but have been less successful and rarely become long-term characters. In the main, middle-class characters exist as villains, such as James Wilmott-Brown (William Boyde), May Wright (Amanda Drew), Stella Crawford (Sophie Thompson), Yusef Khan (Ace Bhatti) and Gray Atkins (Toby-Alexander Smith) or are used to promote positive liberal influences, such as Colin Russell (Michael Cashman) or Rachel Kominski (Jacquetta May).EastEnders has always featured a culturally diverse cast which has included black, Asian, Turkish, Polish and Latvian characters. "The expansion of minority representation signals a move away from the traditional soap opera format, providing more opportunities for audience identification with the characters and hence a wider appeal". Despite this, the programme has been criticised by the Commission for Racial Equality, who argued in 2002 that EastEnders was not giving a realistic representation of the East End's "ethnic make-up". They suggested that the average proportion of visible minority faces on EastEnders was substantially lower than the actual ethnic minority population in East London boroughs, and it therefore reflected the East End in the 1960s, not the East End of the 2000s. The programme has since attempted to address these issues. A sari shop was opened and various characters of different ethnicities were introduced throughout 2006 and 2007, including the Fox family, the Ahmeds, and various background artists. This was part of producer Diederick Santer's plan to "diversify", to make EastEnders "feel more 21st century". EastEnders has had varying success with ethnic minority characters. Possibly the least successful were the Indian Ferreira family, who were not well received by critics or viewers and were dismissed as unrealistic by the Asian community in the UK.EastEnders has been praised for its portrayal of characters with disabilities, including Adam Best (David Proud) (spina bifida), Noah Chambers (Micah Thomas) (deaf), Jean Slater (Gillian Wright) and her daughter Stacey (Lacey Turner) (bipolar disorder), Janet Mitchell (Grace) (Down syndrome), Jim Branning (John Bardon) (stroke) and Dinah Wilson (Anjela Lauren Smith) (multiple sclerosis). The show also features a large number of gay, lesbian and bisexual characters (see list of soap operas with LGBT characters), including Colin Russell (Michael Cashman), Barry Clark (Gary Hailes), Simon Raymond (Andrew Lynford), Tony Hills (Mark Homer), Sonia Fowler (Natalie Cassidy), Naomi Julien (Petra Letang), Tina Carter (Luisa Bradshaw-White), Tosh Mackintosh (Rebecca Scroggs), Ben Mitchell (Harry Reid/Max Bowden), Paul Coker (Jonny Labey), Iqra Ahmed (Priya Davdra), Ash Kaur (Gurlaine Kaur Garcha), and Callum "Halfway" Highway (Tony Clay). Kyle Slater (Riley Carter Millington), a transgender character, was introduced in 2015.EastEnders has a high cast turnover and characters are regularly changed to facilitate storylines or refresh the format. The show has also become known for the return of characters after they have left the show. Sharon Watts (Letitia Dean) returned in August 2012 for her third stint on the show. Den Watts (Leslie Grantham) returned 14 years after he was believed to have died, a feat repeated by Kathy Beale (Gillian Taylforth) in 2015. Speaking extras, including Tracey the barmaid (Jane Slaughter) (who has been in the show since the first episode in 1985), have made appearances throughout the show's duration, without being the focus of any major storylines. The character of Nick Cotton (John Altman) gained a reputation for making constant exits and returns since the programme's first year, until the character's death in 2015.
, Adam Woodyatt, Gillian Taylforth and Letitia Dean are the only members of the original cast remaining in the show, in their roles of Ian Beale, Kathy Beale and Sharon Watts respectively. Ian Beale is the only character to have appeared continuously from the first episode without formally leaving, and is the longest-serving character in EastEnders.
Tracey the barmaid is the longest-serving female character in the show, having appeared since 1985, albeit as a minor character.
Storylines EastEnders programme makers took the decision that the show was to be about "everyday life" in the inner city "today" and regarded it as a "slice of life". Creator/producer Julia Smith declared that "We don't make life, we reflect it". She also said, "We decided to go for a realistic, fairly outspoken type of drama which could encompass stories about homosexuality, rape, unemployment, racial prejudice, etc., in a believable context. Above all, we wanted realism". In 2011, the head of BBC drama, John Yorke, said that the real East End had changed significantly since EastEnders started, and the show no longer truly reflected real life, but that it had an "emotional truthfulness" and was partly "true to the original vision" and partly "adapt[ing] to a changing world", adding that "If it was a show where every house cost a fortune and everyone drove a Lexus, it wouldn't be EastEnders. You have to show shades of that change, but certain things are immutable, I would argue, like The Vic and the market."
In the 1980s, EastEnders featured "gritty" storylines involving drugs and crime, representing the issues faced by working-class Britain under Thatcherism. Storylines included the cot death of 14-month-old Hassan Osman, Nick Cotton's (John Altman) homophobia, racism and murder of Reg Cox (Johnnie Clayton), Arthur Fowler's (Bill Treacher) unemployment reflecting the recession of the 1980s, the rape of Kathy Beale (Gillian Taylforth) in 1988 by James Willmott-Brown (William Boyde) and Michelle Fowler's (Susan Tully) teenage pregnancy. The show also dealt with prostitution, mixed-race relationships, shoplifting, sexism, divorce, domestic violence and mugging. In 1989, the programme came under criticism in the British media for being too depressing, and according to writer Colin Brake, the programme makers were determined to change this. In 1989, there was a deliberate attempt to increase the lighter, more comic aspects of life in Albert Square. This led to the introduction of some characters who were deliberately conceived as comic or light-hearted. Brake suggested that humour was an important element in EastEnders storylines during 1989, with a greater amount of slapstick and light comedy than before. He classed 1989's changes as a brave experiment, and suggested that while some found this period of EastEnders entertaining, many other viewers felt that the comedy stretched the programme's credibility. Although the programme still covered many issues in 1989, such as domestic violence, drugs, rape and racism, Brake reflected that the new emphasis on a more balanced mix between "light and heavy storylines" gave the illusion that the show had lost a "certain edge".
As the show progressed into the 1990s, EastEnders still featured hard-hitting issues such as Mark Fowler (Todd Carty) revealing he was HIV positive in 1991, the death of his wife Gill (Susanna Dawson) from an AIDS-related illness in 1992, murder, adoption, abortion, Peggy Mitchell's (Barbara Windsor) battle with breast cancer, and Phil Mitchell's (Steve McFadden) alcoholism and violence towards wife Kathy. Mental health issues were confronted in 1996 when 16-year-old Joe Wicks developed schizophrenia following the off-screen death of his sister in a car crash. The long-running storyline of Mark Fowler's HIV was so successful in raising awareness that in 1999, a survey by the National Aids Trust found teenagers got most of their information about HIV from the soap, though one campaigner noted that in some ways the storyline was not reflective of what was happening at the time as the condition was more common among the gay community. Still, heterosexual Mark struggled with various issues connected to his HIV status, including public fears of contamination, a marriage breakdown connected to his inability to have children and the side effects of combination therapies.
In the early 2000s, EastEnders covered the issue of euthanasia with Ethel Skinner's (Gretchen Franklin) death in a pact with her friend Dot Cotton (June Brown), the unveiling of Kat Slater's (Jessie Wallace) sexual abuse by her uncle Harry (Michael Elphick) as a child (which led to the birth of her daughter Zoe (Michelle Ryan), who had been brought up to believe that Kat was her sister), the domestic abuse of Little Mo Morgan (Kacey Ainsworth) by husband Trevor (Alex Ferns) (which involved marital rape and culminated in Trevor's death after he tried to kill Little Mo in a fire), Sonia Jackson (Natalie Cassidy) giving birth at the age of 15 and then putting her baby up for adoption, and Janine Butcher's (Charlie Brooks) prostitution, agoraphobia and drug addiction. The soap also tackled the issue of mental illness and carers of people who have mental conditions, illustrated with mother and daughter Jean (Gillian Wright) and Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner); Jean suffers from bipolar disorder, and teenage daughter Stacey was her carer (this storyline won a Mental Health Media Award in September 2006). Stacey went on to struggle with the disorder herself. The issue of illiteracy was highlighted by the characters of middle-aged Keith (David Spinx) and his young son Darren (Charlie G. Hawkins). EastEnders has also covered the issue of Down syndrome, as Billy (Perry Fenwick) and Honey Mitchell's (Emma Barton) baby, Janet Mitchell (Grace), was born with the condition in 2006. EastEnders covered child abuse with its storyline involving Phil Mitchell's (Steve McFadden) 11-year-old son Ben (Charlie Jones) and lawyer girlfriend Stella Crawford (Sophie Thompson), and child grooming involving the characters Tony King (Chris Coghill) as the perpetrator and Whitney Dean (Shona McGarty) as the victim.
Aside from this, soap opera staples of youthful romance, jealousy, domestic rivalry, gossip and extramarital affairs are regularly featured, with high-profile storylines occurring several times a year. Whodunits also feature regularly, including the "Who Shot Phil?" story arc in 2001 that attracted over 19 million viewers and was one of the biggest successes in British soap television; the "Who Killed Archie?" storyline, which was revealed in a special live episode of the show that drew a peak of 17 million viewers; and the "Who Killed Lucy Beale?" saga.
Production
Set
The exterior set for the fictional Albert Square is located in the permanent backlot of the BBC Elstree Centre, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, at , and is outdoors and open to the weather. It was initially built in 1984 with a specification that it should last for at least 15 years at a cost of £750,000. The EastEnders lot was designed by Keith Harris, who was a senior designer within the production team together with supervising art directors Peter Findley and Gina Parr. The main buildings on the square consisted originally of hollow shells, constructed from marine plywood facades mounted onto steel frames. The lower walls, pavements, etc., were constructed of real brick and tarmac. The set had to be made to look as if it had been standing for years. This was done by a number of means, including chipping the pavements, using chemicals to crack the top layer of the paint work, using varnish to create damp patches underneath the railway bridge, and making garden walls in such a way they appeared to sag. The final touches were added in summer 1984, these included a telephone box, telegraph pole that was provided by British Telecom, lampposts that were provided by Hertsmere Borough Council and a number of vehicles parked on the square. On each set all the appliances are fully functional such as gas cookers, the laundry washing machines and The Queen Victoria beer pumps.
The walls were intentionally built crooked to give them an aged appearance. The drains around the set are real so rainwater can naturally flow from the streets. The square was built in two phases with only three sides being built, plus Bridge Street, to begin with in 1984, in time to be used for the show's first episode. Then in 1986, Harris added an extension to the set, building the fourth side of Albert Square, and in 1987, Turpin Road began to be featured more, which included buildings such as The Dagmar.
In 1993, George Street was added, and soon after Walford East Underground station was built, to create further locations when EastEnders went from two to three episodes per week. The set was constructed by the BBC in-house construction department under construction manager Mike Hagan. Most of the buildings on Albert Square have no interior filming space, with a few exceptions, and most do not have rears or gardens. Some interior shots are filmed in the actual buildings.
In February 2008, it was reported that the set would transfer to Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, where a new set would be built as the set was looking "shabby", with its flaws showing up on high-definition television broadcasts. However, by April 2010 a follow-up report confirmed that Albert Square would remain at Elstree Studios for at least another four years, taking the set through its 25th anniversary. The set was consequently rebuilt for high definition on the same site, using mostly real brick with some areas using a new improved plastic brick. Throughout rebuilding filming would still take place, and so scaffolding was often seen on screen during the process, with some storylines written to accommodate the rebuilding, such as the Queen Vic fire.
In 2014, then executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins said that he wanted Albert Square to look like a real-life east London neighbourhood so that the soap would "better reflect the more fashionable areas of east London beloved of young professionals" giving a flavour of the "creeping gentrification" of east London. He added: "It should feel more like London. It's been frozen in aspic for too long." The BBC announced that they would rebuild the EastEnders set to secure the long-term future of the show, with completion expected to be in 2018. The set will provide a modern, upgraded exterior filming resource for EastEnders, and will copy the appearance of the existing buildings. However, it will be 20 per cent bigger, in order to enable greater editorial ambition and improve working conditions for staff. A temporary set will be created on-site to enable filming to continue while the permanent structure is rebuilt.
In May 2016 the rebuild was delayed until 2020 and forecast to cost in excess of £15 million, although the main part of the set is scheduled to be able to start filming in May 2019. In December 2018, it was revealed that the new set was now planned to cost £59 million but a National Audit Office (NAO) report stated that it would actually cost £86.7 million and be completed two-and-a-half years later than planned, in 2023; the NAO concluded that the BBC "could not provide value for money on the project". The NAO's forecast cost is more than the annual combined budget for BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2. The BBC said the new set would allow for HD filming and better reflect the modern East End of London. In March 2019 there was criticism from a group of MPs about how the BBC handled the redevelopment of the set. In March 2020 during the suspension of filming, the interior sets were used for a new adaptation of Talking Heads. This marked the first time that it had been used for anything other than EastEnders. In January 2022 the new £86.7m exterior set of EastEnders was officially unveiled by the BBC replacing the original set built in 1984. The new scenes from the new set will first appear from new episodes airing in spring.
Filming
The majority of EastEnders episodes are filmed at the BBC Elstree Centre in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire. In January 1987, EastEnders had three production teams each comprising a director, production manager, production assistant and assistant floor manager. Other permanent staff included the producer's office, script department and designer, meaning between 30 and 35 people would be working full-time on EastEnders, rising to 60 to 70 on filming days. When the number of episodes was increased to four per week, more studio space was needed, so Top of the Pops was moved from its studio at Elstree to BBC Television Centre in April 2001. Episodes are produced in "quartets" of four episodes, each of which starts filming on a Tuesday and takes nine days to record. Each day, between 25 and 30 scenes are recorded. During the filming week, actors can film for as many as eight to twelve episodes. Exterior scenes are filmed on a specially constructed film lot, and interior scenes take place in six studios. The episodes are usually filmed about six to eight weeks in advance of broadcast. During the winter period, filming can take place up to twelve weeks in advance, due to less daylight for outdoor filming sessions. This time difference has been known to cause problems when filming outdoor scenes. On 8 February 2007, heavy snow fell on the set and filming had to be cancelled as the scenes due to be filmed on the day were to be transmitted in April. EastEnders is normally recorded using four cameras. When a quartet is completed, it is edited by the director, videotape editor and script supervisor. The producer then reviews the edits and decides if anything needs to be re-edited, which the director will do. A week later, sound is added to the episodes and they are technically reviewed, and are ready for transmission if they are deemed of acceptable quality.
Although episodes are predominantly recorded weeks before they are broadcast, occasionally, EastEnders includes current events in their episodes. In 1987, EastEnders covered the general election. Using a plan devised by co-creators Smith and Holland, five minutes of material was cut from four of the pre-recorded episodes preceding the election. These were replaced by specially recorded election material, including representatives from each major party, and a scene recorded on the day after the election reflecting the result, which was broadcast the following Tuesday. The result of the 2010 general election was referenced on 7 May 2010 episode. During the 2006 FIFA World Cup, actors filmed short scenes following the tournament's events that were edited into the programme in the following episode. Last-minute scenes have also been recorded to reference the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1995, the two-minute silence on Remembrance Day 2005 (2005 also being the year for the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar), Barack Obama's election victory in 2008, the death of Michael Jackson in 2009, the 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review, Andy Murray winning the Men's Singles at the 2013 Wimbledon Championships, the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the birth of Prince George of Cambridge, Scotland voting no against independence in 2014, and the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Great War.EastEnders is often filmed on location, away from the studios in Borehamwood. Sometimes an entire quartet is filmed on location, which has a practical function and are the result of EastEnders making a "double bank", when an extra week's worth of episodes are recorded at the same time as the regular schedule, enabling the production of the programme to stop for a two-week break at Christmas. These episodes often air in late June or early July and again in late October or early November. The first time this happened was in December 1985 when Pauline (Wendy Richard) and Arthur Fowler (Bill Treacher) travelled to the Southend-on-Sea to find their son Mark, who had run away from home. In 1986, EastEnders filmed overseas for the first time, in Venice, and this was also the first time it was not filmed on videotape, as a union rule at the time prevented producers taking a video crew abroad and a film crew had to be used instead. In 2011, it was reported that eight per cent of the series is filmed on location.
If scenes during a normal week are to be filmed on location, this is done during the normal recording week. Off-set locations that have been used for filming include Clacton (1989), Devon (September 1990), Hertfordshire (used for scenes set in Gretna Green in July 1991), Portsmouth (November 1991), Milan (1997), Ireland (1997), Amsterdam (December 1999), Brighton (2001) and Portugal (2003). In 2003, filming took place at Loch Fyne Hotel and Leisure Club in Inveraray, The Arkinglass Estate in Cairndow and Grims Dyke Hotel, Harrow Weald, north London, for a week of episodes set in Scotland. The episode shown on 9 April 2007 featured scenes filmed at St Giles Church and The Blacksmiths Arms public house in Wormshill, the Ringlestone Inn, two miles away and Court Lodge Farm in Stansted, Kent. and the Port of Dover, Kent. .
Other locations have included the court house, a disused office block, Evershed House, and St Peter's Church, all in St Albans, an abandoned mental facility in Worthing, and a wedding dress shop in Muswell Hill, north London. A week of episodes in 2011 saw filming take place on a beach in Thorpe Bay and a pier in Southend-on-Sea—during which a stuntman was injured when a gust of wind threw him off balance and he fell onto rocks— with other scenes filmed on the Essex coast. In 2012, filming took place in Keynsham, Somerset. In January 2013, on-location filming at Grahame Park in Colindale, north London, was interrupted by at least seven youths who threw a firework at the set and threatened to cut members of the crew. In October 2013, scenes were filmed on a road near London Southend Airport in Essex.EastEnders has featured seven live broadcasts. For its 25th anniversary in February 2010, a live episode was broadcast in which Stacey Slater (Lacey Turner) was revealed as Archie Mitchell's (Larry Lamb) killer. Turner was told only 30 minutes before the live episode and to maintain suspense, she whispers this revelation to former lover and current father-in-law, Max Branning, in the very final moments of the live show. Many other cast members only found out at the same time as the public, when the episode was broadcast. On 23 July 2012, a segment of that evening's episode was screened live as Billy Mitchell (Perry Fenwick) carried the Olympic Flame around Walford in preparation for the 2012 Summer Olympics. In February 2015, for the soap's 30th anniversary, five episodes in a week featured live inserts throughout them. Episodes airing on Tuesday 17, Wednesday 18 and Thursday 19 (which featured an hour long episode and a second episode) all featured at least one live insert. The show revealed that the killer of Lucy Beale (Hetti Bywater) was her younger brother, Bobby (Eliot Carrington), during the second episode on Thursday, after a ten-month mystery regarding who killed her. In a flashback episode which revisited the night of the murder, Bobby was revealed to have killed his sister. The aftermath episode, which aired on Friday 20, was completely live and explained in detail Lucy's death. Carrington was told he was Lucy's killer on Monday 16, while Laurie Brett (who plays Bobby's adoptive mother, Jane) was informed in November, due to the character playing a huge role in the cover-up of Lucy's murder. Bywater only discovered Bobby was responsible for Lucy's death on the morning of Thursday, 19 February, several hours before they filmed the scenes revealing Bobby as Lucy's killer.
Post-production
Each episode should run for 27 minutes and 15 seconds, however, if any episode runs over or under then it is the job of post-production to cut or add scenes where appropriate. As noted in the 1994 behind-the-scenes book, EastEnders: The First 10 Years, after filming, tapes were sent to the videotape editor, who then edited the scenes together into an episode. The videotape editor used the director's notes so they knew which scenes the director wanted to appear in a particular episode. The producer might have asked for further changes to be made. The episode was then copied onto D3 video. The final process was to add the audio which included background noise such as a train or a jukebox music and to check it met the BBC's technical standard for broadcasting.
Since 2010, EastEnders no longer uses tapes in the recording or editing process. After footage is recorded, the material is sent digitally to the post-production team. The editors then assemble all the scenes recorded for the director to view and note any changes that are needed. The sound team also have the capability to access the edited episode, enabling them to dub the sound and create the final version.
Budgets and costs
According to the book How to Study Television, in 1995 EastEnders cost the BBC £40,000 per episode on average. A 2012 agreement between the BBC, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain and the Personal Managers' Association set out the pay rate for EastEnders scripts as £137.70 per minute of transmission time (£4,131 for 30 minutes), which is 85 per cent of the rate for scripts for other BBC television series. The writers would be paid 75 per cent of that fee for any repeats of the episode. In 2011, it was reported that actors receive a per-episode fee of between £400 and £1,200, and are guaranteed a certain number of episodes per year, perhaps as few as 30 or as many as 100, therefore annual salaries could range from £12,000 to £200,000 depending on the popularity of a character. Some actors' salaries were leaked in 2006, revealing that Natalie Cassidy (Sonia Fowler) was paid £150,000, Cliff Parisi (Minty Peterson) received £220,000, Barbara Windsor (Peggy Mitchell) and Steve McFadden (Phil Mitchell) each received £360,000 and Wendy Richard (Pauline Fowler) had a salary of £370,000. In 2017, it was revealed that Danny Dyer (Mick Carter) and Adam Woodyatt (Ian Beale) were the highest-paid actors in EastEnders, earning between £200,000 and £249,999, followed by Laurie Brett (Jane Beale), Letitia Dean (Sharon Watts), Tameka Empson (Kim Fox), Linda Henry (Shirley Carter), Scott Maslen (Jack Branning), Diane Parish (Denise Fox), Gillian Taylforth (Kathy Beale) and Lacey Turner (Stacey Slater), earning between £150,000 and £199,999.
A 2011 report from the National Audit Office (NAO) showed that EastEnders had an annual budget of £29.9 million. Of that, £2.9 million was spent on scripts and £6.9 million went towards paying actors, extras and chaperones for child actors. According to the NAO, BBC executives approved £500,000 of additional funding for the 25th anniversary live episode (19 February 2010). With a total cost of £696,000, the difference was covered from the 2009–2010 series budget for EastEnders. When repeats and omnibus editions are shown, the BBC pays additional fees to cast and scriptwriters and incurs additional editing costs, which in the period 2009–2010, amounted to £5.5million. According to a Radio Times article for 212 episodes it works out at £141,000 per episode or 3.5p per viewer hour.
Sustainability
In 2014, two new studios were built and they were equipped with low-energy lighting which has saved approximately 90,000 kwh per year. A carbon literacy course was run with Heads of Departments of EastEnders attending and as a result, representatives from each department agreed to meet quarterly to share new sustainability ideas. The paper usage was reduced by 50 per cent across script distribution and other weekly documents and 20 per cent across all other paper usage. The production team now use recycled paper and recycled stationery.
Also changes to working online has also saved transportation cost of distribution 2,500 DVDs per year. Sets, costumes, paste pots and paint are all recycled by the design department. Cars used by the studio are low emission vehicles and the production team take more efficient energy efficient generators out on location. Caterers no longer use polystyrene cups and recycling on location must be provided.
As a result of EastEnders sustainability, it was awarded albert+, an award that recognises the production's commitment to becoming a more eco-friendly television production. The albert+ logo was first shown at the end of the EastEnders titles for episode 5281 on 9 May 2016.
Scheduling
Broadcast
Since 1985, EastEnders has remained at the centre of BBC One's primetime schedule. From 2001 to 2022, it was broadcast at 7:30pm on Tuesday and Thursday, and 8pm on Monday and Friday. EastEnders was originally broadcast twice weekly at 7:00pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 19 February 1985. However, in September 1985 the two episodes were moved to 7:30pm as Michael Grade did not want the soap running in direct competition with Emmerdale Farm, and this remained the same until 7 April 1994. The BBC had originally planned to take advantage of the 'summer break' that Emmerdale Farm usually took to capitalise on ratings, but ITV added extra episodes and repeats so that Emmerdale Farm was not taken off the air over the summer. Realising the futility of the situation, Grade decided to move the show to the later 7:30pm slot.EastEnders output then increased to three times a week on Mondays, Tuesday and Thursdays from 11 April 1994 until 2 August 2001.
From 10 August 2001, EastEnders then added its fourth episode (shown on Fridays). This caused some controversy as the first Friday episode clashed with Coronation Street, which was moved to 8pm to make way for an hour-long episode of rural soap Emmerdale. In this first head-to-head battle, EastEnders claimed victory over its rival.
In early 2003, viewers could watch episodes of EastEnders on digital channel BBC Three before they were broadcast on BBC One. This was to coincide with the relaunch of the channel and helped BBC Three break the one million viewers mark for the first time with 1.03 million who watched to see Mark Fowler's departure. According to the EastEnders website, there are on average 208 episodes outputted each year.
On 21 February 2022, it was announced that from 7 March 2022, EastEnders would begin airing from Monday to Thursday at 7:30pm, therefore no longer airing on a Friday. This meant that EastEnders would clash with Emmerdale, but the producers stated that due to the importance of online streaming figures, they were not concerned about the soaps clashing on the live television guides.
Repeats
The omnibus edition, a compilation of the week's episodes in a continuous sequence, originally aired on BBC One on Sunday afternoons, until 1 April 2012 when it was changed to a late Friday night or early Saturday morning slot, commencing 6 April 2012, though the exact time differed. It reverted to a weekend daytime slot as from January 2013 on BBC Two. In 2014, the omnibus moved back to around midnight on Friday nights, and in April 2015, the omnibus was axed, following detailed audience research and the introduction of 30-day catch up on BBC iPlayer and the planning of BBC One +1. The last omnibus on the BBC was shown on 24 April 2015. While W was showing same-day repeats of EastEnders, they also returned the weekend omnibus, starting on 20 February 2016.
From 20 February to 26 May 1995, as part of the programme's 10th Anniversary celebrations, episodes from 1985 were repeated each weekday morning at 10am, starting from episode one. Four specially selected episodes from 1985, 1986 and 1987 were also repeated on BBC1 on Friday evenings at 8pm under the banner "The Unforgettable EastEnders". These included the wedding of Michelle Fowler and Lofty Holloway, the revelation of the father of Michelle's baby, a two-hander between Dot Cotton and Ethel Skinner and the 1986 Christmas episode featuring Den Watts presenting Angie Watts with divorce papers.EastEnders was regularly repeated at 10pm on BBC Choice from the channel's launch in 1998, a practice continued by BBC Three for many years until mid-2012 with the repeat moving to 10:30pm. From 25 December 2010 - 29 April 2011 and 31 July 2012 - 13 August 2012 to the show was repeated on BBC HD in a Simulcast with BBC Three. In 2015, the BBC Three repeat moved back to 10pm. In February 2016, the repeat moved to W, the rebranded Watch, after BBC Three became an online-only channel. W stopped showing EastEnders in April 2018. Episodes of EastEnders are available on-demand through BBC iPlayer for 30 days after their original screening.
On 1 December 2012, the BBC uploaded the first 54 episodes of EastEnders to YouTube, and on 23 July 2013 they uploaded a further 14 episodes bringing the total to 68. These have since been taken down. In April 2018, it was announced that Drama would be showing repeats starting 6 August 2018 during weekdays and they are also available on-demand on the UKTV Play catch-up service for 30 days after the broadcast. In December 2019, Christmas episodes were added to Britbox UK.
International EastEnders is broadcast around the world in many English-speaking countries. New Zealand became the first to broadcast EastEnders overseas, the first episode being shown on 27 September 1985. This was followed by the Netherlands on 8 December 1986, Australia on 5 January 1987, Norway on 27 April, and Barcelona on 30 June (dubbed into Catalan). On 9 July 1987, it was announced that the show would be aired in the United States on PBS. BBC Worldwide licensed 200 hours of EastEnders for broadcast in Serbia on RTS (dubbed into Serbian); it began airing the first episode in December 1997. The series was broadcast in the United States until BBC America ceased broadcasts of the serial in 2003, amidst fan protests. In June 2004, the satellite television provider Dish Network picked up EastEnders, broadcasting episodes starting at the point where BBC America had ceased broadcasting them, offering the series as a pay-per-view item. Episodes air two months behind the UK schedule. Episodes from prior years are still shown on various PBS stations in the US. Since 7 March 2017, EastEnders has been available in the United States on demand, 24 hours after it has aired in the United Kingdom via BritBox, a joint venture between BBC and ITV.
The series was screened in Australia by ABC TV from 1987 until 1991. It is aired in Australia on Satellite & Streaming services on BBC UKTV, from Mondays to Thursdays 7:50pm–8:30pm with two advertisement breaks of five minutes each. Episodes are shown roughly one week after their UK broadcast. In New Zealand, it was shown by TVNZ on TVNZ 1 for several years, and then on Prime each weekday afternoon. It is shown on BBC UKTV from Mondays to Thursdays at 8pm. Episodes are roughly two weeks behind the UK.EastEnders is shown on BBC Entertainment (formerly BBC Prime) in Europe and in Africa, where it is approximately six episodes behind the UK. It was also shown on BBC Prime in Asia, but when the channel was replaced by BBC Entertainment, it ceased broadcasting the series. In Canada, EastEnders was shown on BBC Canada until 2010, at which point it was picked up by VisionTV.
In Ireland, EastEnders was shown on TV3 from September 1998 until March 2001, when it moved over to RTÉ One, after RTÉ lost to TV3 the rights to air rival soap Coronation Street. Additionally, episodes of EastEnders are available on-demand through RTÉ Online for seven days after their original screening.
International versions
In 1991 the BBC sold the programme's format rights to a Dutch production company IDTV, the programme was renamed Het Oude Noorden (Translation: Old North). The Dutch version was re-written from already existing EastEnders scripts. The schedule remained the same as EastEnders twice weekly episodes, however some notable changes included the programme is now set in Rotterdam rather than London, characters are given Dutch names (Den and Angie became Ger and Ankie) and The Queen Victoria pub is renamed "Cade Faas".
According to Barbara Jurgen who re-wrote the scripts for a Dutch audience he said "The power of the show is undeniable. The Scripts are full of hard, sharp drama, plus great one-liners which will translate well to Holland." The Dutch version began broadcasting on VARA 13 March 1993 but was cancelled after 20 episodes.
Spin-offs and merchandise
On 26 December 1988, the first EastEnders "bubble" was shown, titled "CivvyStreet". Since then, "Return of Nick Cotton" (2000), "Ricky & Bianca" (2002), "Dot's Story" (2003), "Perfectly Frank" (2003) and "Pat and Mo" (2004) have all been broadcast, each episode looking into lives of various characters and revealing part of their backstories or lives since leaving EastEnders. In 1993, the two-part story "Dimensions in Time", a charity cross-over with Doctor Who, was shown.
In 1998, EastEnders Revealed was launched on BBC Choice (now BBC Three). The show takes a look behind the scenes of the EastEnders and investigates particular places, characters or families within EastEnders. An episode of EastEnders Revealed that was commissioned for BBC Three attracted 611,000 viewers. As part of the BBC's digital push, EastEnders Xtra was introduced in 2005. The show was presented by Angellica Bell and was available to digital viewers at 8:30 pm on Monday nights. It was also shown after the Sunday omnibus. The series went behind the scenes of the show and spoke to some of the cast members. A new breed of behind-the-scenes programmes have been broadcast on BBC Three since 1 December 2006. These are all documentaries related to current storylines in EastEnders, in a similar format to EastEnders Revealed, though not using the EastEnders Revealed name.
In October 2009, a 12-part Internet spin-off series entitled EastEnders: E20 was announced. The series was conceived by executive producer Diederick Santer "as a way of nurturing new, young talent, both on- and off-screen, and exploring the stories of the soaps' anonymous bystanders." E20 features a group of sixth-form characters and targets the "Hollyoaks demographic". It was written by a team of young writers and was shown three times a week on the EastEnders website from 8 January 2010. A second 10-part series started in September 2010, with twice-weekly episodes available online and an omnibus on BBC Three. A third series of 15 episodes started in September 2011.EastEnders and rival soap opera Coronation Street took part in a crossover episode for Children in Need on 19 November 2010 called "East Street". On 4 April 2015, EastEnders confirmed plans for a BBC One series featuring Kat and Alfie Moon. The six-part drama, Kat & Alfie: Redwater, was created by executive producer Dominic Treadwell-Collins and his team. In the spin-off, the Moons visit Ireland where they "search for answers to some very big questions."
Until its closure, BBC Store released 553 EastEnders episodes from various years, including the special episode "CivvyStreet", available to buy as digital downloads.
Popularity and viewership
An example of EastEnders popularity is that after episodes, electricity use in the United Kingdom rises significantly as viewers who have waited for the show to end begin boiling water for tea, a phenomenon known as TV pickup. Over five minutes, power demand rises by three GW, the equivalent of 1.5 to 1.75 million kettles. National Grid personnel watch the show to know when closing credits begin so they can prepare for the surge, asking for additional power from France if necessary.
Ratings EastEnders is the BBC's most consistent programme in terms of ratings, and as of 2021, episodes typically receive between 4 and 6 million viewers. EastEnders two biggest ratings rivals are the ITV soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale.
The launch show in 1985 attracted 17.35 million viewers. 25 July 1985 was the first time the show's viewership rose to first position in the weekly top 10 shows for BBC One. The highest rated episode of EastEnders is the Christmas Day 1986 episode, which attracted a combined 30.15 million viewers who tuned into either the original transmission or the omnibus to see Den Watts hand over divorce papers to his wife Angie. This remains the highest rated episode of a soap in British television history.
In 2001, EastEnders clashed with Coronation Street for the first time. EastEnders won the battle with 8.4 million viewers (41% share) whilst Coronation Street lagged behind with 7.3 million viewers (34% share). On 21 September 2004, Louise Berridge, the then executive producer, quit following criticism of the show. The following day the show received its lowest ever ratings at that time (6.2 million) when ITV scheduled an hour-long episode of Emmerdale against it. Emmerdale was watched by 8.1 million viewers. The poor ratings motivated the press into reporting viewers were bored with implausible and ill-thought-out storylines. Under new producers, EastEnders and Emmerdale continued to clash at times, and Emmerdale tended to come out on top, giving EastEnders lower than average ratings. In 2006, EastEnders regularly attracted between 8 and 12 million viewers in official ratings. EastEnders received its second lowest ratings on 17 May 2007, when 4.0 million viewers tuned in. This was also the lowest ever audience share, with just 19.6 per cent. This was attributed to a conflicting one-hour special episode of Emmerdale on ITV1. However, ratings for the 10pm EastEnders repeat on BBC Three reached an all-time high of 1.4 million. However, there have been times when EastEnders had higher ratings than Emmerdale despite the two going head-to-head.
The ratings increased in 2010, thanks to the "Who Killed Archie?" storyline and second wedding of Ricky Butcher (Sid Owen) and Bianca Jackson (Patsy Palmer), and the show's first live episode on 19 February 2010. The live-episode averaged 15.6 million viewers, peaking at 16.6 million in the final five minutes of broadcast. In January 2010, the average audience was higher than that of Coronation Street for the first time in three years. During the 30th anniversary week in which there were live elements and the climax of the Who Killed Lucy Beale? storyline, 10.84 million viewers tuned in for the 30th anniversary episode itself in an hour long special on 19 February 2015 (peaking with 11.9 million). Later on in the same evening, a special flashback episode averaged 10.3 million viewers, and peaked with 11.2 million. The following day, the anniversary week was rounded off with another fully live episode (the second after 2010) with 9.97 million viewers watching the aftermath of the reveal, the Beale family finding out the truth of Lucy's killer and deciding to keep it a secret.
Criticism EastEnders has received both praise and criticism for most of its storylines, which have dealt with difficult themes, such as violence, rape, murder and child abuse.
Morality and violence
Mary Whitehouse, social critic, argued at the time that EastEnders represented a violation of "family viewing time" and that it undermined the watershed policy. She regarded EastEnders as a fundamental assault on the family and morality itself. She made reference to representation of family life and emphasis on psychological and emotional violence within the show. She was also critical of language such as "bleeding", "bloody hell", "bastard" and "for Christ's sake". However, Whitehouse also praised the programme, describing Michelle Fowler's decision not to have an abortion as a "very positive storyline". She also felt that EastEnders had been cleaned up as a result of her protests, though she later commented that EastEnders had returned to its old ways. Her criticisms were widely reported in the tabloid press as ammunition in its existing hostility towards the BBC. The stars of Coronation Street in particular aligned themselves with Mary Whitehouse, gaining headlines such as "STREETS AHEAD! RIVALS LASH SEEDY EASTENDERS" and "CLEAN UP SOAP! Street Star Bill Lashes 'Steamy' EastEnders".EastEnders has been criticised for being too violent, most notably during a domestic violence storyline between Little Mo Morgan (Kacey Ainsworth) and her husband Trevor Morgan (Alex Ferns). As EastEnders is shown pre-watershed, there were worries that some scenes in this storyline were too graphic for its audience. Complaints against a scene in which Little Mo's face was pushed in gravy on Christmas Day were upheld by the Broadcasting Standards Council. However, a helpline after this episode attracted over 2000 calls. Erin Pizzey, who became internationally famous for having started one of the first women's refuges, said that EastEnders had done more to raise the issue of violence against women in one story than she had done in 25 years. The character of Phil Mitchell (played by Steve McFadden since early 1990) has been criticised on several occasions for glorifying violence and proving a bad role model to children. On one occasion following a scene in an episode broadcast in October 2002, where Phil brutally beat his godson, Jamie Mitchell (Jack Ryder), 31 complaints came from viewers.
In 2003, cast member Shaun Williamson, who was in the final months of his role of Barry Evans, said that the programme had become much grittier over the past 10 to 15 years, and found it "frightening" that parents let their young children watch.
In 2005, the BBC was accused of anti-religious bias by a House of Lords committee, who cited EastEnders as an example. Dr. Indarjit Singh, editor of the Sikh Messenger and patron of the World Congress of Faiths, said: "EastEnders Dot Cotton is an example. She quotes endlessly from the Bible and it ridicules religion to some extent." In July 2010, complaints were received following the storyline of Christian minister Lucas Johnson (Don Gilet) committing a number of murders that he believed was his duty to God, claiming that the storyline was offensive to Christians.
In 2008, EastEnders, along with Coronation Street, was criticised by Martin McGuinness, then Northern Ireland's deputy first minister, for "the level of concentration around the pub" and the "antics portrayed in The [...] Queen Vic".
In 2017, viewers complained on Twitter about scenes implying that Keanu Taylor (Danny Walters) is the father of his 15-year-old sister Bernadette Taylor's (Clair Norris) unborn baby, with the pair agreeing to keep the pregnancy secret from their mother, Karen Taylor (Lorraine Stanley). However, the baby's father is revealed as one of Bernadette's school friends.
Allegations of national and racial stereotypes
In 1997, several episodes were shot and set in Ireland, resulting in criticisms for portraying the Irish in a negatively stereotypical way. Ted Barrington, the Irish Ambassador to the UK at the time, described the portrayal of Ireland as an "unrepresentative caricature", stating he was worried by the negative stereotypes and the images of drunkenness, backwardness and isolation. Jana Bennett, the BBC's then director of production, later apologised for the episodes, stating on BBC1's news bulletin: "It is clear that a significant number of viewers have been upset by the recent episodes of EastEnders, and we are very sorry, because the production team and programme makers did not mean to cause any offence." A year later BBC chairman Christopher Bland admitted that as result of the Irish-set EastEnders episodes, the station failed in its pledge to represent all groups accurately and avoid reinforcing prejudice.
In 2008, the show was criticised for stereotyping their Asian and Black characters, by having a black single mother, Denise Fox (Diane Parish), and an Asian shopkeeper, Zainab Masood (Nina Wadia). There has been criticism that the programme does not authentically portray the ethnic diversity of the population of East London, with the programme being 'twice as white' as the real East End.
Controversial storylines
In 1992, writer David Yallop successfully sued the BBC for £68,000 after it was revealed he had been hired by producer Mike Gibbon in 1989 to pen several controversial storylines in an effort to "slim down" the cast. However, after Gibbon left the programme, executive producers chose not to use Yallop's storylines, which put the BBC in breach of the contract Yallop had signed with them. Unused storylines penned by Yallop, which were revealed in the press during the trial, included the death of Cindy Beale's (Michelle Collins) infant son Steven; Sufia Karim (Rani Singh) being killed during a shotgun raid at the corner shop; Pauline Fowler (Wendy Richard) dying of undiscovered cancer; and an IRA explosion at the Walford community centre, killing Pete Beale (Peter Dean) and Diane Butcher (Sophie Lawrence), and leaving Simon Wicks (Nick Berry) paralysed below the waist. A suicide was also planned, but the character this storyline was assigned to was not revealed.
Some storylines have provoked high levels of viewer complaints. In August 2006, a scene involving Carly Wicks (Kellie Shirley) and Jake Moon (Joel Beckett) having sex on the floor of Scarlet nightclub, and another scene involving Owen Turner (Lee Ross) violently attacking Denise Fox (Diane Parish), prompted 129 and 128 complaints, respectively.
In March 2008, scenes showing Tanya Branning (Jo Joyner) and boyfriend, Sean Slater (Robert Kazinsky), burying Tanya's husband Max (Jake Wood) alive, attracted many complaints. The UK communications regulator Ofcom later found that the episodes depicting the storyline were in breach of the 2005 Broadcasting Code. They contravened the rules regarding protection of children by appropriate scheduling, appropriate depiction of violence before the 9 p.m. watershed and appropriate depiction of potentially offensive content. In September 2008, EastEnders began a grooming and paedophilia storyline involving characters Tony King (Chris Coghill), Whitney Dean (Shona McGarty), Bianca Jackson (Patsy Palmer), Lauren Branning (Madeline Duggan) and Peter Beale (Thomas Law). The storyline attracted over 200 complaints.
In December 2010, Ronnie Branning (Samantha Womack) swapped her newborn baby, who died in cot, with Kat Moon's (Jessie Wallace) living baby. Around 3,400 complaints were received, with viewers branding the storyline "insensitive", "irresponsible" and "desperate". Roz Laws from the Sunday Mercury called the plot "shocking and ridiculous" and asked "are we really supposed to believe that Kat won't recognise that the baby looks different?" The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths (FSID) praised the storyline, and its director Joyce Epstein explained, "We are very grateful to EastEnders for their accurate depiction of the devastating effect that the sudden death of an infant can have on a family. We hope that this story will help raise the public's awareness of cot death, which claims 300 babies' lives each year." By 7 January, that storyline had generated the most complaints in show history: the BBC received about 8,500 complaints, and media regulator Ofcom received 374. Despite the controversy however, EastEnders pulled in rating highs of 9–10 million throughout the duration of the storyline.
In October 2014, the BBC defended a storyline, after receiving 278 complaints about 6 October 2014 episode where pub landlady Linda Carter (Kellie Bright) was raped by Dean Wicks (Matt Di Angelo). On 17 November 2014 it was announced that Ofcom will investigate over the storyline. On 5 January 2015, the investigation was cleared by Ofcom. A spokesman of Ofcom said: "After carefully investigating complaints about this scene, Ofcom found the BBC took appropriate steps to limit offence to viewers. This included a warning before the episode and implying the assault, rather than depicting it. Ofcom also took into account the programme's role in presenting sometimes challenging or distressing social issues."
Portrayal of certain professions
In 2010, EastEnders came under criticism from the police for the way that they were portrayed during the "Who Killed Archie?" storyline. During the storyline, DCI Jill Marsden (Sophie Stanton) and DC Wayne Hughes (Jamie Treacher) talk to locals about the case and Hughes accepts a bribe. The police claimed that such scenes were "damaging" to their reputation and added that the character DC Deanne Cunningham (Zoe Henry) was "irritatingly inaccurate". In response to the criticism, EastEnders apologised for offending real life detectives and confirmed that they use a police consultant for such storylines.
In October 2012, a storyline involving Lola Pearce (Danielle Harold), forced to hand over her baby Lexi Pearce, was criticised by the charity The Who Cares? Trust, who called the storyline an "unhelpful portrayal" and said it had already received calls from members of the public who were "distressed about the EastEnders scene where a social worker snatches a baby from its mother's arms". The scenes were also condemned by the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), calling the BBC "too lazy and arrogant" to correctly portray the child protection process, and saying that the baby was taken "without sufficient grounds to do so". Bridget Robb, acting chief of the BASW, said the storyline provoked "real anger among a profession well used to a less than accurate public and media perception of their jobs .. EastEnders shabby portrayal of an entire profession has made a tough job even tougher."
Awards and nominations
In popular culture
Since its premiere in 1985, EastEnders has had a large impact on British popular culture. It has frequently been referred to in many different media, including songs and television programmes.
Further reading
Many books have been written about EastEnders. Notably, from 1985 to 1988, author and television writer Hugh Miller wrote 17 novels, detailing the lives of many of the show's original characters before 1985, when events on screen took place.
Kate Lock also wrote four novels centred on more recent characters; Steve Owen (Martin Kemp), Grant Mitchell (Ross Kemp), Bianca Jackson (Patsy Palmer) and Tiffany Mitchell (Martine McCutcheon). Lock also wrote a character guide entitled Who's Who in EastEnders () in 2000, examining main characters from the first 15 years of the show.
Show creators Julia Smith and Tony Holland also wrote a book about the show in 1987, entitled EastEnders: The Inside Story (), telling the story of how the show made it to screen. Two special anniversary books have been written about the show; EastEnders: The First 10 Years: A Celebration () by Colin Brake in 1995 and EastEnders: 20 Years in Albert Square'' () by Rupert Smith in 2005.
See also
East End of London in popular culture
List of soap operas
List of British television programmes
List of most-watched television broadcasts
List of television programmes broadcast by the BBC
List of programmes broadcast by RTÉ
List of programmes broadcast by TV3 Ireland
List of programs broadcast by Showcase
List of LGBT characters in soap operas
List of television shows set in London
List of television programs by episode count
List of television programs by name
Footnotes
References
Bibliography
External links
EastEnders at BBC Studios
EastEnders at BBC Studioworks
1985 British television series debuts
1980s British television soap operas
1990s British television soap operas
2000s British television soap operas
2010s British television soap operas
2020s British television soap operas
BAFTA winners (television series)
BBC television dramas
BBC television soap operas
Television shows shot at BBC Elstree Centre
English-language television shows
Social realism
Television productions suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic
Television shows set in London
Television series impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic
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An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used, as are electronic documents such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails. The word epistolary is derived from Latin from the Greek word ἐπιστολή epistolē, meaning a letter (see epistle). In German, this type of novel is known as a Briefroman.
The epistolary form can add greater realism to a story, because it mimics the workings of real life. It is thus able to demonstrate differing points of view without recourse to the device of an omniscient narrator. An important strategic device in the epistolary novel for creating the impression of authenticity of the letters is the fictional editor.
Early works
There are two theories on the genesis of the epistolary novel. The first claims that the genre is originated from novels with inserted letters, in which the portion containing the third-person narrative in between the letters was gradually reduced. The other theory claims that the epistolary novel arose from miscellanies of letters and poetry: some of the letters were tied together into a (mostly amorous) plot. Both claims have some validity. The first truly epistolary novel, the Spanish "Prison of Love" (Cárcel de amor) (c. 1485) by Diego de San Pedro, belongs to a tradition of novels in which a large number of inserted letters already dominated the narrative. Other well-known examples of early epistolary novels are closely related to the tradition of letter-books and miscellanies of letters. Within the successive editions of Edmé Boursault's Letters of Respect, Gratitude and Love (Lettres de respect, d'obligation et d'amour) (1669), a group of letters written to a girl named Babet were expanded and became more and more distinct from the other letters, until it formed a small epistolary novel entitled Letters to Babet (Lettres à Babet). The immensely famous Letters of a Portuguese Nun (Lettres portugaises) (1669) generally attributed to Gabriel-Joseph de La Vergne, comte de Guilleragues, though a small minority still regard Marianna Alcoforado as the author, is claimed to be intended to be part of a miscellany of Guilleragues prose and poetry. The founder of the epistolary novel in English is said by many to be James Howell (1594–1666) with "Familiar Letters" (1645–50), who writes of prison, foreign adventure, and the love of women.
Perhaps first work to fully utilize the potential of an epistolary novel was Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. This work was published anonymously in three volumes (1684, 1685, and 1687), and has been attributed to Aphra Behn though its authorship remains disputed in the 21st Century. The novel shows the genre's results of changing perspectives: individual points were presented by the individual characters, and the central voice of the author and moral evaluation disappeared (at least in the first volume; further volumes introduced a narrator). The author furthermore explored a realm of intrigue with complex scenarios such as letters that fall into the wrong hands, faked letters, or letters withheld by protagonists.
The epistolary novel as a genre became popular in the 18th century in the works of such authors as Samuel Richardson, with his immensely successful novels Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1749). John Cleland's early erotic novel Fanny Hill (1748) is written as a series of letters from the titular character to an unnamed recipient. In France, there was Lettres persanes (1721) by Montesquieu, followed by Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Choderlos de Laclos' Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), which used the epistolary form to great dramatic effect, because the sequence of events was not always related directly or explicitly. In Germany, there was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werther) (1774) and Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion. The first Canadian novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769) by Frances Brooke, and twenty years later the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy (1789) by William Hill Brown, were both written in epistolary form.
Starting in the 18th century, the epistolary form was subject to much ridicule, resulting in a number of savage burlesques. The most notable example of these was Henry Fielding's Shamela (1741), written as a parody of Pamela. In it, the female narrator can be found wielding a pen and scribbling her diary entries under the most dramatic and unlikely of circumstances. Oliver Goldsmith used the form to satirical effect in The Citizen of the World, subtitled "Letters from a Chinese Philosopher Residing in London to his Friends in the East" (1760–61). So did the diarist Fanny Burney in a successful comic first novel, Evelina (1788).
The epistolary novel slowly became less popular after 18th century. Although Jane Austen tried her hand at the epistolary in juvenile writings and her novella Lady Susan (1794), she abandoned this structure for her later work. It is thought that her lost novel First Impressions, which was redrafted to become Pride and Prejudice, may have been epistolary: Pride and Prejudice contains an unusual number of letters quoted in full and some play a critical role in the plot.
The epistolary form nonetheless saw continued use, surviving in exceptions or in fragments in nineteenth-century novels. In Honoré de Balzac's novel Letters of Two Brides, two women who became friends during their education at a convent correspond over a 17-year period, exchanging letters describing their lives. Mary Shelley employs the epistolary form in her novel Frankenstein (1818). Shelley uses the letters as one of a variety of framing devices, as the story is presented through the letters of a sea captain and scientific explorer attempting to reach the north pole who encounters Victor Frankenstein and records the dying man's narrative and confessions. Published in 1848, Anne Brontë's novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is framed as a retrospective letter from one of the main heroes to his friend and brother-in-law with the diary of the eponymous tenant inside it. In the late 19th century, Bram Stoker released one of the most widely recognized and successful novels in the epistolary form to date, Dracula. Printed in 1897, the novel is compiled entirely of letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, telegrams, doctor's notes, ship's logs, and the like.
Types
Epistolary novels can be categorized based on the number of people whose letters are included. This gives three types of epistolary novels: monophonic (giving the letters of only one character, like Letters of a Portuguese Nun and The Sorrows of Young Werther), dialogic (giving the letters of two characters, like Mme Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Letters of Fanni Butler (1757), and polyphonic (with three or more letter-writing characters, such as in Bram Stoker's Dracula). A crucial element in polyphonic epistolary novels like Clarissa and Dangerous Liaisons is the dramatic device of 'discrepant awareness': the simultaneous but separate correspondences of the heroines and the villains creating dramatic tension.
Notable works
The epistolary novel form has continued to be used after the eighteenth century.
Eighteenth century
Les Liaisons dangereuses is a 1782 French novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, about the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two narcissistic rivals (and ex-lovers) who use seduction as a weapon to socially control and exploit others, all the while enjoying their cruel games and boasting about their talent for manipulation (also seen as depicting the corruption and depravity of the French nobility shortly before the French Revolution). The book is composed entirely of letters written by the various characters to each other.
Marquis de Sade's Aline and Valcour (1795).
Nineteenth century
Fyodor Dostoevsky used the epistolary format for his first novel, Poor Folk (1846), as a series of letters between two friends, struggling to cope with their impoverished circumstances and life in pre-revolution Russia.
The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins uses a collection of various documents to construct a detective novel in English. In the second piece, a character explains that he is writing his portion because another had observed to him that the events surrounding the disappearance of the eponymous diamond might reflect poorly on the family, if misunderstood, and therefore he was collecting the true story. This is an unusual element, as most epistolary novels present the documents without questions about how they were gathered. He also used the form previously in The Woman in White (1859).
Spanish foreign minister Juan Valera's Pepita Jiménez (1874) is written in three sections, the first and third being a series of letters, the middle part narrated by an unknown observer.
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) uses not only letters and diaries, but also dictation cylinders and newspaper accounts.
Twentieth century
Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace's The Documents in the Case (1930).
Haki Stërmilli's novel If I Were a Boy (1936) is written in the form of diary entries documenting the life of the protagonist.
Kathrine Taylor's Address Unknown (1938) is an anti-Nazi novel in which the final letter is returned marked "Address Unknown", indicating the disappearance of the German character.
Virginia Woolf used the epistolary form for her feminist essay Three Guineas (1938).
C. S. Lewis used the epistolary form for The Screwtape Letters (1942), and considered writing a companion novel from an angel's point of view – though he never did so. It is less generally realized that his Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964) is a similar exercise, exploring theological questions through correspondence addressed to a fictional recipient, "Malcolm", though this work may be considered a "novel" only loosely in that developments in Malcolm's personal life gradually come to light and impact the discussion.
Thornton Wilder's fifth novel Ides of March (1948) consists of letters and documents illuminating the last days of the Roman Republic.
Theodore Sturgeon's short novel Some of Your Blood (1961) consists of letters and case-notes relating to the psychiatric treatment of a non-supernatural vampire.
Saul Bellow's novel Herzog (1964) is largely written in letter format. These are both real and imagined letters, written by the protagonist Moses Herzog to family members, friends, and celebrities.
Up the Down Staircase is a novel written by Bel Kaufman, published in 1965, which spent 64 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In 1967 it was released as a movie starring Patrick Bedford, Sandy Dennis and Eileen Heckart.
Shūsaku Endō's novel Silence (1966) is an example of the epistolary form, half of which consists of letters from Rodrigues, the other half either in the third person or in letters from other persons.
Daniel Keyes's short story and novel Flowers for Algernon (1959, 1966) takes the form of a series of lab progress reports written by the main character as his treatment progresses, with his writing style changing correspondingly.
The Anderson Tapes (1969, 1970) by Lawrence Sanders is a novel primarily consisting of transcripts of tape recordings.
84, Charing Cross Road (1970, 1990) by Helene Hanff is the correspondence between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer working in London at Marks & Co.
Stephen King's novel Carrie (1974) is written in an epistolary structure through newspaper clippings, magazine articles, letters, and book excerpts.
Stephen King also used the epistolary style in his short story "Jerusalem's Lot", a prequel to his novel 'Salem's Lot that was first published in the collection Night Shift.
In John Barth's epistolary work Letters (1979), the author interacts with characters from his other novels.
Alice Walker employed the epistolary form in The Color Purple (1982). The 1985 film adaptation echoes the form by incorporating into the script some of the novel's letters, which the actors deliver as monologues.
Octavia Butler's speculative fiction novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) are predominantly written as journal entries by the main character and protagonist, Lauren Olamina.
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ (1982) by Sue Townsend is a comic novel in the form of a diary set in 1980s Britain.
Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw is a juvenile novel that was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1984.
John Updike's S. (1988) is an epistolary novel consisting of the heroine's letters and transcribed audio recordings.
Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer's Sorcery and Cecelia (1988) is an epistolary fantasy novel in a Regency setting from the first-person perspectives of cousins Kate and Cecelia, who recount their adventures in magic and polite society. Unusually for modern fiction, it is written using the style of the letter game.
Avi's young-adult novel Nothing but the Truth (1991) uses only documents, letters, and scripts.
Bridget Jones's Diary (1996) by Helen Fielding is written in the form of a personal diary.
Last Days of Summer (1998) by Steve Kluger is written in a series of letters, telegrams, therapy transcripts, newspaper clippings, and baseball box scores.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) was written by Stephen Chbosky in the form of letters from an anonymous character to a secret role model of sorts.
Twenty-first century
The Whalestoe Letters (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski is an epistolary novella and a companion piece to his debut novel House of Leaves. It is written with letters from the protagonist's mother who lives in a mental institution.
Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan (2001) uses letters and journal entries to weave the story of a middle-aged woman in the 1930s.
The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot is a series of ten novels written in the form of diary entries. Cabot also used the epistolary form in The Boy Next Door (2002), a romantic comedy novel consisting entirely of e-mails sent among the characters.
Several of Gene Wolfe's novels are written in the forms of diaries, letters, or memoirs.
Mark Dunn's Ella Minnow Pea (2001) is a progressively lipogrammatic epistolary novel – the letters become increasingly more difficult to read as the lipogrammatic constraints are brought in, and this requires the reader to attempt to interpret what is being written.
La silla del águila ("The Eagle's Throne") by Carlos Fuentes (2003) is a political satire written as a series of letters between persons in high levels of the Mexican government in 2020. The epistolary format is treated by the author as a consequence of necessity: the United States impedes all telecommunications in Mexico as a retaliatory measure, leaving letters and smoke signals as the only possible methods of communication, particularly ironic given one character's observation that "Mexican politicians put nothing in writing."
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003) is a monologic epistolary novel written as a series of letters from Eva, Kevin's mother, to her husband Franklin.
The 2004 novel Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell tells a story in several time periods in a nested format, with some sections told in epistolary style, including an interview, journal entries and a series of letters.
Griffin and Sabine by artist Nick Bantock is a love story written as a series of hand-painted postcards and letters.
Where Rainbows End (alternately titled "Rosie Dunne" or "Love, Rosie" in the United States) (2004), by Cecelia Ahern, is written in the form of letters, e-mails, instant messages, newspaper articles, etc.
Uncommon Valour (2005) by John Stevens, the story of two naval officers in 1779, is primarily written in the form of diary and log extracts.
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006), by Max Brooks, is a series of interviews from various survivors of a zombie apocalypse.
Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2007) by Paul Torday, is a series of letters, e-mails, interview transcripts, newspaper articles and other non-narrative media.
Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2007), by Jeff Kinney, is a series of fiction books written in the form a diary, including hand-written notes and cartoon drawings.
The White Tiger (2008) by Aravind Adiga, winner of the 40th Man Booker Prize in 2008, is a novel in the form of letters written by an Indian villager to the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008), by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, is written as a series of letters and telegraphs sent and received by the protagonist.
A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) by Jennifer Egan has parts which are epistolary in nature. One chapter is written as a report of a celebrity interview, and another as a PowerPoint presentation.
Super Sad True Love Story (2010) by Gary Shteyngart.
Why We Broke Up (2011) by Daniel Handler, illustrated by Maira Kalman.
The Martian, by Andy Weir, is written as a collection of video journal entries for each Martian day (sol) by the protagonist on Mars, and sometimes by main characters on Earth and on the space station Hermes.
The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37 is one of a series of books written by Adrian Plass, this one consisting entirely of diary entries. Another consists of transcripts of tapes, yet another consists of letters.
Illuminae, by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufmann, is told exclusively through a series of classified documents, censored emails, interviews, and others.
Dear Committee Members (2014) by Julie Schumacher is a novel composed entirely through letters of recommendation.
On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous (2019) by Ocean Vuong, written in the form of a letter from a Vietnamese American son to his illiterate mother.
See also
Epistolography
Epistolary poem
Letter collection
List of fictional diaries
List of contemporary epistolary novels
Found footage (film technique)
Footnotes
External links
BBC Radio 4's 15 March 2007 edition of In Our Times, "Epistolary Literature". Hosted by Melvyn Bragg.
Literary genres
Narratology | [
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] |
Edmund Burke (; 12 January [NS] 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an ethnically Irish British statesman, economist, and philosopher. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party after moving to London in 1750.
Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. These views were expressed in his A Vindication of Natural Society. He criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies. Burke also supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, although he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. He is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company, and his staunch opposition to the French Revolution.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke asserted that the revolution was destroying the fabric of good society and traditional institutions of state and society and condemned the persecution of the Catholic Church that resulted from it. This led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig Party which he dubbed the Old Whigs as opposed to the pro-French Revolution New Whigs led by Charles James Fox.
In the 19th century, Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals. Subsequently, in the 20th century, he became widely regarded as the philosophical founder of conservatism.
Early life
Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland. His mother Mary, née Nagle (c. 1702–1770), was a Roman Catholic who hailed from a déclassé County Cork family and a cousin of the Catholic educator Nano Nagle whereas his father Richard (died 1761), a successful solicitor, was a member of the Church of Ireland. It remains unclear whether this is the same Richard Burke who converted from Catholicism. The Burke dynasty descends from an Anglo-Norman knight surnamed de Burgh (Latinised as de Burgo), who arrived in Ireland in 1185 following Henry II of England's 1171 invasion of Ireland and is among the chief Gall or Old English families that assimilated into Gaelic society".
Burke adhered to his father's faith and remained a practising Anglican throughout his life, unlike his sister Juliana who was brought up as and remained a Roman Catholic. Later, his political enemies repeatedly accused him of having been educated at the Jesuit College of St. Omer, near Calais, France; and of harbouring secret Catholic sympathies at a time when membership of the Catholic Church would disqualify him from public office per Penal Laws in Ireland. As Burke told Frances Crewe:
Mr. Burke's Enemies often endeavoured to convince the World that he had been bred up in the Catholic Faith, & that his Family were of it, & that he himself had been educated at St. Omer—but this was false, as his father was a regular practitioner of the Law at Dublin, which he could not be unless of the Established Church: & it so happened that though Mr. B—was twice at Paris, he never happened to go through the Town of St. Omer.
After being elected to the House of Commons, Burke was required to take the oath of allegiance and abjuration, the oath of supremacy and declare against transubstantiation. Although never denying his Irishness, Burke often described himself as "an Englishman".
As a child, Burke sometimes spent time away from the unhealthy air of Dublin with his mother's family near Killavullen in the Blackwater Valley in County Cork. He received his early education at a Quaker school in Ballitore, County Kildare, some from Dublin; and possibly like his cousin Nano Nagle at a Hedge school near Killavullen. He remained in correspondence with his schoolmate from there, Mary Leadbeater, the daughter of the school's owner, throughout his life.
In 1744, Burke started at Trinity College Dublin, a Protestant establishment which up until 1793 did not permit Catholics to take degrees. In 1747, he set up a debating society Edmund Burke's Club which in 1770 merged with TCD's Historical Club to form the College Historical Society, the oldest undergraduate society in the world. The minutes of the meetings of Burke's Club remain in the collection of the Historical Society. Burke graduated from Trinity in 1748. Burke's father wanted him to read Law and with this in mind he went to London in 1750, where he entered the Middle Temple, before soon giving up legal study to travel in Continental Europe. After eschewing the Law, he pursued a livelihood through writing.
Early writing
The late Lord Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History was published in 1752 and his collected works appeared in 1754. This provoked Burke into writing his first published work, A Vindication of Natural Society: A View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind, appearing in Spring 1756. Burke imitated Bolingbroke's style and ideas in a reductio ad absurdum of his arguments for atheistic rationalism in order to demonstrate their absurdity.
Burke claimed that Bolingbroke's arguments against revealed religion could apply to all social and civil institutions as well. Lord Chesterfield and Bishop Warburton as well as others initially thought that the work was genuinely by Bolingbroke rather than a satire. All the reviews of the work were positive, with critics especially appreciative of Burke's quality of writing. Some reviewers failed to notice the ironic nature of the book which led to Burke stating in the preface to the second edition (1757) that it was a satire.
Richard Hurd believed that Burke's imitation was near-perfect and that this defeated his purpose, arguing that an ironist "should take care by a constant exaggeration to make the ridicule shine through the Imitation. Whereas this Vindication is everywhere enforc'd, not only in the language, and on the principles of L. Bol., but with so apparent, or rather so real an earnestness, that half his purpose is sacrificed to the other". A minority of scholars have taken the position that in fact Burke did write the Vindication in earnest, later disowning it only for political reasons.
In 1757, Burke published a treatise on aesthetics titled A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful that attracted the attention of prominent Continental thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Immanuel Kant. It was his only purely philosophical work and when asked by Sir Joshua Reynolds and French Laurence to expand it thirty years later, Burke replied that he was no longer fit for abstract speculation (Burke had written it before he was nineteen years of age).
On 25 February 1757, Burke signed a contract with Robert Dodsley to write a "history of England from the time of Julius Caesar to the end of the reign of Queen Anne", its length being eighty quarto sheets (640 pages), nearly 400,000 words. It was to be submitted for publication by Christmas 1758. Burke completed the work to the year 1216 and stopped; it was not published until after Burke's death, in an 1812 collection of his works, An Essay Towards an Abridgement of the English History. G. M. Young did not value Burke's history and claimed that it was "demonstrably a translation from the French". On commenting on the story that Burke stopped his history because David Hume published his, Lord Acton said "it is ever to be regretted that the reverse did not occur".
During the year following that contract, Burke founded with Dodsley the influential Annual Register, a publication in which various authors evaluated the international political events of the previous year. The extent to which Burke contributed to the Annual Register is unclear. In his biography of Burke, Robert Murray quotes the Register as evidence of Burke's opinions, yet Philip Magnus in his biography does not cite it directly as a reference. Burke remained the chief editor of the publication until at least 1789 and there is no evidence that any other writer contributed to it before 1766.
On 12 March 1757, Burke married Jane Mary Nugent (1734–1812), daughter of Dr. Christopher Nugent, a Catholic physician who had provided him with medical treatment at Bath. Their son Richard was born on 9 February 1758 while an elder son, Christopher, died in infancy. Burke also helped raise a ward, Edmund Nagle (later Admiral Sir Edmund Nagle), the son of a maternal cousin orphaned in 1763.
At about this same time, Burke was introduced to William Gerard Hamilton (known as "Single-speech Hamilton"). When Hamilton was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, Burke accompanied him to Dublin as his private secretary, a position he held for three years. In 1765, Burke became private secretary to the liberal Whig politician Charles, Marquess of Rockingham, then Prime Minister of Great Britain, who remained Burke's close friend and associate until his untimely death in 1782.
Member of Parliament
In December 1765, Burke entered the House of Commons of the British Parliament as Member for Wendover in Buckinghamshire, a pocket borough in the gift of Lord Fermanagh, later 2nd Earl Verney and a close political ally of Rockingham. After Burke delivered his maiden speech, William Pitt the Elder said he had "spoken in such a manner as to stop the mouths of all Europe" and that the Commons should congratulate itself on acquiring such a Member.
The first great subject Burke addressed was the controversy with the American colonies which soon developed into war and ultimate separation. In reply to the 1769 Grenvillite pamphlet The Present State of the Nation, he published his own pamphlet titled Observations on a Late State of the Nation. Surveying the finances of France, Burke predicts "some extraordinary convulsion in that whole system".
During the same year, with mostly borrowed money, Burke purchased Gregories, a estate near Beaconsfield. Although the estate included saleable assets such as art works by Titian, Gregories proved a heavy financial burden in the following decades and Burke was never able to repay its purchase price in full. His speeches and writings, having made him famous, led to the suggestion that he was the author of the Letters of Junius.
At about this time, Burke joined the circle of leading intellectuals and artists in London of whom Samuel Johnson was the central luminary. This circle also included David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith and Joshua Reynolds. Edward Gibbon described Burke as "the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew". Although Johnson admired Burke's brilliance, he found him a dishonest politician.
Burke took a leading role in the debate regarding the constitutional limits to the executive authority of the King. He argued strongly against unrestrained royal power and for the role of political parties in maintaining a principled opposition capable of preventing abuses, either by the monarch, or by specific factions within the government. His most important publication in this regard was his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents of 23 April 1770. Burke identified the "discontents" as stemming from the "secret influence" of a neo-Tory group he labelled as the "king's friends", whose system "comprehending the exterior and interior administrations, is commonly called, in the technical language of the Court, Double Cabinet". Britain needed a party with "an unshaken adherence to principle, and attachment to connexion, against every allurement of interest". Party divisions, "whether operating for good or evil, are things inseparable from free government".
During 1771, Burke wrote a bill that would have given juries the right to determine what was libel, if passed. Burke spoke in favour of the bill, but it was opposed by some, including Charles James Fox, not becoming law. When introducing his own bill in 1791 in opposition, Fox repeated almost verbatim the text of Burke's bill without acknowledgement. Burke was prominent in securing the right to publish debates held in Parliament.
Speaking in a parliamentary debate on the prohibition on the export of grain on 16 November 1770, Burke argued in favour of a free market in corn: "There are no such things as a high, & a low price that is encouraging, & discouraging; there is nothing but a natural price, which grain brings at an universal market". In 1772, Burke was instrumental in the passing of the Repeal of Certain Laws Act 1772 which repealed various old laws against dealers and forestallers in corn.
In the Annual Register for 1772 (published in July 1773), Burke condemned the partition of Poland. He saw it as "the first very great breach in the modern political system of Europe" and as upsetting the balance of power in Europe.
On 3 November 1774, Burke was elected Member for Bristol, at the time "England's second city" and a large constituency with a genuine electoral contest. At the conclusion of the poll, he made his Speech to the Electors of Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll, a remarkable disclaimer of the constituent-imperative form of democracy, for which he substituted his statement of the "representative mandate" form. He failed to win re-election for that seat in the subsequent 1780 general election.
In May 1778, Burke supported a parliamentary motion revising restrictions on Irish trade. His constituents, citizens of the great trading city of Bristol, urged Burke to oppose free trade with Ireland. Burke resisted their protestations and said: "If, from this conduct, I shall forfeit their suffrages at an ensuing election, it will stand on record an example to future representatives of the Commons of England, that one man at least had dared to resist the desires of his constituents when his judgment assured him they were wrong".
Burke published Two Letters to Gentlemen of Bristol on the Bills relative to the Trade of Ireland in which he espoused "some of the chief principles of commerce; such as the advantage of free intercourse between all parts of the same kingdom, […] the evils attending restriction and monopoly, […] and that the gain of others is not necessarily our loss, but on the contrary an advantage by causing a greater demand for such wares as we have for sale".
Burke also supported the attempts of Sir George Savile to repeal some of the penal laws against Catholics. Burke also called capital punishment "the Butchery which we call justice" in 1776 and in 1780 condemned the use of the pillory for two men convicted for attempting to practice sodomy.
This support for unpopular causes, notably free trade with Ireland and Catholic emancipation, led to Burke losing his seat in 1780. For the remainder of his parliamentary career, Burke represented Malton, another pocket borough under the Marquess of Rockingham's patronage.
American War of Independence
Burke expressed his support for the grievances of the American Thirteen Colonies under the government of King George III and his appointed representatives. On 19 April 1774, Burke made a speech, "On American Taxation" (published in January 1775), on a motion to repeal the tea duty:
Again and again, revert to your old principles—seek peace and ensue it; leave America, if she has taxable matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here going into the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to mark their boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions; I hate the very sound of them. Leave the Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it. […] Be content to bind America by laws of trade; you have always done it […] Do not burthen them with taxes […] But if intemperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison the very source of government by urging subtle deductions, and consequences odious to those you govern, from the unlimited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty itself in question. […] If that sovereignty and their freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They will cast your sovereignty in your face. No body of men will be argued into slavery.
On 22 March 1775, Burke delivered in the House of Commons a speech (published during May 1775) on reconciliation with America. Burke appealed for peace as preferable to civil war and reminded the House of Commons of America's growing population, its industry and its wealth. He warned against the notion that the Americans would back down in the face of force since most Americans were of British descent:
[T]he people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. […] They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and on English principles. The people are Protestants, […] a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built upon it. […] My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government—they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you.
Burke prized peace with America above all else, pleading with the House of Commons to remember that the interest by way of money received from the American colonies was far more attractive than any sense of putting the colonists in their place:
The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium of war, not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations, not peace to arise out of universal discord. […] [I]t is simple peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.
Burke was not merely presenting a peace agreement to Parliament, but rather he stepped forward with four reasons against using force, carefully reasoned. He laid out his objections in an orderly manner, focusing on one before moving to the next. His first concern was that the use of force would have to be temporary and that the uprisings and objections to British governance in Colonial America would not be. Second, Burke worried about the uncertainty surrounding whether Britain would win a conflict in America. "An armament", Burke said, "is not a victory". Third, Burke brought up the issue of impairment, stating that it would do the British government no good to engage in a scorched earth war and have the object they desired (America) become damaged or even useless. The American colonists could always retreat into the mountains, but the land they left behind would most likely be unusable, whether by accident or design. The fourth and final reason to avoid the use of force was experience as the British had never attempted to rein in an unruly colony by force and they did not know if it could be done, let alone accomplished thousands of miles away from home. Not only were all of these concerns reasonable, but some turned out to be prophetic—the American colonists did not surrender, even when things looked extremely bleak and the British were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to win a war fought on American soil.
It was not temporary force, uncertainty, impairment, or even experience that Burke cited as the number one reason for avoiding war with the American colonies. Rather, it was the character of the American people themselves: "In this character of Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole. […] [T]his fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any other people of the earth. […] [The] men [are] acute, inquisitive, dextrous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources". Burke concludes with another plea for peace and a prayer that Britain might avoid actions which in Burke's words "may bring on the destruction of this Empire".
Burke proposed six resolutions to settle the American conflict peacefully:
Allow the American colonists to elect their own representatives, settling the dispute about taxation without representation.
Acknowledge this wrongdoing and apologise for grievances caused.
Procure an efficient manner of choosing and sending these delegates.
Set up a General Assembly in America itself, with powers to regulate taxes.
Stop gathering taxes by imposition (or law) and start gathering them only when they are needed.
Grant needed aid to the colonies.
Had they been passed, the effect of these resolutions can never be known. Unfortunately, Burke delivered this speech just less than a month before the explosive conflict at Concord and Lexington. As these resolutions were not enacted, little was done that would help to dissuade conflict.
Among the reasons this speech was so greatly admired was its passage on Lord Bathurst (1684–1775) in which Burke describes an angel in 1704 prophesying to Bathurst the future greatness of England and also of America: "Young man, There is America—which at this day serves little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men, and uncouth manners; yet shall, before you taste of death, shew itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world". Samuel Johnson was so irritated at hearing it continually praised that he made a parody of it, where the devil appears to a young Whig and predicts that in short time Whiggism will poison even the paradise of America.
The administration of Lord North (1770–1782) tried to defeat the colonist rebellion by military force. British and American forces clashed in 1775 and in 1776 came the American Declaration of Independence. Burke was appalled by celebrations in Britain of the defeat of the Americans at New York and Pennsylvania. He claimed the English national character was being changed by this authoritarianism. Burke wrote: "As to the good people of England, they seem to partake every day more and more of the Character of that administration which they have been induced to tolerate. I am satisfied, that within a few years there has been a great Change in the National Character. We seem no longer that eager, inquisitive, jealous, fiery people, which we have been formerly".
In Burke's view, the British government was fighting "the American English" ("our English Brethren in the Colonies"), with a Germanic king employing "the hireling sword of German boors and vassals" to destroy the English liberties of the colonists. On American independence, Burke wrote: "I do not know how to wish success to those whose Victory is to separate from us a large and noble part of our Empire. Still less do I wish success to injustice, oppression and absurdity".
During the Gordon Riots in 1780, Burke became a target of hostility and his home was placed under armed guard by the military.
Paymaster of the Forces
The fall of North led to Rockingham being recalled to power in March 1782. Burke was appointed Paymaster of the Forces and a Privy Counsellor, but without a seat in Cabinet. Rockingham's unexpected death in July 1782 and replacement with Shelburne as Prime Minister put an end to his administration after only a few months, but Burke did manage to introduce two Acts.
The Paymaster General Act 1782 ended the post as a lucrative sinecure. Previously, Paymasters had been able to draw on money from HM Treasury at their discretion. Instead, now they were required to put the money they had requested to withdraw from the Treasury into the Bank of England, from where it was to be withdrawn for specific purposes. The Treasury would receive monthly statements of the Paymaster's balance at the Bank. This Act was repealed by Shelburne's administration, but the Act that replaced it repeated verbatim almost the whole text of the Burke Act.
The Civil List and Secret Service Money Act 1782 was a watered-down version of Burke's original intentions as outlined in his famous Speech on Economical Reform of 11 February 1780. However, he managed to abolish 134 offices in the royal household and civil administration. The third Secretary of State and the Board of Trade were abolished and pensions were limited and regulated. The Act was anticipated to save £72,368 a year.
In February 1783, Burke resumed the post of Paymaster of the Forces when Shelburne's government fell and was replaced by a coalition headed by North that included Charles James Fox. That coalition fell in 1783 and was succeeded by the long Tory administration of William Pitt the Younger which lasted until 1801. Accordingly, having supported Fox and North, Burke was in opposition for the remainder of his political life.
Representative Democracy
In 1774, Burke's Speech to the Electors at Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll was noted for its defence of the principles of representative government against the notion that those elected to assemblies like Parliament are, or should be, merely delegates:
Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a Representative, to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any sett of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the Law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.My worthy Colleague says, his Will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If Government were a matter of Will upon any side, yours, without question, ought to be superior. But Government and Legislation are matters of reason and judgement, and not of inclination; and, what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one sett of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?To deliver an opinion is the right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion which a Representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought always most seriously to consider. But authoritative instructions; mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and conscience; these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenour of our constitution.Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of Parliament.The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke. Volume I (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), pp. 446–448.
It is often forgotten in this connection that Burke, as detailed below, was an opponent of slavery, and therefore his conscience was refusing to support a trade in which many of his Bristol electors were lucratively involved.
Political scientist Hanna Pitkin points out that Burke linked the interest of the district with the proper behaviour of its elected official, explaining: "Burke conceives of broad, relatively fixed interest, few in number and clearly defined, of which any group or locality has just one. These interests are largely economic or associated with particular localities whose livelihood they characterize, in his over-all prosperity they involve".
Burke was a leading sceptic with respect to democracy. While admitting that theoretically in some cases it might be desirable, he insisted a democratic government in Britain in his day would not only be inept, but also oppressive. He opposed democracy for three basic reasons. First, government required a degree of intelligence and breadth of knowledge of the sort that occurred rarely among the common people. Second, he thought that if they had the vote, common people had dangerous and angry passions that could be aroused easily by demagogues, fearing that the authoritarian impulses that could be empowered by these passions would undermine cherished traditions and established religion, leading to violence and confiscation of property. Third, Burke warned that democracy would create a tyranny over unpopular minorities, who needed the protection of the upper classes.
Opposition to the slave trade
Burke proposed a bill to ban slaveholders from being able to sit in the House of Commons, claiming they were a danger incompatible with traditional notions of British liberty. While Burke did believe that Africans were "barbaric" and needed to be "civilised" by Christianity, Gregory Collins argues that this was not an unusual attitude amongst abolitionists at the time. Furthermore, Burke seemed to believe that Christianity would provide a civilising benefit to any group of people, as he believed Christianity had "tamed" European civilisation and regarded Southern European peoples as equally savage and barbarous. Collins also suggests that Burke viewed the "uncivilised" behaviour of African slaves as being partially caused by slavery itself, as he believed that making someone a slave stripped them of any virtues and rendered them mentally deficient, regardless of race. Burke proposed a gradual program of emancipation called Sketch of a Negro Code, which Collins argues was quite detailed for the time. Collins concludes that Burke's "gradualist" position on the emancipation of slaves, while perhaps seeming ridiculous to some modern-day readers, was nonetheless sincere.
India and the impeachment of Warren Hastings
For years, Burke pursued impeachment efforts against Warren Hastings, formerly Governor-General of Bengal, that resulted in the trial during 1786. His interaction with the British dominion of India began well before Hastings' impeachment trial. For two decades prior to the impeachment, Parliament had dealt with the Indian issue. This trial was the pinnacle of years of unrest and deliberation. In 1781, Burke was first able to delve into the issues surrounding the East India Company when he was appointed Chairman of the Commons Select Committee on East Indian Affairs—from that point until the end of the trial, India was Burke's primary concern. This committee was charged "to investigate alleged injustices in Bengal, the war with Hyder Ali, and other Indian difficulties". While Burke and the committee focused their attention on these matters, a second secret committee was formed to assess the same issues. Both committee reports were written by Burke. Among other purposes, the reports conveyed to the Indian princes that Britain would not wage war on them, along with demanding that the East India Company should recall Hastings. This was Burke's first call for substantive change regarding imperial practices. When addressing the whole House of Commons regarding the committee report, Burke described the Indian issue as one that "began 'in commerce' but 'ended in empire'".
On 28 February 1785, Burke delivered a now-famous speech, The Nabob of Arcot's Debts, wherein he condemned the damage to India by the East India Company. In the province of the Carnatic, the Indians had constructed a system of reservoirs to make the soil fertile in a naturally dry region, and centred their society on the husbandry of water:
These are the monuments of real kings, who were the fathers of their people; testators to a posterity which they embraced as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by ambition; but by the ambition of an insatiable benevolence, which, not contented with reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of human life, had strained, with all the reachings and graspings of a vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty beyond the limits of nature, and to perpetuate themselves through generations of generations, the guardians, the protectors, the nourishers of mankind.
Burke claimed that the advent of East India Company domination in India had eroded much that was good in these traditions and that as a consequence of this and the lack of new customs to replace them the Indian populace under Company rule was needlessly suffering. He set about establishing a set of imperial expectations, whose moral foundation would in his opinion warrant an overseas empire.
On 4 April 1786, Burke presented the House of Commons with the Article of Charge of High Crimes and Misdemeanors against Hastings. The impeachment in Westminster Hall which did not begin until 14 February 1788 would be the "first major public discursive event of its kind in England", bringing the morality of imperialism to the forefront of public perception. Burke was already known for his eloquent rhetorical skills and his involvement in the trial only enhanced its popularity and significance. Burke's indictment, fuelled by emotional indignation, branded Hastings a "captain-general of iniquity" who never dined without "creating a famine", whose heart was "gangrened to the core" and who resembled both a "spider of Hell" and a "ravenous vulture devouring the carcasses of the dead". The House of Commons eventually impeached Hastings, but subsequently the House of Lords acquitted him of all charges.
French Revolution: 1688 versus 1789
Initially, Burke did not condemn the French Revolution. In a letter of 9 August 1789, he wrote: "England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud! The thing indeed, though I thought I saw something like it in progress for several years, has still something in it paradoxical and Mysterious. The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner". The events of 5–6 October 1789, when a crowd of Parisian women marched on Versailles to compel King Louis XVI to return to Paris, turned Burke against it. In a letter to his son Richard Burke dated 10 October, he said: "This day I heard from Laurence who has sent me papers confirming the portentous state of France—where the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it—where Mirabeau presides as the Grand Anarch; and the late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable". On 4 November, Charles-Jean-François Depont wrote to Burke, requesting that he endorse the Revolution. Burke replied that any critical language of it by him should be taken "as no more than the expression of doubt", but he added: "You may have subverted Monarchy, but not recover'd freedom". In the same month, he described France as "a country undone". Burke's first public condemnation of the Revolution occurred on the debate in Parliament on the army estimates on 9 February 1790 provoked by praise of the Revolution by Pitt and Fox:
Since the House had been prorogued in the summer much work was done in France. The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures. […] [There was a danger of] an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody and tyrannical democracy. […] [In religion] the danger of their example is no longer from intolerance, but from Atheism; a foul, unnatural vice, foe to all the dignity and consolation of mankind; which seems in France, for a long time, to have been embodied into a faction, accredited, and almost avowed.
In January 1790, Burke read Richard Price's sermon of 4 November 1789 entitled A Discourse on the Love of Our Country to the Revolution Society. That society had been founded to commemorate the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In this sermon, Price espoused the philosophy of universal "Rights of Men". Price argued that love of our country "does not imply any conviction of the superior value of it to other countries, or any particular preference of its laws and constitution of government". Instead, Price asserted that Englishmen should see themselves "more as citizens of the world than as members of any particular community".
A debate between Price and Burke ensued that was "the classic moment at which two fundamentally different conceptions of national identity were presented to the English public". Price claimed that the principles of the Glorious Revolution included "the right to choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a government for ourselves".
Immediately after reading Price's sermon, Burke wrote a draft of what eventually became Reflections on the Revolution in France. On 13 February 1790, a notice in the press said that shortly Burke would publish a pamphlet on the Revolution and its British supporters, but he spent the year revising and expanding it. On 1 November, he finally published the Reflections and it was an immediate best-seller. Priced at five shillings, it was more expensive than most political pamphlets, but by the end of 1790 it had gone through ten printings and sold approximately 17,500 copies. A French translation appeared on 29 November and on 30 November the translator Pierre-Gaëton Dupont wrote to Burke saying 2,500 copies had already been sold. The French translation ran to ten printings by June 1791.
What the Glorious Revolution had meant was as important to Burke and his contemporaries as it had been for the last one hundred years in British politics. In the Reflections, Burke argued against Price's interpretation of the Glorious Revolution and instead, gave a classic Whig defence of it. Burke argued against the idea of abstract, metaphysical rights of humans and instead advocated national tradition:
The Revolution was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty […] The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon [scion] alien to the nature of the original plant. […] Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone, are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties. They endeavour to prove that the ancient charter […] were nothing more than a re-affirmance of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom. […] In the famous law […] called the Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, "Your subjects have inherited this freedom", claiming their franchises not on abstract principles "as the rights of men", but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived from their forefathers.
Burke said: "We fear God, we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected". Burke defended this prejudice on the grounds that it is "the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages" and superior to individual reason, which is small in comparison. "Prejudice", Burke claimed, "is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit". Burke criticised social contract theory by claiming that society is indeed a contract, although it is "a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born".
The most famous passage in Burke's Reflections was his description of the events of 5–6 October 1789 and the part of Marie-Antoinette in them. Burke's account differs little from modern historians who have used primary sources. His use of flowery language to describe it provoked both praise and criticism. Philip Francis wrote to Burke saying that what he wrote of Marie-Antoinette was "pure foppery". Edward Gibbon reacted differently: "I adore his chivalry". Burke was informed by an Englishman who had talked with the Duchesse de Biron that when Marie-Antoinette was reading the passage she burst into tears and took considerable time to finish reading it. Price had rejoiced that the French king had been "led in triumph" during the October Days, but to Burke this symbolised the opposing revolutionary sentiment of the Jacobins and the natural sentiments of those who shared his own view with horror—that the ungallant assault on Marie-Antoinette was a cowardly attack on a defenceless woman.
Louis XVI translated the Reflections "from end to end" into French. Fellow Whig MPs Richard Sheridan and Charles James Fox disagreed with Burke and split with him. Fox thought the Reflections to be "in very bad taste" and "favouring Tory principles". Other Whigs such as the Duke of Portland and Earl Fitzwilliam privately agreed with Burke, but they did not wish for a public breach with their Whig colleagues. Burke wrote on 29 November 1790: "I have received from the Duke of Portland, Lord Fitzwilliam, the Duke of Devonshire, Lord John Cavendish, Montagu (Frederick Montagu MP), and a long et cetera of the old Stamina of the Whiggs a most full approbation of the principles of that work and a kind indulgence to the execution". The Duke of Portland said in 1791 that when anyone criticised the Reflections to him, he informed them that he had recommended the book to his sons as containing the true Whig creed.
In the opinion of Paul Langford, Burke crossed something of a Rubicon when he attended a levee on 3 February 1791 to meet the King, later described by Jane Burke as follows:
On his coming to Town for the Winter, as he generally does, he went to the Levee with the Duke of Portland, who went with Lord William to kiss hands on his going into the Guards—while Lord William was kissing hands, The King was talking to The Duke, but his Eyes were fixed on [Burke] who was standing in the Crowd, and when He said His say to The Duke, without waiting for [Burke]'s coming up in his turn, The King went up to him, and, after the usual questions of how long have you been in Town and the weather, He said you have been very much employed of late, and very much confined. [Burke] said, no, Sir, not more than usual—You have and very well employed too, but there are none so deaf as those that w'ont hear, and none so blind as those that w'ont see—[Burke] made a low bow, Sir, I certainly now understand you, but was afraid my vanity or presumption might have led me to imagine what Your Majesty has said referred to what I have done—You cannot be vain—You have been of use to us all, it is a general opinion, is it not so Lord Stair? who was standing near. It is said Lord Stair;—Your Majesty's adopting it, Sir, will make the opinion general, said [Burke]—I know it is the general opinion, and I know that there is no Man who calls himself a Gentleman that must not think himself obliged to you, for you have supported the cause of the Gentlemen—You know the tone at Court is a whisper, but The King said all this loud, so as to be heard by every one at Court.
Burke's Reflections sparked a pamphlet war. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first into print, publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Men a few weeks after Burke. Thomas Paine followed with the Rights of Man in 1791. James Mackintosh, who wrote Vindiciae Gallicae, was the first to see the Reflections as "the manifesto of a Counter Revolution". Mackintosh later agreed with Burke's views, remarking in December 1796 after meeting him that Burke was "minutely and accurately informed, to a wonderful exactness, with respect to every fact relating to the French Revolution". Mackintosh later said: "Burke was one of the first thinkers as well as one of the greatest orators of his time. He is without parallel in any age, excepting perhaps Lord Bacon and Cicero; and his works contain an ampler store of political and moral wisdom than can be found in any other writer whatever".
In November 1790, François-Louis-Thibault de Menonville, a member of the National Assembly of France, wrote to Burke, praising Reflections and requesting more "very refreshing mental food" that he could publish. This Burke did in April 1791 when he published A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly. Burke called for external forces to reverse the Revolution and included an attack on the late French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau as being the subject of a personality cult that had developed in revolutionary France. Although Burke conceded that Rousseau sometimes showed "a considerable insight into human nature", he mostly was critical. Although he did not meet Rousseau on his visit to Britain in 1766–1767, Burke was a friend of David Hume, with whom Rousseau had stayed. Burke said Rousseau "entertained no principle either to influence of his heart, or to guide his understanding—but vanity"—which he "was possessed to a degree little short of madness". He also cited Rousseau's Confessions as evidence that Rousseau had a life of "obscure and vulgar vices" that was not "chequered, or spotted here and there, with virtues, or even distinguished by a single good action". Burke contrasted Rousseau's theory of universal benevolence and his having sent his children to a foundling hospital, stating that he was "a lover of his kind, but a hater of his kindred".
These events and the disagreements that arose from them within the Whig Party led to its break-up and to the rupture of Burke's friendship with Fox. In debate in Parliament on Britain's relations with Russia, Fox praised the principles of the Revolution, although Burke was not able to reply at this time as he was "overpowered by continued cries of question from his own side of the House". When Parliament was debating the Quebec Bill for a constitution for Canada, Fox praised the Revolution and criticised some of Burke's arguments such as hereditary power. On 6 May 1791, Burke used the opportunity to answer Fox during another debate in Parliament on the Quebec Bill and condemn the new French Constitution and "the horrible consequences flowing from the French idea of the Rights of Man". Burke asserted that those ideas were the antithesis of both the British and the American constitutions. Burke was interrupted and Fox intervened, saying that Burke should be allowed to carry on with his speech. However, a vote of censure was moved against Burke for noticing the affairs of France which was moved by Lord Sheffield and seconded by Fox. Pitt made a speech praising Burke and Fox made a speech—both rebuking and complimenting Burke. He questioned the sincerity of Burke, who seemed to have forgotten the lessons he had learned from him, quoting from Burke's own speeches of fourteen and fifteen years before. Burke's response was as follows:
It certainly was indiscreet at any period, but especially at his time of life, to parade enemies, or give his friends occasion to desert him; yet if his firm and steady adherence to the British constitution placed him in such a dilemma, he would risk all, and, as public duty and public experience taught him, with his last words exclaim, "Fly from the French Constitution".
At this point, Fox whispered that there was "no loss of friendship". "I regret to say there is", Burke replied, "I have indeed made a great sacrifice; I have done my duty though I have lost my friend. There is something in the detested French constitution that envenoms every thing it touches". This provoked a reply from Fox, yet he was unable to give his speech for some time since he was overcome with tears and emotion. Fox appealed to Burke to remember their inalienable friendship, but he also repeated his criticisms of Burke and uttered "unusually bitter sarcasms". This only aggravated the rupture between the two men. Burke demonstrated his separation from the party on 5 June 1791 by writing to Fitzwilliam, declining money from him.
Burke was dismayed that some Whigs, instead of reaffirming the principles of the Whig Party he laid out in the Reflections, had rejected them in favour of "French principles" and that they criticised Burke for abandoning Whig principles. Burke wanted to demonstrate his fidelity to Whig principles and feared that acquiescence to Fox and his followers would allow the Whig Party to become a vehicle for Jacobinism.
Burke knew that many members of the Whig Party did not share Fox's views and he wanted to provoke them into condemning the French Revolution. Burke wrote that he wanted to represent the whole Whig Party "as tolerating, and by a toleration, countenancing those proceedings" so that he could "stimulate them to a public declaration of what every one of their acquaintance privately knows to be […] their sentiments". On 3 August 1791, Burke published his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs in which he renewed his criticism of the radical revolutionary programmes inspired by the French Revolution and attacked the Whigs who supported them as holding principles contrary to those traditionally held by the Whig Party.
Burke owned two copies of what has been called "that practical compendium of Whig political theory", namely The Tryal of Dr. Henry Sacheverell (1710). Burke wrote of the trial: "It rarely happens to a party to have the opportunity of a clear, authentic, recorded, declaration of their political tenets upon the subject of a great constitutional event like that of the [Glorious] Revolution". Writing in the third person, Burke asserted in his Appeal:
[The] foundations laid down by the Commons, on the trial of Doctor Sacheverel, for justifying the revolution of 1688, are the very same laid down in Mr. Burke's Reflections; that is to say,—a breach of the original contract, implied and expressed in the constitution of this country, as a scheme of government fundamentally and inviolably fixed in King, Lords and Commons.—That the fundamental subversion of this antient constitution, by one of its parts, having been attempted, and in effect accomplished, justified the Revolution. That it was justified only upon the necessity of the case; as the only means left for the recovery of that antient constitution, formed by the original contract of the British state; as well as for the future preservation of the same government. These are the points to be proved.
Burke then provided quotations from Paine's Rights of Man to demonstrate what the New Whigs believed. Burke's belief that Foxite principles corresponded to Paine's was genuine. Finally, Burke denied that a majority of "the people" had, or ought to have, the final say in politics and alter society at their pleasure. People had rights, but also duties and these duties were not voluntary. According to Burke, the people could not overthrow morality derived from God.
Although Whig grandees such as Portland and Fitzwilliam privately agreed with Burke's Appeal, they wished he had used more moderate language. Fitzwilliam saw the Appeal as containing "the doctrines I have sworn by, long and long since". Francis Basset, a backbench Whig MP, wrote to Burke that "though for reasons which I will not now detail I did not then deliver my sentiments, I most perfectly differ from Mr. Fox & from the great Body of opposition on the French Revolution". Burke sent a copy of the Appeal to the King and the King requested a friend to communicate to Burke that he had read it "with great Satisfaction". Burke wrote of its reception: "Not one word from one of our party. They are secretly galled. They agree with me to a title; but they dare not speak out for fear of hurting Fox. […] They leave me to myself; they see that I can do myself justice". Charles Burney viewed it as "a most admirable book—the best & most useful on political subjects that I have ever seen", but he believed the differences in the Whig Party between Burke and Fox should not be aired publicly.
Eventually, most of the Whigs sided with Burke and gave their support to William Pitt the Younger's Tory government which in response to France's declaration of war against Britain declared war on France's Revolutionary Government in 1793.
In December 1791, Burke sent government ministers his Thoughts on French Affairs where he put forward three main points, namely that no counter-revolution in France would come about by purely domestic causes; that the longer the Revolutionary Government exists, the stronger it becomes; and that the Revolutionary Government's interest and aim is to disturb all of the other governments of Europe.
As a Whig, Burke did not wish to see an absolute monarchy again in France after the extirpation of Jacobinism. Writing to an émigré in 1791, Burke expressed his views against a restoration of the Ancien Régime:
When such a complete convulsion has shaken the State, and hardly left any thing whatsoever, either in civil arrangements, or in the Characters and disposition of men's minds, exactly where it was, whatever shall be settled although in the former persons and upon old forms, will be in some measure a new thing and will labour under something of the weakness as well as other inconveniences of a Change. My poor opinion is that you mean to establish what you call 'L'ancien Régime,' If any one means that system of Court Intrigue miscalled a Government as it stood, at Versailles before the present confusions as the thing to be established, that I believe will be found absolutely impossible; and if you consider the Nature, as well of persons, as of affairs, I flatter myself you must be of my opinion. That was tho' not so violent a State of Anarchy as well as the present. If it were even possible to lay things down exactly as they stood, before the series of experimental politicks began, I am quite sure that they could not long continue in that situation. In one Sense of L'Ancien Régime I am clear that nothing else can reasonably be done.
Burke delivered a speech on the debate of the Aliens Bill on 28 December 1792. He supported the Bill as it would exclude "murderous atheists, who would pull down Church and state; religion and God; morality and happiness". The peroration included a reference to a French order for 3,000 daggers. Burke revealed a dagger he had concealed in his coat and threw it to the floor: "This is what you are to gain by an alliance with France". Burke picked up the dagger and continued:
When they smile, I see blood trickling down their faces; I see their insidious purposes; I see that the object of all their cajoling is—blood! I now warn my countrymen to beware of these execrable philosophers, whose only object it is to destroy every thing that is good here, and to establish immorality and murder by precept and example—'Hic niger est hunc tu Romane caveto' ['Such a man is evil; beware of him, Roman'. Horace, Satires I. 4. 85.].
Burke supported the war against Revolutionary France, seeing Britain as fighting on the side of the royalists and émigres in a civil war, rather than fighting against the whole nation of France. Burke also supported the royalist uprising in La Vendée, describing it on 4 November 1793 in a letter to William Windham as "the sole affair I have much heart in". Burke wrote to Henry Dundas on 7 October urging him to send reinforcements there as he viewed it as the only theatre in the war that might lead to a march on Paris, but Dundas did not follow Burke's advice.
Burke believed the British government was not taking the uprising seriously enough, a view reinforced by a letter he had received from the Prince Charles of France (S.A.R. le comte d'Artois), dated 23 October, requesting that he intercede on behalf of the royalists to the government. Burke was forced to reply on 6 November: "I am not in His Majesty's Service; or at all consulted in his Affairs". Burke published his Remarks on the Policy of the Allies with Respect to France, begun in October, where he said: "I am sure every thing has shewn us that in this war with France, one Frenchman is worth twenty foreigners. La Vendée is a proof of this".
On 20 June 1794, Burke received a vote of thanks from the House of Commons for his services in the Hastings Trial and he immediately resigned his seat, being replaced by his son Richard. A tragic blow fell upon Burke with the loss of Richard in August 1794, to whom he was tenderly attached and in whom he saw signs of promise which were not patent to others and which in fact appear to have been non-existent, although this view may have rather reflected the fact that his son Richard had worked successfully in the early battle for Catholic emancipation. King George III, whose favour he had gained by his attitude on the French Revolution, wished to create him Earl of Beaconsfield, but the death of his son deprived the opportunity of such an honour and all its attractions, so the only award he would accept was a pension of £2,500. Even this modest reward was attacked by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to whom Burke replied in his Letter to a Noble Lord (1796): "It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform". He argued that he was rewarded on merit, but the Duke of Bedford received his rewards from inheritance alone, his ancestor being the original pensioner: "Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign; his from Henry the Eighth". Burke also hinted at what would happen to such people if their revolutionary ideas were implemented and included a description of the British Constitution:
But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion—as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land—so long as the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.
Burke's last publications were the Letters on a Regicide Peace (October 1796), called forth by negotiations for peace with France by the Pitt government. Burke regarded this as appeasement, injurious to national dignity and honour. In his Second Letter, Burke wrote of the French Revolutionary government: "Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The State is all in all. Everything is referred to the production of force; afterwards, everything is trusted to the use of it. It is military in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements. The State has dominion and conquest for its sole objects—dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms".
This is held to be the first explanation of the modern concept of totalitarian state. Burke regarded the war with France as ideological, against an "armed doctrine". He wished that France would not be partitioned due to the effect this would have on the balance of power in Europe and that the war was not against France, but against the revolutionaries governing her. Burke said: "It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France".
Later life
In November 1795, there was a debate in Parliament on the high price of corn and Burke wrote a memorandum to Pitt on the subject. In December, Samuel Whitbread MP introduced a bill giving magistrates the power to fix minimum wages and Fox said he would vote for it. This debate probably led Burke to editing his memorandum as there appeared a notice that Burke would soon publish a letter on the subject to the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture Arthur Young, but he failed to complete it. These fragments were inserted into the memorandum after his death and published posthumously in 1800 as Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. In it, Burke expounded "some of the doctrines of political economists bearing upon agriculture as a trade". Burke criticised policies such as maximum prices and state regulation of wages and set out what the limits of government should be:
That the State ought to confine itself to what regards the State, or the creatures of the State, namely, the exterior establishment of its religion; its magistracy; its revenue; its military force by sea and land; the corporations that owe their existence to its fiat; in a word, to every thing that is truly and properly public, to the public peace, to the public safety, to the public order, to the public prosperity.
The economist Adam Smith remarked that Burke was "the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us".
Writing to a friend in May 1795, Burke surveyed the causes of discontent: "I think I can hardly overrate the malignity of the principles of Protestant ascendency, as they affect Ireland; or of Indianism [i.e. corporate tyranny, as practiced by the British East Indies Company], as they affect these countries, and as they affect Asia; or of Jacobinism, as they affect all Europe, and the state of human society itself. The last is the greatest evil". By March 1796, Burke had changed his mind: "Our Government and our Laws are beset by two different Enemies, which are sapping its foundations, Indianism, and Jacobinism. In some Cases they act separately, in some they act in conjunction: But of this I am sure; that the first is the worst by far, and the hardest to deal with; and for this amongst other reasons, that it weakens discredits, and ruins that force, which ought to be employed with the greatest Credit and Energy against the other; and that it furnishes Jacobinism with its strongest arms against all formal Government".
For more than a year prior to his death, Burke knew that his stomach was "irrecoverably ruind". After hearing that Burke was nearing death, Fox wrote to Mrs. Burke enquiring after him. Fox received the reply the next day:
Mrs. Burke presents her compliments to Mr. Fox, and thanks him for his obliging inquiries. Mrs. Burke communicated his letter to Mr. Burke, and by his desire has to inform Mr. Fox that it has cost Mr. Burke the most heart-felt pain to obey the stern voice of his duty in rending asunder a long friendship, but that he deemed this sacrifice necessary; that his principles continue the same; and that in whatever of life may yet remain to him, he conceives that he must live for others and not for himself. Mr. Burke is convinced that the principles which he has endeavoured to maintain are necessary to the welfare and dignity of his country, and that these principles can be enforced only by the general persuasion of his sincerity.
Burke died in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, on 9 July 1797 and was buried there alongside his son and brother.
Legacy
Burke is regarded by most political historians in the English-speaking world as a liberal conservative and the father of modern British conservatism. Burke was utilitarian and empirical in his arguments while Joseph de Maistre, a fellow conservative from the Continent, was more providentialist and sociological and deployed a more confrontational tone in his arguments.
Burke believed that property was essential to human life. Because of his conviction that people desire to be ruled and controlled, the division of property formed the basis for social structure, helping develop control within a property-based hierarchy. He viewed the social changes brought on by property as the natural order of events which should be taking place as the human race progressed. With the division of property and the class system, he also believed that it kept the monarch in check to the needs of the classes beneath the monarch. Since property largely aligned or defined divisions of social class, class too was seen as natural—part of a social agreement that the setting of persons into different classes, is the mutual benefit of all subjects. Concern for property is not Burke's only influence. Christopher Hitchens summarises as follows: "If modern conservatism can be held to derive from Burke, it is not just because he appealed to property owners in behalf of stability but also because he appealed to an everyday interest in the preservation of the ancestral and the immemorial".
Burke's support for the causes of the "oppressed majorities", such as Irish Catholics and Indians, led him to be at the receiving end of hostile criticism from Tories; while his opposition to the spread of the French Republic (and its radical ideals) across Europe led to similar charges from Whigs. As a consequence, Burke often became isolated in Parliament.
In the 19th century, Burke was praised by both liberals and conservatives. Burke's friend Philip Francis wrote that Burke "was a man who truly & prophetically foresaw all the consequences which would rise from the adoption of the French principles", but because Burke wrote with so much passion, people were doubtful of his arguments. William Windham spoke from the same bench in the House of Commons as Burke had when he had separated from Fox and an observer said Windham spoke "like the ghost of Burke" when he made a speech against peace with France in 1801. William Hazlitt, a political opponent of Burke, regarded him as amongst his three favourite writers (the others being Junius and Rousseau) and made it "a test of the sense and candour of any one belonging to the opposite party, whether he allowed Burke to be a great man". William Wordsworth was originally a supporter of the French Revolution and attacked Burke in A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff (1793), but by the early 19th century he had changed his mind and came to admire Burke. In his Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmorland, Wordsworth called Burke "the most sagacious Politician of his age", whose predictions "time has verified". He later revised his poem The Prelude to include praise of Burke ("Genius of Burke! forgive the pen seduced/By specious wonders") and portrayed him as an old oak. Samuel Taylor Coleridge came to have a similar conversion as he had criticised Burke in The Watchman, but in his Friend (1809–1810) had defended Burke from charges of inconsistency. Later in his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge hails Burke as a prophet and praises Burke for referring "habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer". Henry Brougham wrote of Burke that "all his predictions, save one momentary expression, had been more than fulfilled: anarchy and bloodshed had borne sway in France; conquest and convulsion had desolated Europe. […] [T]he providence of mortals is not often able to penetrate so far as this into futurity". George Canning believed that Burke's Reflections "has been justified by the course of subsequent events; and almost every prophecy has been strictly fulfilled". In 1823, Canning wrote that he took Burke's "last works and words [as] the manual of my politics". The Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli "was deeply penetrated with the spirit and sentiment of Burke's later writings".
The 19th-century Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone considered Burke "a magazine of wisdom on Ireland and America" and in his diary recorded: "Made many extracts from Burke—sometimes almost divine". The Radical MP and anti-Corn Law activist Richard Cobden often praised Burke's Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. The Liberal historian Lord Acton considered Burke one of the three greatest Liberals, along with Gladstone and Thomas Babington Macaulay. Lord Macaulay recorded in his diary: "I have now finished reading again most of Burke's works. Admirable! The greatest man since Milton". The Gladstonian Liberal MP John Morley published two books on Burke (including a biography) and was influenced by Burke, including his views on prejudice. The Cobdenite Radical Francis Hirst thought Burke deserved "a place among English libertarians, even though of all lovers of liberty and of all reformers he was the most conservative, the least abstract, always anxious to preserve and renovate rather than to innovate. In politics he resembled the modern architect who would restore an old house instead of pulling it down to construct a new one on the site". Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was controversial at the time of its publication, but after his death it was to become his best known and most influential work and a manifesto for Conservative thinking.
Two contrasting assessments of Burke also were offered long after his death by Karl Marx and Winston Churchill. In a footnote to Volume One of Das Kapital, Marx wrote:
The sycophant—who in the pay of the English oligarchy played the romantic laudator temporis acti against the French Revolution just as, in the pay of the North American colonies at the beginning of the American troubles, he had played the liberal against the English oligarchy—was an out-and-out vulgar bourgeois. "The laws of commerce are the laws of Nature, and therefore the laws of God." (E. Burke, l.c., pp. 31, 32) No wonder that, true to the laws of God and Nature, he always sold himself in the best market.
In Consistency in Politics, Churchill wrote:
On the one hand [Burke] is revealed as a foremost apostle of Liberty, on the other as the redoubtable champion of Authority. But a charge of political inconsistency applied to this life appears a mean and petty thing. History easily discerns the reasons and forces which actuated him, and the immense changes in the problems he was facing which evoked from the same profound mind and sincere spirit these entirely contrary manifestations. His soul revolted against tyranny, whether it appeared in the aspect of a domineering Monarch and a corrupt Court and Parliamentary system, or whether, mouthing the watch-words of a non-existent liberty, it towered up against him in the dictation of a brutal mob and wicked sect. No one can read the Burke of Liberty and the Burke of Authority without feeling that here was the same man pursuing the same ends, seeking the same ideals of society and Government, and defending them from assaults, now from one extreme, now from the other.
The historian Piers Brendon asserts that Burke laid the moral foundations for the British Empire, epitomised in the trial of Warren Hastings, that was ultimately to be its undoing. When Burke stated that "[t]he British Empire must be governed on a plan of freedom, for it will be governed by no other", this was "an ideological bacillus that would prove fatal. This was Edmund Burke's paternalistic doctrine that colonial government was a trust. It was to be so exercised for the benefit of subject people that they would eventually attain their birthright—freedom". As a consequence of these opinions, Burke objected to the opium trade which he called a "smuggling adventure" and condemned "the great Disgrace of the British character in India".
A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque commemorates Burke at 37 Gerrard Street now in London's Chinatown.
Statues of Burke are in Bristol, England, Trinity College Dublin and Washington, D.C. Burke is also the namesake of a private college preparatory school in Washington, Edmund Burke School.
Burke Avenue, in The Bronx, New York, is named for him.
Criticism
One of Burke's largest and most developed critics was the American political theorist Leo Strauss. In his book Natural Right and History, Strauss makes a series of points in which he somewhat harshly evaluates Burke's writings.
One of the topics that he first addresses is the fact that Burke creates a definitive separation between happiness and virtue and explains that "Burke, therefore, seeks the foundation of government 'in a conformity to our duties' and not in 'imaginary rights of man" Strauss views Burke as believing that government should focus solely on the duties that a man should have in society as opposed to trying to address any additional needs or desires. Government is simply a practicality to Burke and not necessarily meant to function as a tool to help individuals live their best lives. Strauss also argues that in a sense Burke's theory could be seen as opposing the very idea of forming such philosophies. Burke expresses the view that theory cannot adequately predict future occurrences and therefore men need to have instincts that cannot be practised or derived from ideology.
This leads to an overarching criticism that Strauss holds regarding Burke which is his rejection of the use of logic. Burke dismisses a widely held view amongst theorists that reason should be the primary tool in the forming of a constitution or contract. Burke instead believes that constitutions should be made based on natural processes as opposed to rational planning for the future. However, Strauss points out that criticising rationality actually works against Burke's original stance of returning to traditional ways because some amount of human reason is inherent and therefore is in part grounded in tradition. In regards to this formation of legitimate social order, Strauss does not necessarily support Burke's opinion—that order cannot be established by individual wise people, but exclusively by a culmination of individuals with historical knowledge of past functions to use as a foundation. Strauss notes that Burke would oppose more newly formed republics due to this thought, although Lenzner adds the fact that he did seem to believe that America's constitution could be justified given the specific circumstances. On the other hand, France's constitution was much too radical as it relied too heavily on enlightened reasoning as opposed to traditional methods and values.
Religious thought
Burke's religious writing comprises published works and commentary on the subject of religion. Burke's religious thought was grounded in the belief that religion is the foundation of civil society. He sharply criticised deism and atheism and emphasised Christianity as a vehicle of social progress. Born in Ireland to a Catholic mother and a Protestant father, Burke vigorously defended the Anglican Church, but he also demonstrated sensitivity to Catholic concerns. He linked the conservation of a state-established religion with the preservation of citizens' constitutional liberties and highlighted Christianity's benefit not only to the believer's soul, but also to political arrangements.
False quotations
"When good men do nothing"
The statement that "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" is often attributed to Burke despite the debated origin of this quote. In 1770, it is known that Burke wrote in "Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents":
In 1867, John Stuart Mill made a similar statement in an inaugural address delivered before the University of St. Andrews:
Timeline
Bibliography
A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
An Account of the European Settlement in America (1757)
The Abridgement of the History of England (1757)
Annual Register editor for some 30 years (1758)
Tracts on the Popery Laws (Early 1760s)
On the Present State of the Nation (1769)
Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770)
On American Taxation (1774)
Conciliation with the Colonies (1775)
A Letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol (1777)
Reform of the Representation in the House of Commons (1782)
Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)
An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791)
Thoughts on French Affairs (1791)
Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793)
Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795)
Letters on a Regicide Peace (1795–97)
Letter to a Noble Lord (1796)
In popular media
Actor T. P. McKenna was cast as Edmund Burke in the TV series, Longitude in 2000.
See also
Burke family
Conservative Party
List of abolitionist forerunners
References
Citations
Sources
Blakemore, Steven (ed.), Burke and the French Revolution. Bicentennial Essays (The University of Georgia Press, 1992).
Bourke, Richard, Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke (Princeton University Press, 2015).
Bromwich, David, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). A review: Freedom fighter, The Economist, 5 July 2014
Clark, J. C. D. (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press: 2001).
Cone, Carl B. Burke and the Nature of Politics (2 vols, 1957, 1964), a detailed modern biography of Burke; somewhat uncritical and sometimes superficial regarding politics
Thomas Wellsted Copeland, 'Edmund Burke and the Book Reviews in Dodsley's Annual Register', Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. 57, No. 2. (Jun. 1942), pp. 446–468.
Courtenay, C.P. Montesquieu and Burke (1963), good introduction
Crowe, Ian, ed. The Enduring Edmund Burke: Bicentennial Essays (1997) essays by American conservatives online edition
Crowe, Ian, ed. An Imaginative Whig: Reassessing the Life and Thought of Edmund Burke. (2005). 247 pp. essays by scholars
Ian Crowe, 'The career and political thought of Edmund Burke', Journal of Liberal History, Issue 40, Autumn 2003.
Frederick Dreyer, 'The Genesis of Burke's Reflections', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 50, No. 3. (Sep. 1978), pp. 462–479.
Robert Eccleshall, English Conservatism since the Restoration (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990).
Gibbons, Luke. Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime. (2003). 304 pp.
Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot (7th ed. 1992).
Kirk, Russell. Edmund Burke: A Genius Reconsidered (1997) online edition
Kramnick, Isaac. The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (1977) online edition
Lock, F. P. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985).
Lock, F. P. Edmund Burke. Volume I: 1730–1784 (Clarendon Press, 1999).
Lock, F. P. Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784–1797 (Clarendon Press, 2006).
Levin, Yuval. The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left (Basic Books; 2013) 275 pages; their debate regarding the French Revolution.
Lucas, Paul. "On Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription; Or, An Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers", Historical Journal, 11 (1968) opens the way towards an effective synthesis of Burke's ideas of History, Change and Prescription.
Jim McCue, Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents (The Claridge Press, 1997).
Magnus, Philip. Edmund Burke: A Life (1939), older biography
Marshall, P. J. The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (1965), the standard history of the trial and Burke's role
O'Brien, Conor Cruise, The Great Melody. A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (1992). .
O'Gorman, Frank. Edmund Burke: Edmund Burke: His Political Philosophy (2004) 153pp online edition
Parkin, Charles. The Moral Basis of Burke's Political Thought (1956)
Pocock, J.G.A. "Burke and the Ancient Constitution", Historical Journal, 3 (1960), 125–143; shows Burke's debt to the Common Law tradition of the seventeenth century in JSTOR
Raeder, Linda C. "Edmund Burke: Old Whig". Political Science Reviewer 2006 35: 115–131. Fulltext: Ebsco, argues Burke's ideas closely resemble those of conservative philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek (1899–1992).
J. J. Sack, 'The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts Its Past, 1806–1829', The Historical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3. (Sep. 1987), pp. 623–640.
J. J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative. Reaction and orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Spinner, Jeff. "Constructing Communities: Edmund Burke on Revolution", Polity, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1991), pp. 395–421 in JSTOR
Stanlis, Peter. Edmund Burke and the Natural Law (1958)
Vermeir, Koen and Funk Deckard, Michael (ed.) The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry (International Archives of the History of Ideas, Vol. 206) (Springer, 2012)
John Whale (ed.), Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. New interdisciplinary essays (Manchester University Press, 2000).
Whelan, Frederick G. Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire (1996)
O'Connor Power, J. 'Edmund Burke and His Abiding Influence', The North American Review, vol. 165 issue 493, December 1897, 666–681.
Main sources
Clark, J. C. D., ed. (2001). Reflections on the Revolution in France. A Critical Edition. Stanford University Press.
Hoffman, R.; Levack, P. (eds.) (1949). Burke's Politics. Alfred A. Knopf.
Burke, Edmund. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (9 vol 1981– ) vol 1 online; vol 2 online; vol 6 India: The Launching of the Hastings Impeachment, 1786–1788 online; vol 8 online; vol 9 online.
Further reading
Bourke, Richard (2015). Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke. Princeton University Press.
Bromwich, David (2014). The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence. Harvard University Press.
Doran, Robert (2015). "Burke: Sublime Individualism". The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lock, F. P. (1999). Edmund Burke. Volume I: 1730–1784. Clarendon Press.
Lock, F. P. (2006). Edmund Burke. Volume II: 1784–1797. Clarendon Press.
Marshall, P. J. (2019) Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies: Wealth, Power, and Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2019) online review
Norman, Jesse (2014). Edmund Burke: The Visionary who Invented Modern Politics. William Collins.
O'Brien, Conor Cruise (1992). The Great Melody. A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke. University of Chicago Press
Uglow, Jenny (23 May 2019). "Big Talkers" (review of Leo Damrosch, The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, Yale University Press, 473 pp.). The New York Review of Books. LXVI (9): 26–28.
Whelan, Frederick G. (1996). Edmund Burke and India: Political Morality and Empire. University of Pittsburgh Press
External links
Edmund Burke Society at Columbia University
Burke's works at The Online Library of Liberty
Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", lightly modified for easier reading
Burke according to Dr Jesse Norman MP at www.bbc.co.uk
"Edmund Burke for a Postmodern Age", William F. Byrne, Berfrois, 29 June 2011
The Liberalism/Conservatism of Edmund Burke and F. A. Hayek: A Critical Comparison, Linda C. Raeder. From Humanitas, Volume X, No. 1, 1997. National Humanities Institute.
1729 births
1797 deaths
18th-century Anglo-Irish people
18th-century Irish philosophers
18th-century Irish writers
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Etiology (pronounced ; alternatively: aetiology or ætiology) is the study of causation or origination. The word is derived from the Greek (aitiología) "giving a reason for" (, aitía, "cause"; and , -logía). More completely, etiology is the study of the causes, origins, or reasons behind the way that things are, or the way they function, or it can refer to the causes themselves. The word is commonly used in medicine (pertaining to causes of disease) and in philosophy, but also in physics, psychology, government, geography, spatial analysis, theology, and biology, in reference to the causes or origins of various phenomena.
In the past, when many physical phenomena were not well understood or when histories were not recorded, myths often arose to provide etiologies. Thus, an etiological myth, or origin myth, is a myth that has arisen, been told over time or written to explain the origins of various social or natural phenomena. For example, Virgil's Aeneid is a national myth written to explain and glorify the origins of the Roman Empire. In theology, many religions have creation myths explaining the origins of the world or its relationship to believers.
Medicine
In medicine, the etiology of an illness or condition refers to the frequent studies to determine one or more factors that come together to cause the illness. Relatedly, when disease is widespread, epidemiological studies investigate what associated factors, such as location, sex, exposure to chemicals, and many others, make a population more or less likely to have an illness, condition, or disease, thus helping determine its etiology. Sometimes determining etiology is an imprecise process. In the past, the etiology of a common sailor's disease, scurvy, was long unknown. When large, ocean-going ships were built, sailors began to put to sea for long periods of time, and often lacked fresh fruit and vegetables. Without knowing the precise cause, Captain James Cook suspected scurvy was caused by the lack of vegetables in the diet. Based on his suspicion, he forced his crew to eat sauerkraut, a cabbage preparation, every day, and based upon the positive outcomes, he inferred that it prevented scurvy, even though he did not know precisely why. It took about another two hundred years to discover the precise etiology: the lack of vitamin C in a sailor's diet.
The following are examples of intrinsic factors:
Inherited conditions, or conditions that are passed down to you from your parents. An example of this is hemophilia, a disorder that leads to excessive bleeding.
Metabolic and endocrine, or hormone, disorders. These are abnormalities in the chemical signaling and interaction in the body. For example, Diabetes mellitus is an endocrine disease that causes high blood sugar.
Neoplastic disorders or cancer where the cells of the body grow out of control.
Problems with immunity, such as allergies, which are an overreaction of the immune system.
Mythology
An etiological myth, or origin myth, is a myth intended to explain the origins of cult practices, natural phenomena, proper names and the like. For example, the name Delphi and its associated deity, Apollon Delphinios, are explained in the Homeric Hymn which tells of how Apollo, in the shape of a dolphin (), propelled Cretans over the seas to make them his priests. While Delphi is actually related to the word ("womb"), many etiological myths are similarly based on folk etymology (the term "Amazon", for example). In the Aeneid (published circa 17 BC), Virgil claims the descent of Augustus Caesar's Julian clan from the hero Aeneas through his son Ascanius, also called Iulus. The story of Prometheus' sacrifice trick at Mecone in Hesiod's Theogony relates how Prometheus tricked Zeus into choosing the bones and fat of the first sacrificial animal rather than the meat to justify why, after a sacrifice, the Greeks offered the bones wrapped in fat to the gods while keeping the meat for themselves. In Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe, the origin of the color of mulberries is explained, as the white berries become stained red from the blood gushing forth from their double suicide.
See also
Backstory
Bradford Hill criteria
Creation myth
Just-so story
Just So Stories
Pathology
Involution (esoterism)
References
External links
Origin myths
Mythography
Mythology
Origins
Philosophy of science | [
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In poetry, enjambment ( or ; from the French enjamber) is incomplete syntax at the end of a line; the meaning 'runs over' or 'steps over' from one poetic line to the next. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped. The origin of the word is credited to the French word enjamber, which means 'to straddle or encroach'.
In reading, the delay of meaning creates a tension that is released when the word or phrase that completes the syntax is encountered (called the rejet); the tension arises from the "mixed message" produced both by the pause of the line-end, and the suggestion to continue provided by the incomplete meaning. In spite of the apparent lack of support for the other people who are not yet to be in the contradiction between rhyme, which heightens closure, and enjambment, which delays it, the technique is compatible with rhymed verse. Even in couplets, the closed or heroic couplet was a late development; older is the open couplet, where rhyme and enjambed lines co-exist.
Enjambment has a long history in poetry. Homer used the technique, and it is the norm for alliterative verse where rhyme is unknown. In the 32nd Psalm of the Hebrew Bible enjambment is unusually conspicuous. It was used extensively in England by Elizabethan poets for dramatic and narrative verses, before giving way to closed couplets. The example of John Milton in Paradise Lost laid the foundation for its subsequent use by the English Romantic poets; in its preface he identified it as one of the chief features of his verse: "sense variously drawn out from one verse into another".
Examples
The start of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, with only lines 4 and 7 end-stopped:
These lines from Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale (c. 1611) are heavily enjambed:
Meaning flows as the lines progress, and the reader's eye is forced to go on to the next sentence. It can also make the reader feel uncomfortable or the poem feel like "flow-of-thought" with a sensation of urgency or disorder. In contrast, the following lines from Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595) are completely end-stopped:
Each line is formally correspondent with a unit of thought—in this case, a clause of a sentence. End-stopping is more frequent in early Shakespeare: as his style developed, the proportion of enjambment in his plays increased. Scholars such as Goswin König and A. C. Bradley have estimated approximate dates of undated works of Shakespeare by studying the frequency of enjambment.
Endymion by John Keats, lines 2–4:
The song "One Night In Bankok", from the musical Chess, written by Tim Rice and Björn Ulvaeus, includes examples such as :
Closely related to enjambment is the technique of "broken rhyme" or "split rhyme" which involves the splitting of an individual word, typically to allow a rhyme with one or more syllables of the split word. In English verse, broken rhyme is used almost exclusively in light verse, such as to form a word that rhymes with "orange", as in this example by Willard Espy, in his poem "The Unrhymable Word: Orange":
The clapping game "Miss Susie" uses the break "... Hell / -o operator" to allude to the taboo word "Hell", then replaces it with the innocuous "Hello".
See also
Blank verse
Caesura
Concrete poetry
Free verse
Line break (poetry)
Notes
References
Further reading
John Hollander, Vision and Resonance, Oxford U. Press, 1975 (especially chapter 5).
Free online explanation with examples
Poetic devices
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] |
Eurostar is an international high-speed rail service connecting the United Kingdom with France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Most Eurostar trains travel through the Channel Tunnel between the United Kingdom and France, owned and operated separately by Getlink.
The London terminus is London St Pancras International; the other British calling points are Ebbsfleet International and Ashford International in Kent. Intermediate calling points in France are Calais-Fréthun and Lille-Europe. Trains to Paris terminate at Gare du Nord. Trains to Belgium and the Netherlands serve Brussels-South and Rotterdam Centraal, before terminating at Amsterdam Centraal. Additionally, in France there are direct services from London to Marne-la-Vallée–Chessy (Disneyland Paris) and seasonal direct services to southern France (Lyon, Avignon and Marseille) in summer, and to the French Alps in winter.
The service is operated by 11 Class 373/1 trainsets, each with 18 coaches, and 17 Class 374 trainsets, each with 16 coaches. The trains run at up to on high-speed lines. The LGV Nord high-speed line in France opened before Eurostar services began in 1994, and newer lines enabling faster journeys were added later: HSL 1 in Belgium and High Speed 1 in south-east England. The French and Belgian parts of the network are shared with Paris–Brussels Thalys services and TGV trains.
Eurostar is operated by Eurostar International Limited (EIL), jointly owned by SNCF, the national railway of France (55%), investment firms (40%), and the National Railway Company of Belgium (5%).
In December 2021 Eurostar said it intended to move its administrative activities from London to Brussels, citing problems with doing business in the UK and stating that being based in an EU country would make expansion and development easier. Administratively Eurostar is merging with Thalys, combining ticket sales in a single system, but the Eurostar brand and train liveries are to be kept separate from other Thalys operations.
History
Conception and planning
The history of Eurostar can be traced to the choice in 1986 of a rail tunnel to provide a cross-channel link between Britain and France. A previous attempt to construct a tunnel between the two nations had begun in 1974, but was quickly aborted. Construction began afresh in 1988. Eurotunnel was created to manage and own the tunnel, which was finished in 1993, the official opening taking place on 6 May 1994.
In addition to the tunnel's shuttle trains carrying cars and lorries between Folkestone and Calais, the tunnel opened up the possibility of through passenger and freight train services between places further afield. British Rail and SNCF contracted with Eurotunnel to use half the tunnel's capacity for this purpose. In 1987, Britain, France and Belgium set up an International Project Group to specify a train to provide an international high-speed passenger service through the tunnel. France had been operating high-speed TGV services since 1981, and had begun construction of a new high-speed line between Paris and the Channel Tunnel, LGV Nord; French TGV technology was chosen as the basis for the new trains. An order for 30 trainsets, to be manufactured in France but with some British and Belgian components, was placed in December 1989. On 20 June 1993, the first Eurostar test train travelled through the tunnel to the UK. Various technical difficulties in running the new trains on British tracks were quickly overcome.
Launch of service
On 14 November 1994, Eurostar services began running from London Waterloo International station in London, to Paris Gare du Nord in Paris, and Brussels-South railway station in Brussels. The train service started with a limited Discovery service; the full daily service started from 28 May 1995.
In 1995, Eurostar was achieving an average end-to-end speed of from London to Paris.
On 8 January 1996, Eurostar launched services from a second railway station in the UK when Ashford International was opened.
On 23 September 2003, passenger services began running on the first completed section of High Speed 1. Following a high-profile glamorous opening ceremony and a large advertising campaign, on 14 November 2007, Eurostar services in London transferred from Waterloo to the extended and extensively refurbished London St Pancras International.
Records achieved
The Channel Tunnel used by Eurostar services holds the record for having the longest underwater section of any tunnel in the world, and it is the third-longest railway tunnel (behind the Seikan tunnel and the Gotthard Base Tunnel) in the world.
On 30 July 2003, a Eurostar train set a new British speed record of on the first section of the "High Speed 1" railway between the Channel Tunnel, and Fawkham Junction in north Kent, two months before official public services began running.
On 16 May 2006, Eurostar set a new record for the longest non-stop high-speed journey, a distance of from London to Cannes taking 7 hours 25 minutes.
On 4 September 2007, a record-breaking train left Paris Gare du Nord at 10:44 (09:44 BST) and reached London St Pancras International in 2 hours 3 minutes 39 seconds, carrying journalists and railway workers. This record trip was also the first passenger-carrying arrival at the new London St Pancras International station. On 20 September 2007, Eurostar broke another record when it completed the journey from Brussels to London in 1 hour 43 minutes.
Regional Eurostar and Nightstar
The original proposals for Eurostar included direct services to Paris and Brussels from cities north of London: Manchester Piccadilly via Birmingham New Street on the West Coast Main Line and Leeds and via Edinburgh Waverley, Newcastle and on the East Coast Main Line.
Seven 14-coach "North of London" Eurostar trains for these Regional Eurostar services were built, but these services never came to fruition. Predicted journey times of almost nine hours for Glasgow to Paris at the time of growth of low-cost air travel during the 1990s made the plans commercially unviable against the cheaper and quicker airlines. Other reasons that have been suggested for these services having never been run were both government policies and the disruptive privatisation of British Rail. Three of the Regional Eurostar units were leased by Great North Eastern Railway (GNER) to increase domestic services from London King's Cross to York and later Leeds. The lease expired in December 2005, and most of the NoL sets were transferred to SNCF for TGV services in northern France.
An international Nightstar sleeper train was also planned; this would have travelled the same routes as Regional Eurostar, plus the Great Western Main Line to . These were also deemed commercially unviable, and the scheme was abandoned with no services ever operated. In 2000, the coaches were sold to Via Rail in Canada.
Ashford International station
Ashford International station was the original station for Eurostar services in Kent.
Once Ebbsfleet International railway station, also designed to serve Kent, had opened, only three trains a day to Paris Nord and one to Disneyland Paris called at Ashford for a considerable period of time. There were fears that services at Ashford International might be further reduced or withdrawn altogether as Eurostar planned to make Ebbsfleet the new regional hub instead. However, after a period during which no Brussels trains served the station, to the dissatisfaction of the local communities, Eurostar reintroduced a single daily Ashford–Brussels service on 23 February 2009.
Changes to corporate structure
On 1 September 2010, Eurostar was incorporated as a single corporate entity, Eurostar International Limited (EIL), replacing the joint operation between EUKL, SNCF and SNCB/NMBS. EIL is owned by SNCF (55%), Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) (30%), Hermes Infrastructure (10%) and SNCB (5%).
In June 2014, the UK shareholding in Eurostar International Limited was transferred from London and Continental Railways / Department for Transport to HM Treasury. That October, it was announced that the UK government planned to raise £300 million by selling its stake. In March 2015, the UK government announced that it would sell its 40% share to an Anglo-Canadian consortium made up of the Caisse and Hermes Infrastructure. The sale was completed in May 2015.
Rules for cycles on trains
In 2015, Eurostar threatened to require that cyclists dismantle bicycles before they could be transported on the trains. Following criticism from Boris Johnson and cycling groups, Eurostar reversed the plans.
Wi-Fi and onboard entertainment
By March 2016, onboard entertainment was provided by GoMedia, including Wi-Fi connectivity and up to 300 hours of movies and television kept on the train's servers and accessed using the passenger's own devices: mobile phones, tablets, laptops etc. A tracker app allows customers to see where they are.
Merger with Thalys
On 27 September 2019, the heads of two of Eurostar's major shareholders, Guillaume Pepy of SNCF, and the chair of SNCB, , publicised that Eurostar was planning to come together with its sister company the Franco-Belgian transnational rail service Thalys. The arrangement is to merge their operations under the working title of "Green Speed" and expand services outside the core London-Paris-Brussels-Amsterdam service, to create a grand Western European high-speed rail service covering the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, serving up to 30 million customers by 2030.
Thalys assisted Eurostar with onwards connections between Amsterdam and Brussels, and to provide the Amsterdam to London service, in lieu of passport and customs checks at Amsterdam Centraal station. Thalys currently uses two ex-Eurostar class 373 trains (half-sets 373213 and 373224) to provide Thalys' no frills service IZY, between Paris and Brussels.
In September 2020, the merger between Thalys and Eurostar International was confirmed, a year after Thalys announced its intention to merge with the cross-Channel provider subject to gaining European Commission clearance, to form "Green Speed". SNCF and SNCB already hold a controlling shareholding in Eurostar. In October 2021, it was announced that, following the completion of the merger, the Thalys brand would be discontinued, with all of the new operation's services to be operated under the Eurostar name.
COVID-19 Impact
By January 2021, Eurostar ridership went down to less than 1% of pre-pandemic levels. The combined financial troubles and lack of ridership caused by the COVID-19 pandemic led to Eurostar seeking governmental assistance from Britain's Treasury and Department for Transport, even though Britain sold its 40% Eurostar holding in 2015. Eurostar's appeal included granting the company access to Bank of England-backed loans and a temporary reduction in track access charges for use of the UK's high-speed rail line. Despite being majority-owned by the French state railway, SNCF, Eurostar was thought to have already exhausted options for governmental assistance from Paris, but both the French transport minister and the UK Department for Transport confirmed they were working on further plans to maintain the service.
In March 2020, Eurostar placed all of their Class 373 or E300 into storage due to reduced operations. The sets have rebegun testing on HS1 as of January 2022, with no confirmed date of when they will return. -
Mainline routes
LGV Nord (France)
LGV Nord is a French -long high-speed rail line that connects Paris to the Belgian border and the Channel Tunnel via Lille. It opened in 1993.
Its extensions to Belgium and towards Paris, as well as connecting to the Channel Tunnel, have made LGV Nord a part of every Eurostar journey undertaken. A Belgian high-speed line, HSL 1, was added to the end of LGV Nord, at the Belgian border, in 1997. Of all French high-speed lines, LGV Nord sees the widest variety of high-speed rolling stock and is quite busy; a proposed cut-off bypassing Lille, which would reduce Eurostar journey times to Paris, is called LGV Picardie.
Channel Tunnel
The Channel Tunnel is the most important part of the route as it is the only rail connection between Great Britain and the European mainland. It joins LGV Nord in France with High Speed One in Britain. Tunnelling began in 1988, and the tunnel was officially opened by British sovereign Queen Elizabeth II and the French President François Mitterrand at a ceremony in Calais on 6 May 1994.
It is owned by Getlink, which charges a significant toll to Eurostar for its use.
In 1996, the American Society of Civil Engineers named the tunnel as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World.
Along the current route of the Eurostar service, line speeds are except within the Channel Tunnel, where a reduced speed of applies for safety reasons.
Since the launch of Eurostar services, severe disruptions and cancellations have been caused by fires breaking out within the Channel Tunnel, such as in 1996, 2006 (minor), 2008 and 2015.
HSL 1 (Belgium)
Until the opening on 2 June 1996, of the first phase of the Belgian high speed line, Eurostar trains were routed via the Belgian railway line 94. The Eurostar routes still use the line as a diversion if engineering works are taking place on HSL1, depending where it is. The 06:13 from London St Pancras to Brussels still uses the line as a diversion to bypass the peak time disruptions on HSL1 due to the extra TGV services from Brussels for the commuters. After 2 June 1996, some Eurostars to Brussels were routed via the first phase of the Belgian High Speed line and the Belgian railway line 78 via Mons. Although this line is still as a diversion if HSL1 is doing engineering, also depending where the maintenance is taking place. Journey times between London and Brussels were improved when an Belgian high-speed line, HSL 1, opened on 14 December 1997. It links with LGV Nord on the border with France, allowing Eurostar trains heading to Brussels to make the transition between the two without having to reduce speed. A further four-minute improvement for London–Brussels trains was achieved in December 2006, with the opening of the Brussels South Viaduct. Linking the international platforms of Brussels-South railway station with the high-speed line, the viaduct separates Eurostar (and Thalys) from local services.
High Speed 1 (United Kingdom)
High Speed 1 (HS1), formerly known as the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL), is a high-speed railway line running from London through Kent to the British end of the Channel Tunnel.
It was built in two stages. The first section between the tunnel and Fawkham Junction in north Kent opened in September 2003, cutting London–Paris journey times by 21 minutes to 2 hours 35 minutes, and London–Brussels to 2 hours 20 minutes. On 14 November 2007, commercial services began over the whole of the new HS1 line. The redeveloped St Pancras International station became the new London terminus for all Eurostar services.
The completion of High Speed 1 has brought the British part of Eurostar's route up to the same standards as the French and Belgian high-speed lines. Non-stop journey times were reduced by a further 20 minutes to 2 hours 15 minutes for London–Paris and 1 hour 51 minutes for London–Brussels. As of fall 2020, HS1 is the UK's first renewable-powered railway.
Services
Frequency
Eurostar offers up to fifteen weekday London – Paris services (nineteen on Fridays) including nine non-stop (thirteen on Fridays). There are also nine (ten on Friday) London–Brussels services, with two running non-stop (continuing to Amsterdam) and a further two calling at Lille only. One service daily operates to Amsterdam via Brussels and Rotterdam also calling at Lille. In addition, there is a return trip from London to Marne-la-Vallée - Chessy for Disneyland Paris, which runs 4 times a week with increased frequency during school holidays. There are also seasonal services: an up-to-4-times-a-week service to Marseille via Lyon and Avignon in the summer; and, in the winter, "Snow trains", aimed at skiers, to Bourg-Saint-Maurice, Aime-la-Plagne and Moûtiers in the Alps; these run twice-weekly, one overnight and one during the daytime. Intermediate stations are Ebbsfleet International in northwest Kent, Ashford International in southeast Kent, and Calais-Fréthun and Lille-Europe in Nord-Pas-de-Calais. In February 2018, Eurostar announced the start of its long-planned service from London to Amsterdam, with an initial two trains per day from April of that year running between St Pancras and Amsterdam Centraal. This launched as a one-way service, with return trains carrying passengers to Rotterdam and Brussels Midi/Zuid, making a 28-minute stop (which was not deemed long enough to process UK-bound passengers) and then carrying different passengers from Brussels to London. Initially passengers travelling back took a Thalys service to Brussels Midi/Zuid where they could join the Eurostar. This was due to the lack of facilities for juxtaposed controls by the UK Border Force at Amsterdam Centraal and Rotterdam Centraal. On 4 February 2020, the Dutch Minister of Infrastructure and Water Management, Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, and the UK Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, announced that juxtaposed controls would be established at Amsterdam Centraal and Rotterdam Centraal. The direct train from Amsterdam was originally due to launch on 30 April 2020, and from Rotterdam on 18 May 2020, although it was later postponed to 26 October 2020 for both cities due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since 14 November 2007, all Eurostar trains have been routed via High Speed 1 to or from the redeveloped London terminus at St Pancras International, which at a cost of £800 million was extensively rebuilt and extended to cope with long Eurostar trains.
It had been intended to retain some Eurostar services at Waterloo International, but this was ruled out on cost grounds.
Completion of High Speed 1 increased the potential number of trains serving London. Separation of Eurostar from British domestic services through Kent meant that timetabling was no longer affected by peak-hour restrictions.
Fares
Eurostar's fares were significantly higher in its early years; the cheapest fare in 1994 was £99 return.
In 2002, Eurostar was planning cheaper fares, an example of which was an offer of £50-day returns from London to Paris or Brussels.
By March 2003, the cheapest fare from the UK was £59 return, available all year around. In June 2009 it was announced that one-way single fares would be available at £31 at the cheapest. Competition between Eurostar and airline services was a large factor in ticket prices being reduced from the initial levels.
Business Premier fares also slightly undercut air fares on similar routes, targeted at regular business travellers.
In 2009, Eurostar greatly increased its budget ticket availability to help maintain and grow its dominant market share.
The Eurostar ticketing system is very complex, being distributed through no fewer than 48 individual sales systems.
Eurostar is a member of the Amadeus CRS distribution system, making its tickets available alongside those of airlines worldwide.
Eurostar has two sub-classes of first class: Standard Premier and Business Premier; benefits include guaranteed faster checking-in and meals served at-seat, as well as the improved furnishings and interior of carriages.
The rebranding is part of Eurostar's marketing drive to attract more business professionals. Increasingly, business people in a group have been chartering private carriages as opposed to individual seats on the train.
Service connections
Without the operation of Regional Eurostar services using the North of London trainsets across the rest of Britain, Eurostar has developed its connections with other transport services instead, such as integrating effectively with traditional UK rail operators' schedules and routes, making it possible for passengers to use Eurostar as a quick connection to further destinations on the continent.
All three main terminals used by the Eurostar service – St Pancras International, Paris Gare du Nord, and Brussels Midi/Zuid – are served by domestic trains and by local urban transport networks such as the London Underground and the Paris Metro. Standard Eurostar tickets no longer include free onward connections to or from any other station in Belgium: this is now available for a flat-rate supplement, currently £5.50.
Eurostar has announced several partnerships with other rail services,
most notably Thalys connections at Lille and Brussels for passengers to go beyond current Eurostar routes towards the Netherlands and Germany.
In 2002, Eurostar initiated the Eurostar-Plus program, offering connecting tickets for onward journeys from Lille and Paris to dozens of destinations in France.
Through fares are also available from 68 British towns and cities to destinations in France and Belgium.
In May 2009 Eurostar announced that a formal connection to Switzerland had been established in a partnership between Eurostar and Lyria, which will operate TGV services from Lille to the Swiss Alps for Eurostar connection.
In May 2019, Eurostar ended its agreement with Deutsche Bahn that allowed passengers to travel by train from the UK to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Under the agreement passengers could travel on a single booking which made rescheduling easier. However, the direct tickets will no longer be sold from 9 November 2019.
Controls and security
Because the UK is not part of the European Union or the Schengen Area, and because the Netherlands, Belgium and France are not part of the Common Travel Area, all Eurostar passengers must go through border controls. Both the British Government and the Schengen governments concerned (Belgium, Netherlands and France) have legal obligations to check the travel documents of those entering and leaving their respective countries.
To allow passengers to walk off the train without arrival checks in most cases, juxtaposed controls ordinarily take place at the embarkation station.
To comply with UK law, there are full security checks similar to those at airports, scanning both bags and people's pockets. The recommended check-in time is 90-120 minutes except for business class where it is 45-60 minutes; these are much longer than previously because of extra checks in place due to Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eurostar passengers travelling within the Schengen area on trains towards London bypass border checks, and enter the preallocated cars at the rear of the train, which are reserved for these passengers. This area is then searched at Lille and all passengers removed. This arrangement was set up after numerous people entered the UK without prior authorisation, by buying a ticket from Brussels to Lille or Calais but remaining on the train until London – an issue exacerbated by Belgian police threatening to arrest UK Border Agency staff at Brussels-Midi if they tried to prevent passengers whom they suspected of attempting to exploit this loophole from boarding Eurostar trains. Travel from Calais or Lille towards Brussels and the Netherlands has no border or security control. On 7 July 2020 a modified agreement was signed in Brussels that includes The Netherlands in the previous agreement. This allows for juxtaposed controls in Amsterdam and Rotterdam like those in Brussels and Paris.
When the tripartite agreements were signed, the Belgian Government said that it had serious questions about the compatibility of this agreement with the Schengen Convention and the principle of free movement of people enshrined in various European treaties.
On 30 June 2009 Eurostar raised concerns at the UK House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee that it was illegal under French law to collect the information required by the UK government under the e-Borders scheme, and the company would be unable to cooperate.
On the northbound Marne la Vallée-Chessy - London train, the security check and French passport check take place at Marne la Vallée-Chessy, while the UK passport check takes place at the UK arrival stations. This is the only route where passengers are not cleared by UK border officials before crossing the Channel.
On the northbound Marseille-London train, there is no facility for security or passport checks at the southern French stations, so passengers must leave the train at Lille-Europe, taking all their belongings with them, and undergo security and border checks there before rejoining the train which waits at the station for just over an hour.
On several occasions, people have tried to stow away illegally on board the train, sometimes in large groups, trying to enter the UK; border monitoring and security is therefore extremely tight.
Eurostar claims to have good and well-funded security measures.
Operational performance
Eurostar's punctuality has fluctuated from year to year, but usually remains over 90%; in the first quarter of 1999, 89% of services operated were on time, and in the second quarter it reached 92%. Eurostar's best punctuality record was 97.35%, between 16 and 22 August 2004. In 2006, it was 92.7%, and in 2007, 91.5% were on time. In the first quarter of 2009, 96% of Eurostar services were punctual, compared with rival air routes' 76%.
An advantage held by Eurostar is the convenience and speed of the service: with shorter check-in times than at most airports and hence quicker boarding and less queueing and high punctuality, it takes less time to travel between central London and central Paris by high-speed rail than by air. Eurostar now has a dominant share of the combined rail–air market on its routes to Paris and Brussels. In 2004, it had a 66% share of the London–Paris market, and a 59% share of the London–Brussels market. In 2007, it achieved record market shares of 71% for London–Paris and 65% for London–Brussels routes.
Eurostar's passenger numbers initially failed to meet predictions. In 1996, London and Continental Railways forecast that passenger numbers would reach 21.4 million annually by 2004, but only 7.3 million was achieved. 82 million passengers used Waterloo International Station from its opening in 1994 to its closure in 2007. 2008 was a record year for Eurostar, with a 10.3% rise in passenger use, which was attributed to the use of High Speed 1 and the move to St Pancras. The following year, Eurostar saw an 11.5% fall in passenger numbers during the first three months of 2009, attributed to the 2008 Channel Tunnel fire and the 2009 recession.
As a result of the poor economic conditions, Eurostar received state aid in May 2009 to cancel out some of the accumulated debt from the High Speed 1 construction programme. Later that year, during snowy conditions in the run-up to Christmas, thousands of passengers were left stranded as several trains broke down and many more were cancelled. In an independent review commissioned by Eurostar, the company came in for serious criticism about its handling of the incident and lack of plans for such a scenario.
In 2006, the Department for Transport predicted that, by 2037, annual cross-channel passenger numbers would probably reach 16 million, considerably less optimistic than London and Continental Railways's original 1996 forecast. In 2007 Eurostar set a target of carrying 10 million passengers by 2010.
The company cited several factors to support this objective, such as improved journey times, punctuality and station facilities. Passengers in general, it stated, are becoming increasingly aware of the environmental effects of air travel, and Eurostar services emit much less carbon dioxide. and that its remaining carbon emissions are now offset, making its services carbon neutral. Further expansion of the high-speed rail network in Europe, such as the HSL-Zuid line between Belgium and the Netherlands, continues to bring more destinations within rail-competitive range, giving Eurostar the possibility of opening up new services in future.
The following chart presents the estimated number of passengers annually transported by the Eurostar service since 1995:
Awards and accolades
Eurostar has been hailed as having set new standards in international rail travel and has won praise several times over for its high standards. However, Eurostar had previously struggled with its reputation and brand image. One commentator had defined the situation at the time as:
Eurostar won the Train Operator of the Year award in the HSBC Rail Awards for 2005. In 2006, Eurostar's Environment Group was set up, with the aim of making changes in the Eurostar services' daily running to decrease negative environmental impact. The organization set itself a target of reducing carbon emissions per passenger journey by 25% by 2012. Drivers were trained in techniques to achieve maximum energy efficiency, and lighting was minimised; the provider of the bulk of the energy for the Channel Tunnel was switched to nuclear power stations in France. Eurostar's target was to reduce emissions by 35 percent per passenger journey by 2012, putting itself beyond the efforts of other railway companies in this field and thereby winning the 2007 Network Rail Efficiency Award. In the grand opening ceremony of St Pancras International, one of the Eurostar trains was given the name 'Tread Lightly', said to symbolise their smaller impact on the environment compared to planes. By 2008, Eurostar's environmental credentials had become highly developed and promoted.
Since then, Eurostar has received multiple awards. It was declared the Best Train Company in the joint Guardian/Observer Travel Awards 2008 and earned a spot on the Sunday Times' Best Green Companies List (2009). Other awards include: ICARUS’ Environmental Award for Best Rail Provider (2009), Guardian & Observer Travel Award for Best Train Company (2009), Travel Weekly's Golden Globes Award for Best Rail Operator (2010), World Travel Market's Responsible Tourism Award for Best Low Carbon Initiative (2011), TNT Magazine's Gold Backpack Award for Favourite Travel Transport (2012), World Travel Awards Europe's Leading Passenger Rail Operator (2011), National Rail Awards Train of the Year (2017), PETA's Travel Award for Best Travel Experience (2019), Mobile Industry Awards' Distributor of the Year (2020).
Environmental Initiatives
In 2007, Eurostar became the world's first carbon-neutral train service through its launch of
"Tread Lightly," an environmental programme with the goal of reducing the service's carbon-dioxide emissions by 25% by 2012. The programme included: reducing power consumption on its rolling stock; sourcing more electricity from lower-emission generators; adding new controls on lighting, heating, and air conditioning; reducing paper usage via electronic tickets; recycling water and employee uniforms; sourcing all food on board from Britain, France, or Belgium. Eurostar also funded three renewable energy projects in developing regions around the world: a windfarm in Tamil Nadu, India; a micro-hydropower project in China; and a plan specifying improvements on fuel consumption of three-wheeler taxis in Indonesia.
In 2019, Eurostar removed all single-use plastics from its trains between London and Paris. Now the trains serve only wooden cutlery, recyclable cans of water, glass wine bottles, paper-based coffee cups, and eco-friendly food packaging. Eurostar partnered with the Woodland Trust, ReforestAction, and Trees for All in 2020, with the goal of planting 20,000 trees each year in woodlands along its routes across the UK, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Since Tread Lightly launched, Eurostar has reduced its carbon footprint by over 40% and now emits up to 90% less greenhouse gas emissions than the equivalent flight.
Organisation
Since 2010, Eurostar has been owned by Eurostar International Limited (EIL), a company jointly owned by SNCF (55%), (CDPQ) (30%), Hermes Infrastructure (10%) and SNCB (5%).
Railteam
Eurostar is a member of Railteam, a marketing alliance formed in July 2007 of seven European high-speed rail operators.
The alliance plans to allow tickets to be booked from one end of Europe to the other on a single website. In June 2009 London and Continental Railways, and the Eurostar UK operations they held ownership of, became fully nationalised by the UK government.
Domestic journeys
Eurostar is not permitted to carry passengers on journeys within a country, so passengers cannot travel (for example) from Lille to Marne-la-Vallée–Chessy, London to Ashford, or Rotterdam to Amsterdam. International journeys within the Schengen area, such as Lille to Brussels, are possible.
Fleet
Fleet details
In addition to its multiple unit fleet units, Eurostar operates a single Class 08 diesel shunter as the pilot at Temple Mills depot.
Current fleet
Class 373
Built between 1992 and 1996, Eurostar's fleet consists of 38 EMU trains, designated Class 373 in the United Kingdom and TGV TMST in France. The units have also been branded as the Eurostar e300 by Eurostar since 2015. There are two variants:
31 "Inter-Capital" sets consisting of two power cars and eighteen passenger carriages. These trains are long and can carry 750 passengers: 206 in first class, 544 in standard class.
7 shorter "North of London" sets which have two power cars and fourteen passenger carriages and are long. These sets have a capacity of 558 seats: 114 first class, 444 standard and which were designed to operate the aborted Regional Eurostar services.
The trains are essentially modified TGV sets, and can operate at up to on high-speed lines, and in the Channel Tunnel. It is possible to exceed the 300 km/h speed limit, but only with special permission from the safety authorities in the respective country.
Speed limits in the Channel Tunnel are dictated by air-resistance, energy (heat) dissipation and the need to be used with other, slower trains. The trains were designed with Channel Tunnel safety in mind, and consist of two independent "half-sets" each with its own power car. In the event of a serious fire on board while travelling through the tunnel, passengers would be transferred into the undamaged half of the train, which would then be detached and driven out of the tunnel to safety.
If the undamaged part were the rear half of the train, this would be driven by the Chef du Train, who is a fully authorised driver and occupies the rear driving cab while the train travels through the tunnel for this purpose.
As 27 of the 31 Inter-Capital sets are sufficient to operate the service, four are currently used by SNCF for domestic TGV services; one of these regularly operates a Paris–Lille shuttle. The Eurostar logos have been removed from these sets, but the base colours of white, black, and yellow remain. SNCF's lease of the sets is scheduled to last until 2011, with an option for a further two years.
Each train has a unique four-digit number starting with "3" (3xxx). This designates the train as a Mark 3 TGV (Mark 1 being SNCF TGV Sud-Est; Mark 2 being SNCF TGV Atlantique). The second digit denotes the country of ownership:
30xx UK
31xx Belgium
32xx France
33xx Regional Eurostar
Fleet updates
In 2004–2005 the "Inter-Capital" sets still in daily use for international services were refurbished with a new interior designed by Philippe Starck.
The original grey-yellow scheme in Standard class and grey-red of First/Premium First were replaced with a grey-brown look in Standard and grey-burnt-orange in First class. Power points were added to seats in First class and coaches 5 and 14 in Standard class. Premium First class was renamed BusinessPremier.
In 2008, Eurostar announced that it would be carrying out a mid-life refurbishment of its Class 373 trains to allow the fleet to remain in service beyond 2020.
This will include the 28 units making up the Eurostar fleet, but not the three Class 373/1 units used by SNCF or the seven Class 373/2 "North of London" sets.
As part of the refurbishment, the Italian company Pininfarina was contracted to redesign the interiors, and The Yard Creative was selected to design the new buffet cars.
On 11 May 2009 Eurostar revealed the new look for its first-class compartments.
The first refurbished train was due in service in 2012, and Eurostar plans to have completed the entire process by 2014.
On 13 November 2014 Eurostar announced the first refurbished trains would not re-enter the fleet until the 3rd or 4th quarter of 2015 due to delays at the completion centre.
The last refurbished e300 re-entered service in April 2019.
Class 374
In addition to the announced mid-life update of the existing Class 373 fleet, Eurostar in 2009 reportedly entered prequalification bids for eight new trainsets to be purchased. Any new trains would need to meet the same safety rules governing passage through the Channel Tunnel as the existing Class 373 fleet. The replacement to the Class 373 trains has been decided jointly between the French Transport Ministry and the UK Department for Transport. The new trains will be equipped to use the new ERTMS in-cab signalling system, due to be fitted to High Speed 1 around 2040.
On 7 October 2010, it was reported that Eurostar had selected Siemens as preferred bidder to supply 10 Siemens Velaro e320 trainsets at a cost of €600 million (and a total investment of more than £700 million with the refurbishment of the existing fleet included) to operate an expanded route network, including services from London to Cologne and Amsterdam. These would be sixteen-car, long trainsets built to meet current Channel Tunnel regulations. The top speed will be and they will have 894–950 seats, unlike the current fleet built by the French company Alstom, which has a top speed of and a seating capacity of 750. Total traction power will be rated at 16 MW.
The nomination of Siemens would see it break into the French high-speed market for the first time, as all French and French subsidiary high-speed operators use TGV derivatives produced by Alstom. Alstom attempted legal action to prevent Eurostar from acquiring German-built trains, claiming that the Siemens sets ordered would breach Channel Tunnel safety rules, but this was thrown out of court. Alstom said, after its High Court defeat, that it would "pursue alternative legal options to uphold its position". On 4 November 2010, the company lodged a complaint with the European Commission over the tendering process, which then asked the British government for "clarification". Alstom then announced it had started legal action against Eurostar, again in the High Court in London.
In July 2011, the High Court rejected Alstom's claim that the tender process was "ineffective", and in April 2012 Alstom said it would call off pending court actions against Siemens. This effectively freed the way for Siemens to build the new Eurostar trains, the first of which were expected to enter service in late 2015.
On 13 November 2014 Eurostar announced the purchase of an additional seven e320s for delivery in the second half of 2016. At the same time, Eurostar announced the first five e320s from the original order of ten would be available by December 2015, with the remaining five entering service by May 2016. Of the five sets ready by December 2015, three of them were planned to be used on London-Paris and London-Brussels routes.
Past fleet
Possible use of double-deck trains
In 2005, the chief executive of Eurostar, Richard Brown, suggested that existing Eurostar trains could be replaced by double-deck trains similar to the TGV Duplex units when they are withdrawn from service. According to Brown, a double-deck fleet could carry 40 million passengers per year from Britain to Continental Europe, equivalent to adding an extra runway at a London airport.
Accidents, incidents and events
A number of technical incidents have affected Eurostar services over the years, but there has only been one major accident involving a service operated by Eurostar, a derailment in June 2000. Other incidents in the Channel Tunnel – such as the 1996 and 2008 Channel Tunnel fires – have affected Eurostar services but were not directly related to Eurostar's operations. However, the breakdowns in the tunnel, which resulted in cessation of service and inconvenience to thousands of passengers, in the run-up to Christmas 2009, proved a public-relations disaster.
Minor incidents
There have been several minor incidents with a few Eurostar services. In October 1994 there were teething problems relating to the start of operations. The first preview train, carrying 400 members of the press and media, was delayed for two hours by technical problems.
On 29 May 2002 a Eurostar train was initially sent down a wrong line – towards London Victoria railway station instead of London Waterloo – causing the service to arrive 25 minutes late. A signalling error that led to the incorrect routeing was stated to have caused "no risk" as a result.
On 11 April 2006, a house collapsed next to a railway line near London which caused Eurostar services to have to terminate and start from Ashford International instead of London Waterloo. Passengers waiting at Waterloo International were initially directed on to local trains towards Ashford leaving from the adjacent London Waterloo East railway station, until overcrowding occurred at Ashford.
1996
Approximately 1,000 passengers were trapped in darkness for several hours inside two Eurostar trains on the night of 19/20 February 1996. The trains stopped inside the tunnels due to electronic failures caused by snow and ice. Questions were raised at the time about the ability of the train and tunnel electronics to withstand the mix of snow, salt and ice which collect in the tunnels during periods of extreme cold.
2000
On 5 June 2000 a Eurostar train travelling from Paris to London derailed on the LGV Nord high-speed line while traveling at . Fourteen people were treated for light injuries or shock, with no fatalities or major injuries. The articulated nature of the trainset was credited with maintaining stability during the incident and all of the train stayed upright. The incident was caused by a traction link on the second bogie of the front power car coming loose, leading to components of the transmission system on that bogie impacting the track.
2007
The first departures from St Pancras on 14 November 2007 coincided with an open-ended strike by French rail unions as part of general strike actions over proposed public-sector pension reforms. The trains were operated by uninvolved British employees and service was not interrupted.
2009
On 23 September 2009 an overhead power line dropped on to a Class 373 train arriving at St Pancras station, activating a circuit breaker and delaying eleven other trains. Two days later, on 25 September 2009, electrical power via the overhead lines was lost on a section of high-speed line outside Lille, delaying passengers on two evening Eurostar-operated services.
During the December 2009 European snowfall, five Eurostar trains broke down inside the Channel Tunnel, after leaving France, and one in Kent on 18 December. Although the trains had been winterised, the systems had not coped with the conditions. Over 2,000 passengers were stuck inside failed trains inside the tunnel, and over 75,000 had their services disrupted. All Eurostar services were cancelled from Saturday 19 December to Monday 21 December 2009. An independent review, published on 12 February 2010, was critical of the contingency plans in place for assisting passengers stranded by the delays, calling them "insufficient".
2010
On 7 January 2010 a Brussels-London train broke down in the Channel Tunnel, resulting in three other trains failing to complete their journeys. The cause of the failure was the onboard signalling system. Due to the severe weather, a limited service was operated in the next few days.
On 15 February 2010, services between Brussels and London were interrupted following the Halle train collision, this time after the dedicated HSL 1 lines in the suburbs of the Belgian capital were blocked by debris from a serious train crash on the suburban commuter lines alongside. No efforts were made to reroute trains around the blockage; Eurostar instead terminated services to Brussels at Lille, directing passengers to continue their journey on local trains. Brussels services resumed on a limited scale on 22 February.
On 21 February 2010 the 21:43 service from Paris to London broke down just outside Ashford International, stranding 740 passengers for several hours while a rescue train was called in.
On 15 April 2010 air traffic in Western Europe closed because of the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Many travellers between the UK and the European mainland instead took the Eurostar train, all tickets between Brussels and London on 15 and 16 April being sold out within 3½ hours after the closure of British airspace.
Between 15 and 20 April, Eurostar put on 33 additional trains and carried 165,000 passengers – 50,000 more than had been scheduled to travel during this period.
On 20 December 2010, the Channel Tunnel was closed off for a day due to snowy weather. Eurostar Trains were suspended that day with thousands of passengers stranded in the run up to Christmas.
2011
On 17 October 2011 a man fell from the 17:04 service from London to Brussels as it passed through Westenhanger and Cheriton in Folkestone, near the entry to the Channel Tunnel. The individual was an Albanian who had been refused entry to the United Kingdom and was voluntarily returning to Brussels. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The line was closed for several hours following the incident. The train itself returned north to Ashford International, where passengers were transferred to a Eurostar service operating from Marne-la-Vallée to London.
Possible developments
Stratford International station
Eurostar trains do not currently call at , originally intended to be the London stop for the regional Eurostars. This was to be reviewed following the 2012 Olympics. However, in 2013, Eurostar claimed that its 'business would be hit' by stopping trains there.
Regional Eurostar
Although the original plan for Regional Eurostar services to destinations north of London was abandoned, the significantly improved journey times available since the opening of High Speed 1 — which is physically connected to both the East Coast Main Line and the North London Line (for the West Coast Main Line) at London St Pancras International – and the increased maximum speeds on the West Coast Main Line since the 2000s may make potential Regional Eurostar services more commercially viable. This would be even more likely if proposals are adopted for a new high-speed line from London to the north of Britain.
Simon Montague, Eurostar's Director of Communications, commented that: "...International services to the regions are only likely once High Speed 2 is built." However, as of 2014 the current plans for High Speed 2 do not allow for a direct rail link between that new line, and High Speed 1, meaning passengers would still be required to change at London Euston and take some form of transportation to London St Pancras International.
Key pieces of infrastructure still belong to LCR via its subsidiary London & Continental Stations and Property, such as the Manchester International Depot, and Eurostar (UK) still owns several track access rights and the rights to paths on both the East Coast Main Line and the West Coast Main Line.
While no announcement has been made of plans to start Regional Eurostar services, it remains a possibility for the future. In the meantime, the closest equivalent to Regional Eurostar services are same-station connections with East Midlands Railway and Thameslink, changing at London St Pancras International. The construction of a new concourse at adjacent London King's Cross improved interchange with St Pancras and provided London North Eastern Railway, Great Northern, Hull Trains and Grand Central services with easier connections to Eurostar.
High Speed 2
Eurostar has already been involved in reviewing and publishing reports into High Speed 2 for the British Government and looks favourably upon such an undertaking. The operation of Regional Eurostar services will not be considered until such time as High Speed 2 has been completed. Alternatively, future loans of the North of London sets to other operators would enable the trains to operate at their full speed, unlike GNER's previous loan between 2000 and 2005, where the trains were limited to on regular track.
LGV Picardie
LGV Picardie is a proposed high-speed line between Paris and Calais via Amiens. By cutting off the corner of the LGV Nord at Lille, it would enable Eurostar trains to save 20 minutes on the journey between Paris and Calais, bringing the London–Paris journey time under 2 hours. In 2008 the French Government announced its future investment plans for new LGVs to be built up to 2020; LGV Picardie was not included but was listed as planned in the longer term.
New destinations
Operational difficulties with cross-border trains
The reduced journey times offered by the opening of High Speed 1 and the opening of the LGV Est and HSL-Zuid bring more continental destinations
within a range from London where rail is competitive with air travel. By Eurostar's estimates a train would then take 3 hours 30 minutes from London to Amsterdam.
At present Eurostar is concentrating on developing its connections with other services, but direct services to other destinations would be possible. With the new e320 rolling stock allowed Eurostar to enter the Netherlands and possibly Germany in future. In additional with every new country Eurostar enters there are security issues, due to the UK's not having signed up to the Schengen Agreement, which allows unrestricted movement across borders of member countries. For example, the Amsterdam to London route was previously direct in only one way, with people needing to get a train to Brussels to go through the juxtaposed controls; the direct connection was subject to talks between the UK and Dutch governments, and became completed in 2020 for services to start.
The difficulties that Eurostar faces in expanding its services would also be faced by any potential competitors to Eurostar. As the UK is outside the Schengen Agreement, London-bound trains must use platforms that are physically isolated, a constraint which other international operators such as Thalys do not face. In addition, the British authorities are required to make passenger security and passport checks before they board the train,
which might deter domestic passengers. Compounding the difficulties in providing a similar service are the Channel Tunnel safety rules, the major ones being the "half-train rule" and the "length rule". The "half-train rule" stipulated that passenger trains had to be able to split in the case of emergency. Class 373 trains were designed as two half-sets, which when coupled form a complete train, enabling them to be split easily in the event of an emergency while in the tunnel, with the unaffected set able to be driven out. The half-train rule was finally abolished in May 2010. However, the "length rule", which states that passenger trains must be at least 375 metres long with a through corridor (to match the distance between the safety doors in the tunnel), was retained, preventing any potential operators from applying to run services with existing fleets (the majority of both TGV and ICE trains are only 200m long).
French high-speed rail expansion
Eurostar expansion
At the same time as Pepy's announcement, Richard Brown announced that Eurostar's plans for expanding its network potentially included Amsterdam and Rotterdam as destinations, using the HSL Zuid line. This would require either equipment upgrades of the existing fleet, or a new fleet equipped for both ERTMS and the domestic signalling systems used by Nederlandse Spoorwegen. Following the December 2009 opening of HSL Zuid, a London–Amsterdam journey is estimated to take 4 hr 16 min.
In an interview with Eurostar's Chief Executive Nicolas Petrovic in the Financial Times in May 2012, an intention for Eurostar to serve ten new destinations was expressed, including Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Cologne, Lyon, Marseille and Geneva, along with a likely second hub to be created in Brussels.
In March 2016 in an interview with Bloomberg, Eurostar's Chief Executive expressed interest in operating a direct train service between London and Bordeaux, but not before 2019. Journey time was said to be around four and a half hours using the new LGV Sud Europe Atlantique.
Southern France
In December 2012 Eurostar announced that on Saturdays during May 2013–June 2013 a new seasonal service would be introduced to Aix-en-Provence, also serving Lyon Part-Dieu and Avignon TGV on the way (the latter being from central Avignon). This is in addition to the long-standing seasonal summer service on Saturdays during July and August and the first week of September travelling to Avignon Centre. The Aix-en-Provence services did not run in 2014 but was replaced along with the seasonal Avignon Centre services with the new year-round service to Lyon and Marseille as of 1 May 2015.
In 2018, at least, direct services to Lyon, Avignon and Marseille ran only from May to September, with connections during the rest of the year being offered via Eurostar but requiring a change to SNCF trains in Paris or Lille. Travel time from London to Marseille was roughly 6.5 hours in 2018.
Netherlands
In September 2013, Eurostar announced an agreement with the Government of Netherlands and NS, the Dutch railway company, to start twice daily services between London and Amsterdam Centraal; the launch was initially planned for December 2016. The service will use the newly bought Siemens Velaro trainsets and will also call at Brussels, and Rotterdam. The journey time will be around four hours.
Initially, trains stop in Brussels for about half an hour to allow domestic passengers from Amsterdam and Rotterdam to leave and allow London bound passengers to board. Eventually, Passengers for London from Amsterdam and Rotterdam will undertake all security checks before boarding and will be able to travel direct both ways. The trains will also convey passengers from the Netherlands on journeys to Brussels who will not need to pass through security and they will be allocated half the train which will be kept separate from the London-bound passengers by locking the intermediate door. The Brussels-bound half of the train will be security swept on arrival at Brussels before Brussels-to-London passengers can board.
The journey from London to Amsterdam Centraal will take 3 hr 41 min and trains will call at Brussels Zuid/Midi and Rotterdam Centraal Station. From Amsterdam Centraal to London St Pancras, trains will take 4 hr 9 min to include the 28-minute stop at Brussels.
In November 2014, Eurostar announced the service to Amsterdam would start in "2016-2017", and would include a stop at Schiphol Airport in addition to the previously announced destinations. Eurostar have indicated that the calling pattern 'is not set in stone' and if a business case supports it the service might be extended to additional cities such as Utrecht.
The service was finally planned to start running on 4 April 2018, with fare prices starting at £35 for a single ticket. An "inaugural train" from St Pancras International to Amsterdam via Rotterdam broke a speed record for the journey to Brussels (1hr 46mins) on 20 February 2018. The first regular service to Amsterdam left St Pancras at 08:31 on 4 April 2018.
The direct Amsterdam to London service launched on 26 October 2020 with two trains a day Monday - Friday. Until that date, a change in Brussels for passport controls and security added about an hour to journey time. Eurostar stated that the new journey time to London was 4 hr 9 min from Amsterdam, and 3 hr 29 min from Rotterdam.
Competition
In 2010, international rail travel was liberalised by new European Union directives, designed to break up monopolies in order to encourage competition for services between countries.
This sparked interest among other companies in providing services in competition to Eurostar and new services to destinations beyond Paris and Brussels. The only rail carrier to formally propose and secure permission for such a service up to now is Deutsche Bahn, which intends to run services between London and Germany and the Netherlands. The sale of High Speed One by the British Government having effectively nationalised LCR in June 2009 is also likely to stimulate competition on the line.
In March 2010, it was announced that Eurotunnel was in discussions with the Intergovernment Commission, which oversees the tunnel, with the aim of amending elements of the safety code governing the tunnel's usage. Most saliently, the requirement that trains be able to split within the tunnel and each part of the train be driven out to opposite ends has been removed. However, the proposal to allow shorter trains was not passed. Eurotunnel Chairman & Chief Executive Jacques Gounon said that he hoped the liberalisation of rules would allow entry into the market of competitors such as Deutsche Bahn. Sources at Eurotunnel suggested that Deutsche Bahn could have entered the market at the timetable change in December 2012. This, however, did not happen.
In July 2010 Deutsche Bahn (DB) announced that it intended to make a test run with a high-speed ICE-3MF train through the Channel Tunnel in October 2010 in preparation for possible future operations. The trial ran on 19 October 2010 with a Class 406 ICE train specially liveried with a British "Union flag" decal. The train was then put on display for the press at St Pancras International. However, this is not the class of train that would be used for the proposed service. At the St Pancras ceremony, DB revealed that it planned to operate from London to Frankfurt and Amsterdam (two of the biggest air travel markets in Europe), with trains 'splitting & joining' in Brussels. It hoped to begin these services in 2013 using Class 407 ICE units, with three trains per day each way—morning, midday and afternoon. Initially the only calling points would be Rotterdam on the way to Amsterdam, and Cologne on the way to Frankfurt. Amsterdam and Cologne would be under four hours from London, Frankfurt around five hours. DB decided to put this on hold mainly due to advance passport check requirements. DB had hoped that immigration checks could be done on board, but British authorities required immigration and security checks to be done at Lille Europe station, taking at least 30 minutes.
In August 2010, Trenitalia announced its desire to eventually run high-speed trains from Italy to the United Kingdom, using its newly ordered high-speed trains. The trains will be delivered from 2013.
Ridership
Cumulative ridership since 1994 has reached 190 million, 11 million passengers had used its international services during 2018, the highest ever, a 7% increase on the 10·3 million carried in 2017.
References
Bibliography
External links
Channel Tunnel
High-speed rail in Belgium
High-speed rail in France
High-speed rail in the United Kingdom
Named passenger trains of British Rail
Railteam
Railway services introduced in 1994
SNCF
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An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as an expert. The judge may consider the witness's specialized (scientific, technical or other) opinion about evidence or about facts before the court within the expert's area of expertise, to be referred to as an "expert opinion". Expert witnesses may also deliver "expert evidence" within the area of their expertise. Their testimony may be rebutted by testimony from other experts or by other evidence or facts.
History
The forensic expert practice is an ancient profession. For example, in ancient Babylonia, midwives were used as experts in determining pregnancy, virginity and female fertility. Similarly, the Roman Empire recognized midwives, handwriting experts and land surveyors as legal experts. The codified use of expert witnesses and the admissibility of their testimony and scientific evidence has developed significantly in the Western court system over the last 250 years. The concept of allowing an expert witness to testify in a court setting and provide opinionated evidence on the facts of other witnesses was first introduced by Lord Mansfield in the case of Folkes v. Chadd in 1782. In this particular case, the court was hearing litigation regarding the silting of Wells Harbor in Norfolk and allowed leading civil engineer, John Smeaton, to provide scientific rationale behind the proposed legislation. The decision by the English Court to allow for an expert to provide contextual background and detail on a case is often cited as the root of modern rules on expert testimony.
Role
Expert witnesses are called upon in the court system to serve as an objective party to the lawsuit and never function as an advocate for one side or the other. Expert witnesses are present in litigation to explain complicated scientific issues, not to influence the jury or judge with fervor. The main responsibilities of expert witnesses are to evaluate potential problems, defects, deficiencies, or errors only when able to fully appreciate a process or system. Expert witnesses are obligated to study the processes prior to making a survey or postpone the assignment prior to potentially missing the target due to lack of specific condition understanding. They are called to testify under the assumption that all the preparation required for a competent evaluation of the process has been made.
Typically, experts are relied on for opinions on severity of injury, degree of sanity, cause of failure in a machine or other device, loss of earnings and associated benefits, care costs, and the like. In an intellectual property case an expert may be shown two music scores, book texts, or circuit boards and asked to ascertain their degree of similarity. In the majority of cases, the expert's personal relation to the defendant is considered and usually adjudged to be irrelevant.
The tribunal itself, or the judge, can in some systems call upon experts to technically evaluate a certain fact or action, in order to provide the court with a complete knowledge on the fact/action it is judging. The expertise has the legal value of an acquisition of data. The results of these experts are then compared to those by the experts of the parties.
The expert has a great responsibility, and especially in penal trials, and perjury by an expert is a severely punished crime in most countries. The use of expert witnesses is sometimes criticized in the United States because in civil trials, they are often used by both sides to advocate differing positions, and it is left up to a jury to decide which expert witness to believe. Although experts are legally prohibited from expressing their opinion of submitted evidence until after they are hired, sometimes a party can surmise beforehand, because of reputation or prior cases, that the testimony will be favorable regardless of any basis in the submitted data; such experts are commonly disparaged as "hired guns."
Qualifications
An expert witness at the time of trial is qualified by the court and must be re-qualified each time that person comes to trial for the offering of opinions. The qualification is given by each trial judge and takes place regardless of prior appearances by a particular expert witness. Expert witnesses are those whom the court has deemed qualified to speak on a topic to provide background to anyone on a lay jury.
Duties in United States Courts
In high stakes cases multiple experts, in multiple topics, are often retained by each party. Although it is still relatively rare, the court itself may also retain its own independent expert. In all cases, fees paid to an expert may not be contingent on the outcome of the case.
Expert evidence is often the most important component of many civil and criminal cases today. Fingerprint examination, blood analysis, DNA fingerprinting, and forensic firearm examination are common kinds of expert evidence heard in serious criminal cases. In civil cases, the work of accident analysis, forensic engineers, and forensic accountants is usually important, the latter to assess damages and costs in long and complex cases. Intellectual property and medical negligence cases are typical examples.
Electronic evidence has also entered the courtroom as critical forensic evidence. Audio and video evidence must be authenticated by both parties in any litigation by a forensic expert who is also an expert witness who assists the court in understanding details about that electronic evidence.
Voice-mail recordings and closed-circuit television systems produce electronic evidence often used in litigation, more so today than in the past. Video recordings of bank robberies and audio recordings of life threats are presented in court rooms by electronic expert witnesses.
Rules of evidence and code of procedure
Hearsay rule
One important rule that applies to the expert witness but not the percipient witness is the exception to the hearsay rule. A percipient witness tells only what he/she actually knows about a case and nothing more. Percipient witnesses cannot give opinions nor conjecture regarding a hypothetical set of conditions. Conversely, the court does allow an expert to testify about issues that may not be personally known by them. This allows the expert to rely upon scientific articles, discussions with colleagues on the subject, testimony read in preparation for testimony in the case and similar pieces of information not personally known to the expert.
Chain of custody
It is important that expert witnesses who handle evidence maintain a proper chain of custody such that they are able to authenticate the evidence, prove that it is what they represent it to be, when testifying at trial. Most notably in the context of a criminal prosecution, an expert witness who evaluates or examines an item pertinent to an investigation or case evaluation may add an entry to a “chain of custody” document, a form that contains the item's description, the time and date of release for all prior custodians of the item, and the time and date of release to the witness.
Weight of testimony
In the case of an expert witness, the weight of his/her evidence depends heavily on the foundation support established prior to an opinion being given. Examples include educational background, review of scholarly works, field studies and trainings which all lead up to developing a foundation of knowledge for credibility of a testimony. Before trial, all experts must prepare a report summarizing their analysis and conclusions and share the report with all other parties. This allows other parties to effectively cross-examine the expert.
Types
Testifying experts
If the witness needs to testify in court, the privilege is no longer protected. The expert witness's identity and nearly all documents used to prepare the testimony will become discoverable. Usually an experienced lawyer will advise the expert not to take notes on documents because all of the notes will be available to the other party.
An expert testifying in a United States federal court must satisfy the requirements of Fed. R. Evid. 702. Generally, under Rule 702, an expert is a person with "scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge" who can "assist the trier of fact," which is typically a jury. A witness who is being offered as an expert must first establish his or her competency in the relevant field through an examination of his or her credentials. The opposing attorney is permitted to conduct a voir dire of the witness in order to challenge that witness’ qualifications. If qualified by the court, then the expert may testify "in the form of an opinion or otherwise" so long as: "(1) the testimony is based upon sufficient facts or data, (2) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods, and (3) the witness has applied the principles and methods reliably to the facts of the case."
Although experts can testify in any case in which their expertise is relevant, criminal cases are more likely to use forensic scientists or forensic psychologists, whereas civil cases, such as personal injury, may use forensic engineers, forensic accountants, employment consultants or care experts. Senior physicians – UK, Ireland, and Commonwealth consultants, U.S. attending physicians – are frequently used in both the civil and criminal courts.
The Federal Court of Australia has issued guidelines for experts appearing in Australian courts. This covers the format of the expert's written testimony as well as their behaviour in court. Similar procedures apply in non-court forums, such as the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
Educating witness
The educating witness teaches the fact-finder (jury or, in a bench trial, judge) about the underlying scientific theory and instrument implementing theory. This witness is an expert witness, called to elicit opinions that a theory is valid and the instruments involved are reliable. The witness must be qualified as an expert witness, which may require academic qualifications or specific training.
Reporting witness
Called after teaching witness leaves stand. Usually the laboratory technician who personally conducted the test. Witness will describe both the test and the results. When describing test, will venture opinions that proper test procedures were used and that equipment was in good working order.
Non-testifying experts
In the U.S., a party may hire experts to help them evaluate a given case. For example, a car maker may hire an experienced mechanic to decide if its cars were built to specification. This kind of expert opinion will be protected from discovery by the opposing party. In other words, if the expert finds evidence against their client, the opposite party will not automatically gain access to it. This privilege is similar to the work-product doctrine (not to be confused with attorney–client privilege).
The non-testifying expert can be present at the trial or hearing to aid the attorney in asking questions of other expert witnesses. Unlike a testifying expert, a non-testifying expert can be easily withdrawn from a case. It is also possible to change a non-testifying expert to a testifying expert before the expert disclosure date.
United States
In the United States, under the Federal Rule of Evidence 702 (FRE), an expert witness must be qualified on the topic of testimony. In determining the qualifications of the expert, the FRE requires the expert have had specialized education, training, or practical experience in the subject matter relating to the case. The expert's testimony must be based on facts in evidence, and should offer opinion about the causation or correlation to the evidence in drawing a conclusion.
Experts in the U.S. typically are paid on an hourly basis for their services in investigating the facts, preparing a report, and if necessary, testifying during pre-trial discovery, or at trial. Hourly fees range from approximately $200 to $750 or more per hour, varying primarily by the expert's field of expertise, and the individual expert's qualifications and reputation. In several fields, such as handwriting analysis, where the expert compares signatures to determine the likelihood of a forgery, and medical case reviews by a physician or nurse, in which the expert goes over hospital and medical records to assess the possibility of malpractice, experts often initially charge a flat fixed fee for their initial report. As with the hourly fees discussed previously, the amount of that flat fee varies considerably based on the reviewing expert's field, experience and reputation.
The expert's professional fee, plus his or her related expenses, is generally paid by the party retaining the expert. In some circumstance the party who prevails in the litigation may be entitled to recover the amounts paid to its expert from the losing party.
Scientific evidence
In law, scientific evidence is evidence derived from scientific knowledge or techniques. Most forensic evidence, including genetic evidence, is scientific evidence.
Frye test
The Frye test, coming from the case Frye v. United States (1923), said that admissible scientific evidence must be a result of a theory that had "general acceptance" in the scientific community. This test results in uniform decisions regarding admissibility. In particular, the judges in Frye ruled that:
Just when a scientific principle or discovery crosses the line between experimental and demonstrable stages is difficult to define. Somewhere in this twilight zone the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.
In 1923, the case of Frye v. United States instituted significant change to both criminal and civil law by addressing the use of expert witness testimony in conjunction with scientific testimony. In Frye v. United States, the defense team attempted to introduce both the results of a polygraph test administered to Frye to determine Frye's innocence as well as the testimony of an expert witness to verify and explain the results.
However, the court rejected the expert's testimony, ruling that: “While courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced from a well-recognized scientific principle or discovery, the thing from which the deduction is made must be sufficiently established to have gained general acceptance in the particular field in which it belongs.”
Through this ruling, the judge's opinion in Frye v. United States set precedent and the standard by which expert witnesses would be utilized in the court system for decades. In the federal courts, between 1948 and 1975, Frye was cited 55 times; however, the use and application was not consistent. One of the major struggles that came out of this precedent was the application to both civil and criminal cases. Many of the courts and judges had trouble interpreting the "general acceptance" notion of a particular field in a concise and non-arbitrary manner. In 2012, courts in nine states still used the Frye standard when analyzing state expert witness rules.
The Federal Rules of Evidence
In 1975, the United States Congress issued the Federal Rules of Evidence. FRE 702 was issued to provide a standard for expert witness testimony to be upheld by the United States court system. The rule specified that the application of expert witnesses had to be attributed to a person with “scientific or technical knowledge,” in conjunction with a list of qualifications that would quality one to be an expert in terms of “knowledge, skill, experience, training or education”. This rule thus clarified the acceptable use of expert witnesses in both criminal and civil cases.
However, FRE 702 still left some courts in confusion. The courts who would use this new rule were confused as to whether FRE 702 served to bolster the "general acceptance" ruling in Frye or if FRE 702 was the replacement of this rule. For instance, in U.S. v. Williams (1978), the Second Circuit responded that “the applicable considerations [for expert witness testimony] are ‘probativeness, materiality, and reliability of the evidence on the one side, and any tendency to mislead, prejudice or confuse the jury on the other.’” The court appeared to reject the previous precedent set by Frye. The rationale in the Williams case was later adopted by other federal courts, including the Third Circuit which adopted a "reliability" test in 1984. Meanwhile, other federal courts stuck to the Frye precedent, causing a circuit split which would not be solved until the Supreme Court set a new expert standard in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993).
Daubert standard
The Daubert standard arose out of the U.S. Supreme Court case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. It provides four factors that courts ought to consider when determining whether expert testimony is admissible under the Federal Rules of Evidence:
"Whether the expert’s theory or technique can be (and has been) tested"
"Whether the theory or technique has an acceptable known or potential rate of error"
"The existence and maintenance of standards controlling the technique’s operation"
"Whether the theory or technique has attained 'general acceptance'"
In 2012, twenty-two states used the Daubert test when analyzing their own expert witness rules.
United Kingdom
England and Wales
In England and Wales, under the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR), an expert witness is required to be independent and address his or her expert report to the court. A witness may be jointly instructed by both sides if the parties agree to this, especially in cases where the liability is relatively small.
Under the CPR, expert witnesses may be instructed to produce a joint statement detailing points of agreement and disagreement to assist the court or tribunal. The meeting is held quite independently of instructing lawyers, and often assists in resolution of a case, especially if the experts review and modify their opinions. When this happens, substantial trial costs can be saved when the parties to a dispute agree to a settlement. In most systems, the trial (or the procedure) can be suspended in order to allow the experts to study the case and produce their results. More frequently, meetings of experts occur before trial. Experts charge a professional fee which is paid by the party commissioning the report (both parties for joint instructions) although the report is addressed to the court. The fee must not be contingent on the outcome of the case. Expert witnesses may be subpoenaed (issued with a witness summons), although this is normally a formality to avoid court date clashes.
Scotland
In Scots Law, Davie v Magistrates of Edinburgh (1953) provides authority that where a witness has particular knowledge or skills in an area being examined by the court, and has been called to court in order to elaborate on that area for the benefit of the court, that witness may give evidence of his/her opinion on that area.
Comparison of UK and US law
Similarities
Purpose
United Kingdom: Expert evidence is to furnish the Judge or jury with necessary scientific criteria for testing the accuracy of their conclusions
United States: Expert evidence is admissible on the basis that the knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue
Qualification
United Kingdom: Expert witness is qualified to give evidence, where the court itself cannot form an opinion and special study, skill or experience is required for the purpose
United States: An expert witness is qualified by knowledge, skill, experience or education
Admissibility of Evidence
United Kingdom: Expert evidence must be provided in as much detail as possible in-order to convince the judge that the expert's opinions are well founded
United States: Expert testimony to be based on sufficient facts, data or products of a credible source of test and tried principles and methods
Differences
Conduct
United Kingdom: Expert's “duties to the Court override any obligation to the person from whom they have received instructions or have been paid by”
United States: Expert's duty is not formally defined under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure /Evidence
Depositions
United Kingdom: Expert evidence is examined before the Judge (or Arbitrator)
United States: Expert evidence can be compelled to deposition
Ultimate Issues
United Kingdom: Expert opinion on ultimate issue is not admissible
United States: Expert opinion on ultimate issue is admissible
See also
Ambush defence
Daubert standard and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Death of an Expert Witness - a novel
Employment consultant
Expert shopping
Forensic accountant
Forensic economics
Forensic engineering
Forensic science
Forensic psychology
Forensic video analysis
Frye standard of evidence
Gibson's law
In limine
Jones v Kaney — English caselaw abolishing witness immunity from civil action for negligence
Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael
Questioned document examination
R v Mohan — Canadian case law establishing qualifications for expert witnesses
Saisie-contrefaçon
Traffic collision reconstruction
Ultimate issue
References
Bibliography
Bronstein, DA, Law for the Expert Witness, CRC Press,2nd Ed (1999).
Dwyer, D, The Judicial Assessment of Expert Evidence, Cambridge University Press (2008).
Jasanoff, Sheila, Science at the Bar: Law, Science, and Technology in America (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Reynolds, MP and King, PSD, The Expert Witness and his Evidence, Blackwell (1992).
Smith, D, Being an Effective Expert Witness, Thames Publishing (1993).
External links
Expert Testimony in Federal Civil Trials: A Preliminary Analysis (pdf) (Federal Judicial Center, 2000)
Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy. Daubert-The Most Influential Supreme Court Ruling You've Never Heard Of (pdf)
Kenton K. Yee, Dueling Experts and Imperfect Verification, 28.4 International Review of Law and Economics, 246-255 (2008)
Cole, Simon A. "Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Thinking about Expert Evidence as Expert Testimony" (Archive). Villova Law Journal. Villanova University School of Law. Volume 52, Issue 4, Article 4. p. 803-840.
Evidence law
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was the legendary first emperor of Japan according to the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki. His ascension is traditionally dated as 660 BC. In Japanese mythology, he was a descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu, through her grandson Ninigi, as well as a descendant of the storm god Susanoo. He launched a military expedition from Hyuga near the Seto Inland Sea, captured Yamato, and established this as his center of power. In modern Japan, Jimmu's legendary accession is marked as National Foundation Day on February 11. In the 1930s and 1940s in Japan it was dangerous to question the existence of Jimmu.
Historians have stressed that there is no evidence for the existence of Jimmu with most scholars agreeing that the traditional narrative of Japan’s founding is mythical and Jimmu is a legendary figure. However, stories of him may reflect actual events.
Name and Title
Jimmu is recorded as Japan's first ruler in two early chronicles, Nihon Shoki (721) and Kojiki (712). Nihon Shoki gives the dates of his reign as 660–585 BC. In the reign of Emperor Kanmu (737–806), the eighth-century scholar Ōmi no Mifune designated rulers before Emperor Ōjin as , a Japanese pendant to the Chinese imperial title Tiān-dì (天帝), and gave several of them including Jimmu their canonical names. Prior to this time, these rulers had been known as Sumera no mikoto/Ōkimi. This practice had begun under Empress Suiko, and took root after the Taika Reforms with the ascendancy of the Nakatomi clan.
According to the legendary account in the Nihon Shoki, Emperor Jimmu was born on February 13, 711 BC (the first day of the first month of the Chinese calendar), and died, again according to legend, on April 9, 585 BC (the eleventh day of the third month).
Both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki give Jimmu's name as or . Iware indicates a toponym whose precise purport is unclear.
Among his other names were: , and .
The Imperial House of Japan traditionally based its claim to the throne on its putative descent from the sun-goddess Amaterasu via Jimmu's great-grandfather Ninigi.
Consorts and children
Consort: , Hosuseri's (Ninigi-no-Mikoto's son) daughter
First son:
Princess Misaki (神武天皇)
Empress: , Kotoshironushi's daughter
Second son:
Third son: , later Emperor Suizei
Legendary narrative
In Japanese mythology, the Age of the Gods is the period before Jimmu's accession.
The story of Jimmu seems to rework legends associated with the Ōtomo clan (大伴氏), and its function was to establish that clan's links to the ruling family, just as those of Suijin arguably reflect Mononobe tales and the legends in Ōjin's chronicles seem to derive from Soga clan traditions. Jimmu figures as a direct descendant of the sun goddess, Amaterasu via the side of his father, Ugayafukiaezu. Amaterasu had a son called Ame no Oshihomimi no Mikoto and through him a grandson named Ninigi-no-Mikoto. She sent her grandson to the Japanese islands where he eventually married Konohana-Sakuya-hime. Among their three sons was Hikohohodemi no Mikoto, also called Yamasachi-hiko, who married Toyotama-hime. She was the daughter of Ryūjin, the Japanese sea god. They had a single son called Hikonagisa Takeugaya Fukiaezu no Mikoto. The boy was abandoned by his parents at birth and consequently raised by Tamayori-hime, his mother's younger sister. They eventually married and had four sons. The last of these, Kamu-yamato Iware-biko no mikoto, became Emperor Jimmu.
Migration
According to the chronicles Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, Jimmu's brothers were born in Takachiho, the southern part of Kyūshū in modern-day Miyazaki Prefecture. They moved eastward to find a location more appropriate for administering the entire country. Jimmu's older brother, Itsuse no Mikoto, originally led the migration, and led the clan eastward through the Seto Inland Sea with the assistance of local chieftain Sao Netsuhiko. As they reached Naniwa (modern-day Osaka), they encountered another local chieftain, Nagasunehiko ("the long-legged man"), and Itsuse was killed in the ensuing battle. Jimmu realized that they had been defeated because they battled eastward against the sun, so he decided to land on the east side of Kii Peninsula and to battle westward. They reached Kumano, and, with the guidance of a three-legged crow, Yatagarasu ("eight-span crow"), they moved to Yamato. There, they once again battled Nagasunehiko and were victorious. The record in the Nihon Shoki of Emperor Jimmu states that his armed forces defeated a group of before his enthronement. The Emishi were an ethnic group who lived in Honshu, particularly the Tōhoku region.
In Yamato, , who also claimed descent from the Takamagahara gods, was protected by Nagasunehiko. However, when Nigihayahi met Jimmu, he accepted Jimmu's legitimacy. At this point, Jimmu is said to have ascended to the throne of Japan. Upon scaling a Nara mountain to survey the Seto Inland Sea he now controlled, Jimmu remarked that it was shaped like the "heart" rings made by mating dragonflies, archaically akitsu 秋津. A mosquito then tried to steal Jimmu's royal blood but since Jimmu was a god incarnate Emperor, , a dragonfly killed the mosquito. Japan thus received its classical name the Dragonfly Islands, .
According to the Kojiki, Jimmu died when he was 126 years old. The Emperor's posthumous name literally means "divine might" or "god-warrior". It is generally thought that Jimmu's name and character evolved into their present shape just before the time in which legends about the origins of the Yamato dynasty were chronicled in the Kojiki. There are accounts written earlier than either Kojiki and Nihon Shoki that present an alternative version of the story. According to these accounts, Jimmu's dynasty was supplanted by that of Ōjin, whose dynasty was supplanted by that of Keitai. The Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki then combined these three legendary dynasties into one long and continuous genealogy.
The traditional site of Jimmu's grave is near Mount Unebi in Kashihara, Nara Prefecture.
Modern veneration
Veneration of Jimmu was a central component of the imperial cult that formed following the Meiji Restoration. In 1873, a holiday called Kigensetsu was established on February 11. The holiday commemorated the anniversary of Jimmu's ascension to the throne 2,532 years earlier. After World War II, the holiday was criticized as too closely associated with the "emperor system." It was suspended from 1948 to 1966, but later reinstated as National Foundation Day.
Between 1873 and 1945 an imperial envoy sent offerings every year to the supposed site of Jimmu's tomb. In 1890 Kashihara Shrine was established nearby, on the spot where Jimmu was said to have ascended to the throne.
Before and during World War II, expansionist propaganda made frequent use of the phrase hakkō ichiu, a term coined by Tanaka Chigaku based on a passage in the Nihon Shoki discussing Emperor Jimmu. Some media incorrectly attributed the phrase to Emperor Jimmu. For the 1940 Kigensetsu celebration, marking the supposed 2,600th anniversary of Jimmu's enthronement, the Peace Tower was constructed in Miyazaki.
The same year numerous stone monuments relating to key events in Jimmu's life were erected around Japan. The sites at which these monuments were erected are known as Emperor Jimmu Sacred Historical Sites.
Historicity
There is no compelling evidence Jimmu existed, except the mention in the Nihon Shoki and Kojiki. The dates of Jimmu reigning from 660 BC to 585 BC are improbable, most modern scholars agree that the traditional founding of Japan in 660 BC is a myth and that Jimmu along with the first nine emperors are legendary. The founding of Japan in the year 660 BC was probably created by the writers of Nihon Shoki to put the date on a kanototori year.
However events during the mid to late Yayoi period may reflect stories of Jimmu. According to historian Peter Wetzler, Jimmu’s conquest of Osaka and Nara may reflect an actual event. However the dates and much of the details are fictitious. Historian Kenneth G. Henshall stated that Jimmu’s conquest may also reflect a time when the Yayoi people from continental Asia immigrated in masses starting from Kyushu and moving eastward during the Yayoi period.
The Japanese historian Ino Okifu identifies Emperor Jimmu with the Chinese alchemist and explorer Xu Fu (255 BC - 195 BC), a hypothesis supported by certain traditions in Japan and regarded as possible by some modern scholars. The Yayoi period (300 BCE–300 CE), during which significant changes in Japanese metallurgy and pottery occurred, started around the time of his supposed arrival. However, the legend of Xu Fu's voyage also has numerous inconsistencies with the linguistic and anthropological history of Japan.
Family tree
A genealogical tree based on the Kojiki
* = not in the Nihon Shoki
See also
Modern system of ranked Shinto shrines
Japanese imperial year
National Foundation Day
Jōmon period
Yayoi period
Emishi people
Notes
1.So named after the incident in which a landed on the tip of the upright bow during the final rout of Nagasunehiko's army.
References
Bibliography
Aston, William George. (1896). Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697, Volume 1. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Brown, Delmer M. and Ichirō Ishida, eds. (1979). Gukanshō: The Future and the Past. Berkeley: University of California Press. ;
Brownlee, John S. (1997). Japanese Historians and the National Myths, 1600–1945: The Age of the Gods. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Chamberlain, Basil Hall. (1920). The Kojiki. Read before the Asiatic Society of Japan on April 12 10 May, and June 21, 1882; reprinted, May 1919.
Earhart, David C. (2007). Certain Victory: Images of World War II in the Japanese Media. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe.
Kitagawa, Joseph Mitsuo. (1987). On Understanding Japanese Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ; ;
Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric and Käthe Roth. (2005). Japan encyclopedia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ;
Ponsonby-Fane, Richard Arthur Brabazon. (1959). The Imperial House of Japan. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society.
Titsingh, Isaac. (1834). Nihon Ōdai Ichiran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Royal Asiatic Society, Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.
Varley, H. Paul. (1980). Jinnō Shōtōki: A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns. New York: Columbia University Press. ;
External links
A more detailed profile of Jimmu (archived April 2011)
A detailed summary of Jimmu's descent legend (archived July 2014)
710s BC births
585 BC deaths
Legendary Emperors of Japan
Longevity myths
People of Jōmon-period Japan
Founding monarchs
7th-century BC Japanese monarchs
6th-century BC Japanese monarchs
Legendary progenitors
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Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (commonly abbreviated as E. T. A. Hoffmann; born Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann; 24 January 177625 June 1822) was a German Romantic author of fantasy and Gothic horror, a jurist, composer, music critic and artist. His stories form the basis of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann, in which Hoffmann appears (heavily fictionalized) as the hero. He is also the author of the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, on which Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is based. The ballet Coppélia is based on two other stories that Hoffmann wrote, while Schumann's Kreisleriana is based on Hoffmann's character Johannes Kreisler. See also Schumann's Fantasiestücke, Op. 12.
Hoffmann's stories highly influenced 19th-century literature, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.
Life
Youth
Hoffmann's ancestors, both maternal and paternal, were jurists. His father, Christoph Ludwig Hoffmann (1736–97), was a barrister in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), as well as a poet and amateur musician who played the viola da gamba. In 1767 he married his cousin, Lovisa Albertina Doerffer (1748–96). Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, born on 24 January 1776, was the youngest of three children, of whom the second died in infancy.
When his parents separated in 1778, his father went to Insterburg (now Chernyakhovsk) with his elder son, Johann Ludwig Hoffmann (1768–1822), while Ernst's mother stayed in Königsberg with her relatives: two aunts, Johanna Sophie Doerffer (1745–1803) and Charlotte Wilhelmine Doerffer (c. 1754–79) and their brother, Otto Wilhelm Doerffer (1741–1811), who were all unmarried. The trio raised the youngster.
The household, dominated by the uncle (whom Ernst nicknamed O Weh—"Oh dear!"—in a play on his initials), was pietistic and uncongenial. Hoffmann was to regret his estrangement from his father. Nevertheless, he remembered his aunts with great affection, especially the younger, Charlotte, whom he nicknamed Tante Füßchen ("Aunt Littlefeet"). Although she died when he was only three years old, he treasured her memory (e.g. see Kater Murr) and embroidered stories about her to such an extent that later biographers sometimes assumed her to be imaginary, until proof of her existence was found after World War II.
Between 1781 and 1792 he attended the Lutheran school or Burgschule, where he made good progress in classics. He was taught drawing by one Saemann, and counterpoint by a Polish organist named Podbileski, who was to be the prototype of Abraham Liscot in Kater Murr. Ernst showed great talent for piano-playing, and busied himself with writing and drawing. The provincial setting was not, however, conducive to technical progress, and despite his many-sided talents he remained rather ignorant of both classical forms and of the new artistic ideas that were developing in Germany. He had, however, read Schiller, Goethe, Swift, Sterne, Rousseau and Jean Paul, and wrote part of a novel titled Der Geheimnisvolle.
Around 1787 he became friends with Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel the Younger (1775–1843), the son of a pastor, and nephew of Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel the Elder, the well-known writer friend of Immanuel Kant. During 1792, both attended some of Kant's lectures at the University of Königsberg. Their friendship, although often tested by an increasing social difference, was to be lifelong.
In 1794, Hoffmann became enamored of Dora Hatt, a married woman to whom he had given music lessons. She was ten years older, and gave birth to her sixth child in 1795. In February 1796, her family protested against his attentions and, with his hesitant consent, asked another of his uncles to arrange employment for him in Glogau (Głogów), Prussian Silesia.
The provinces
From 1796, Hoffmann obtained employment as a clerk for his uncle, Johann Ludwig Doerffer, who lived in Glogau with his daughter Minna. After passing further examinations he visited Dresden, where he was amazed by the paintings in the gallery, particularly those of Correggio and Raphael. During the summer of 1798, his uncle was promoted to a court in Berlin, and the three of them moved there in August—Hoffmann's first residence in a large city. It was there that Hoffmann first attempted to promote himself as a composer, writing an operetta called Die Maske and sending a copy to Queen Luise of Prussia. The official reply advised to him to write to the director of the Royal Theatre, a man named Iffland. By the time the latter responded, Hoffmann had passed his third round of examinations and had already left for Posen (Poznań) in South Prussia in the company of his old friend Hippel, with a brief stop in Dresden to show him the gallery.
From June 1800 to 1803, he worked in Prussian provinces in the area of Greater Poland and Masovia. This was the first time he had lived without supervision by members of his family, and he started to become "what school principals, parsons, uncles, and aunts call dissolute."
His first job, at Posen, was endangered after Carnival on Shrove Tuesday 1802, when caricatures of military officers were distributed at a ball. It was immediately deduced who had drawn them, and complaints were made to authorities in Berlin, who were reluctant to punish the promising young official. The problem was solved by "promoting" Hoffmann to Płock in New East Prussia, the former capital of Poland (1079–1138), where administrative offices were relocated from Thorn (Toruń). He visited the place to arrange lodging, before returning to Posen where he married Mischa (Maria or Marianna Thekla Michalina Rorer, whose Polish surname was Trzcińska). They moved to Płock in August 1802.
Hoffmann despaired because of his exile, and drew caricatures of himself drowning in mud alongside ragged villagers. He did make use, however, of his isolation, by writing and composing. He started a diary on 1 October 1803. An essay on the theatre was published in Kotzebue's periodical, Die Freimüthige, and he entered a competition in the same magazine to write a play. Hoffmann's was called Der Preis ("The Prize"), and was itself about a competition to write a play. There were fourteen entries, but none was judged worthy of the award: 100 Friedrichs d'or. Nevertheless, his entry was singled out for praise. This was one of the few good times of a sad period of his life, which saw the deaths of his uncle J. L. Hoffmann in Berlin, his Aunt Sophie, and Dora Hatt in Königsberg.
At the beginning of 1804, he obtained a post at Warsaw. On his way there, he passed through his hometown and met one of Dora Hatt's daughters. He was never to return to Königsberg.
Warsaw
Hoffmann assimilated well with Polish society; the years spent in Prussian Poland he recognized as the happiest of his life. In Warsaw he found the same atmosphere he had enjoyed in Berlin, renewing his friendship with Zacharias Werner, and meeting his future biographer, a neighbour and fellow jurist called Julius Eduard Itzig (who changed his name to Hitzig after his baptism). Itzig had been a member of the Berlin literary group called the Nordstern, or "North Stars", and he gave Hoffmann the works of Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert, Carlo Gozzi and Calderón. These relatively late introductions marked his work profoundly.
He moved in the circles of August Wilhelm Schlegel, Adelbert von Chamisso, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, Rahel Levin and David Ferdinand Koreff.
But Hoffmann's fortunate position was not to last: on 28 November 1806, during the War of the Fourth Coalition, Napoleon Bonaparte's troops captured Warsaw, and the Prussian bureaucrats lost their jobs. They divided the contents of the treasury between them and fled. In January 1807, Hoffmann's wife and two-year-old daughter Cäcilia returned to Posen, while he pondered whether to move to Vienna or go back to Berlin. A delay of six months was caused by severe illness. Eventually the French authorities demanded that all former officials swear allegiance or leave the country. As they refused to grant Hoffmann a passport to Vienna, he was forced to return to Berlin.
He visited his family in Posen before arriving in Berlin on 18 June 1807, hoping to further his career there as an artist and writer.
Berlin and Bamberg
The next fifteen months were some of the worst in Hoffmann's life.
The city of Berlin was also occupied by Napoleon's troops. Obtaining only meagre allowances, he had frequent recourse to his friends, constantly borrowing money and still going hungry for days at a time; he learned that his daughter had died. Nevertheless, he managed to compose his Six Canticles for a cappella choir: one of his best compositions, which he would later attribute to Kreisler in Lebensansichten des Katers Murr.
On 1 September 1808 he arrived with his wife in Bamberg, where he began a job as theatre manager. The director, Count Soden, left almost immediately for Würzburg, leaving a man named Heinrich Cuno in charge. Hoffmann was unable to improve standards of performance, and his efforts caused intrigues against him which resulted in him losing his job to Cuno. He began work as music critic for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a newspaper in Leipzig, and his articles on Beethoven were especially well received, and highly regarded by the composer himself. It was in its pages that the "Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler" character made his first appearance.
Hoffmann's breakthrough came in 1809, with the publication of Ritter Gluck, a story about a man who meets, or believes he has met, the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–87) more than twenty years after the latter's death. The theme alludes to the work of Jean Paul, who invented the term Doppelgänger the previous decade, and continued to exact a powerful influence over Hoffmann, becoming one of his earliest admirers. With this publication, Hoffmann began to use the pseudonym E. T. A. Hoffmann, telling people that the "A" stood for Amadeus, in homage to the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91). However, he continued to use Wilhelm in official documents throughout his life, and the initials E. T. W. also appear on his gravestone.
The next year, he was employed at the Bamberg Theatre as stagehand, decorator, and playwright, while also giving private music lessons.
He became so enamored of a young singing student, Julia Marc, that his feelings were obvious whenever they were together, and Julia's mother quickly found her a more suitable match. When Joseph Seconda offered Hoffmann a position as musical director for his opera company (then performing in Dresden), he accepted, leaving on 21 April 1813.
Dresden and Leipzig
Prussia had declared war against France on 16 March during the War of the Sixth Coalition, and their journey was fraught with difficulties. They arrived on the 25th, only to find that Seconda was in Leipzig; on the 26th, they sent a letter pleading for temporary funds. That same day Hoffmann was surprised to meet Hippel, whom he had not seen for nine years.
The situation deteriorated, and in early May Hoffmann tried in vain to find transport to Leipzig. On 8 May, the bridges were destroyed, and his family were marooned in the city. During the day, Hoffmann would roam, watching the fighting with curiosity. Finally, on 20 May, they left for Leipzig, only to be involved in an accident which killed one of the passengers in their coach and injured his wife.
They arrived on 23 May, and Hoffmann started work with Seconda's orchestra, which he found to be of the best quality. On 4 June an armistice began, which allowed the company to return to Dresden. But on 22 August, after the end of the armistice, the family was forced to relocate from their pleasant house in the suburbs into the town, and during the next few days the Battle of Dresden raged. The city was bombarded; many people were killed by bombs directly in front of him. After the main battle was over, he visited the gory battlefield. His account can be found in Vision auf dem Schlachtfeld bei Dresden. After a long period of continued disturbance, the town surrendered on 11 November, and on 9 December the company travelled to Leipzig.
On 25 February, Hoffmann quarrelled with Seconda, and the next day he was given notice of twelve weeks. When asked to accompany them on their journey to Dresden in April, he refused, and they left without him. But during July his friend Hippel visited, and soon he found himself being guided back into his old career as a jurist.
Berlin
At the end of September 1814, in the wake of Napoleon's defeat, Hoffmann returned to Berlin and succeeded in regaining a job at the Kammergericht, the chamber court. His opera Undine was performed by the Berlin Theatre. Its successful run came to an end only after a fire on the night of the 25th performance. Magazines clamoured for his contributions, and after a while his standards started to decline. Nevertheless, many masterpieces date from this time.
During the period from 1819, Hoffmann was involved with legal disputes, while fighting ill health. Alcohol abuse and syphilis eventually caused weakening of his limbs during 1821, and paralysis from the beginning of 1822. His last works were dictated to his wife or to a secretary.
Prince Metternich's anti-liberal programs began to put Hoffmann in situations that tested his conscience. Thousands of people were accused of treason for having certain political opinions,
and university professors were monitored during their lectures.
King Frederick William III of Prussia appointed an Immediate Commission for the investigation of political dissidence; when he found its observance of the rule of law too frustrating, he established a Ministerial Commission to interfere with its processes. The latter was greatly influenced by Commissioner Kamptz. During the trial of "Turnvater" Jahn, the founder of the gymnastics association movement, Hoffmann found himself annoying Kamptz, and became a political target. When Hoffmann caricatured Kamptz in a story (Meister Floh), Kamptz began legal proceedings. These ended when Hoffmann's illness was found to be life-threatening. The King asked for a reprimand only, but no action was ever taken. Eventually Meister Floh was published with the offending passages removed.
Hoffmann died of syphilis in Berlin on 25 June 1822 at the age of 46. His grave is preserved in the Protestant Friedhof III der Jerusalems- und Neuen Kirchengemeinde (Cemetery No. III of the congregations of Jerusalem Church and New Church) in Berlin-Kreuzberg, south of Hallesches Tor at the underground station Mehringdamm.
Works
Literary
Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (collection of previously published stories, 1814)
"Ritter Gluck", "Kreisleriana", "Don Juan", "Nachricht von den neuesten Schicksalen des Hundes Berganza"
"Der Magnetiseur", "Der goldne Topf" (revised in 1819), "Die Abenteuer der Silvesternacht"
Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815)
Nachtstücke (1817)
"Der Sandmann", "Das Gelübde", "Ignaz Denner", "Die Jesuiterkirche in G."
"Das Majorat", "Das öde Haus", "Das Sanctus", "Das steinerne Herz"
Seltsame Leiden eines Theater-Direktors (1819)
Little Zaches (1819)
Die Serapionsbrüder (1819)
"Der Einsiedler Serapion", "Rat Krespel", "Die Fermate", "Der Dichter und der Komponist"
"Ein Fragment aus dem Leben dreier Freunde", "Der Artushof", "Die Bergwerke zu Falun", "Nußknacker und Mausekönig" (1816)
"Der Kampf der Sänger", "Eine Spukgeschichte", "Die Automate", "Doge und Dogaresse"
"Alte und neue Kirchenmusik", "Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen", "Das fremde Kind"
"Nachricht aus dem Leben eines bekannten Mannes", "Die Brautwahl", "Der unheimliche Gast"
"Das Fräulein von Scuderi", "Spielerglück" (1819), "Der Baron von B."
"Signor Formica", "Zacharias Werner", "Erscheinungen"
"Der Zusammenhang der Dinge", "Vampirismus", "Die ästhetische Teegesellschaft", "Die Königsbraut"
Prinzessin Brambilla (1820)
Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1820)
"Die Irrungen" (1820)
"Die Geheimnisse" (1821)
"Die Doppeltgänger" (1821)
Meister Floh (1822)
"Des Vetters Eckfenster" (1822)
Letzte Erzählungen (1825)
Musical
Vocal music
Messa d-moll (1805)
Trois Canzonettes à 2 et à 3 voix (1807)
6 Canzoni per 4 voci alla capella (1808)
Miserere b-moll (1809)
In des Irtisch weiße Fluten (Kotzebue), Lied (1811)
Recitativo ed Aria „Prendi l'acciar ti rendo" (1812)
Tre Canzonette italiane (1812); 6 Duettini italiani (1812)
Nachtgesang, Türkische Musik, Jägerlied, Katzburschenlied für Männerchor (1819–21)
Works for stage
Die Maske (libretto by Hoffmann), Singspiel (1799)
Die lustigen Musikanten (libretto: Clemens Brentano), Singspiel (1804)
Incidental music to Zacharias Werner's tragedy Das Kreuz an der Ostsee (1805)
Liebe und Eifersucht (libretto by Hoffmann after Calderón, translated by August Wilhelm Schlegel) (1807)
Arlequin, ballet (1808)
Der Trank der Unsterblichkeit (libretto: Julius von Soden), romantic opera (1808)
Wiedersehn! (libretto by Hoffmann), prologue (1809)
Dirna (libretto: Julius von Soden), melodrama (1809)
Incidental music to Julius von Soden's drama Julius Sabinus (1810)
Saul, König von Israel (libretto: Joseph von Seyfried), melodrama (1811)
Aurora (libretto: Franz von Holbein), heroic opera (1812)
Undine (libretto: Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué), Zauberoper (1816)
Der Liebhaber nach dem Tode (unfinished)
Instrumental
Rondo für Klavier (1794/95)
Ouvertura. Musica per la chiesa d-moll (1801)
Klaviersonaten: A-Dur, f-moll, F-Dur, f-moll, cis-moll (1805–1808)
Große Fantasie für Klavier (1806)
Sinfonie Es-Dur (1806)
Harfenquintett c-moll (1807)
Grand Trio E-Dur (1809)
Walzer zum Karolinentag (1812)
Teutschlands Triumph in der Schlacht bei Leipzig, (by "Arnulph Vollweiler", 1814; lost)
Serapions-Walzer (1818–1821)
Assessment
Hoffmann is one of the best-known representatives of German Romanticism, and a pioneer of the fantasy genre, with a taste for the macabre combined with realism that influenced such authors as Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Nikolai Gogol<ref>Krys Svitlana, "Allusions to Hoffmann in Gogol's Ukrainian Horror Stories from the Dikan'ka Collection." Canadian Slavonic Papers: Special Issue, devoted to the 200th anniversary of Nikolai Gogols birth (1809–1852) 51.2-3 (June–September 2009): 243-266. (23 pages)</ref> (1809–1852), Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), George MacDonald (1824–1905), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Vernon Lee (1856–1935), Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980). Hoffmann's story Das Fräulein von Scuderi is sometimes cited as the first detective story and a direct influence on Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"; Characters from it also appear in the opera Cardillac by Paul Hindemith.
The twentieth-century Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin characterised Hoffmann's works as Menippea, essentially satirical and self-parodying in form, thus including him in a tradition that includes Cervantes, Diderot and Voltaire.
Robert Schumann's piano suite Kreisleriana (1838) takes its title from one of Hoffmann's books (and according to Charles Rosen's The Romantic Generation, is possibly also inspired by "The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr", in which Kreisler appears). Jacques Offenbach's masterwork, the opera Les contes d'Hoffmann ("The Tales of Hoffmann", 1881), is based on the stories, principally "Der Sandmann" ("The Sandman", 1816), "Rat Krespel" ("Councillor Krespel", 1818), and "Das verlorene Spiegelbild" ("The Lost Reflection") from Die Abenteuer der Silvester-Nacht (The Adventures of New Year's Eve, 1814). Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober (Little Zaches called Cinnabar, 1819) inspired an aria as well as the operetta Le Roi Carotte, 1872). Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker (1892) is based on "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", and the ballet Coppélia, with music by Delibes, is based on two eerie Hoffmann stories.
Hoffmann also influenced 19th-century musical opinion directly through his music criticism. His reviews of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67 (1808) and other important works set new literary standards for writing about music, and encouraged later writers to consider music as "the most Romantic of all the arts." Hoffmann's reviews were first collected for modern readers by Friedrich Schnapp, ed., in E.T.A. Hoffmann: Schriften zur Musik; Nachlese (1963) and have been made available in an English translation in E.T.A. Hoffmann's Writings on Music, Collected in a Single Volume (2004).
Hoffmann strove for artistic polymathy. He created far more in his works than mere political commentary achieved through satire. His masterpiece novel Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (The Life and Opinions of Tomcat Murr, 1819–1821) deals with such issues as the aesthetic status of true artistry and the modes of self-transcendence that accompany any genuine endeavour to create. Hoffmann's portrayal of the character Kreisler (a genius musician) is wittily counterpointed with the character of the tomcat Murr – a virtuoso illustration of artistic pretentiousness that many of Hoffmann's contemporaries found offensive and subversive of Romantic ideals.
Hoffmann's literature indicates the failings of many so-called artists to differentiate between the superficial and the authentic aspects of such Romantic ideals. The self-conscious effort to impress must, according to Hoffmann, be divorced from the self-aware effort to create. This essential duality in Kater Murr is conveyed structurally through a discursive 'splicing together' of two biographical narratives.
Science fiction
While disagreeing with E. F. Bleiler's claim that Hoffman was "one of the two or three greatest writers of fantasy", Algis Budrys of Galaxy Science Fiction said that he "did lay down the groundwork for some of our most enduring themes".
Historian Martin Willis argues that Hoffmann's impact on science fiction has been overlooked, saying "his work reveals a writer dynamically involved in the important scientific debates of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries." Willis points out that Hoffmann's work is contemporary with Frankenstein (1818) and with "the heated debates and the relationship between the new empirical science and the older forms of natural philosophy that held sway throughout the eighteenth century." His "interest in the machine culture of his time is well represented in his short stories, of which the critically renowned The Sandman (1816) and Automata (1814) are the best examples. ...Hoffmann's work makes a considerable contribution to our understanding of the emergence of scientific knowledge in the early years of the nineteenth century and to the conflict between science and magic, centred mainly on the 'truths' available to the advocates of either practice. ...Hoffmann's balancing of mesmerism, mechanics, and magic reflects the difficulty in categorizing scientific knowledge in the early nineteenth century."
In popular culture
Robertson Davies invokes Hoffmann as a character (with the pet name of 'ETAH') trapped in Limbo, within his novel The Lyre of Orpheus (1988).
Alexandre Dumas, père translated The Nutcracker into French, which aided in making the tale popular and widespread.
The exotic and supernatural elements in the storyline of Ingmar Bergman's 1982 film Fanny and Alexander derive largely from the stories of Hoffmann.
Andrei Tarkovsky wrote a script titled Hoffmaniana in which the writer himself is the main protagonist. Due to Tarkovsky's premature death, the film was never made.
Freud gives an extensive psychoanalytic analysis of Hoffmann's "The Sandman" in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche.
Coppelius is a German classical metal band whose name is taken from a character in Hoffmann's "The Sandman". The band's 2010 album Zinnober includes a track titled "Klein Zaches".
The Russian show Puppets was cancelled by government officials after an episode in which Vladimir Putin was portrayed as Hoffmann's Klein Zaches.
Malifaux, a tabletop skirmish game, uses the names Hoffman and Coppelius from "The Sandman" for characters which reference each other as having an "unexplained connection".
Dario Argento was planning to film an adaptation of "The Sandman" based on Hoffmann's short story and starring Iggy Pop but filming never commenced.
See alsoThe Tales of Hoffmann for Offenbach's opera.The Tales of Hoffmann for the filmGofmaniada'', a Russian puppet-animated feature film about Hoffmann and several of his stories.
References
External links
Hoffmann's Life and Opinions of the Tom Cat Murr
T. A. Hoffmann's Fairy Tales
Compositions of E. T. A. Hoffmann in the digital collection of the Bamberg State Library
E. T. A. Hoffmann entry in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
Extensively cross-indexed bibliography of Hoffmann's works
1776 births
1822 deaths
18th-century classical composers
18th-century German composers
18th-century male musicians
19th-century classical composers
19th-century German composers
Musicians from Königsberg
19th-century German male musicians
Composers for harp
Deaths from syphilis
German fantasy writers
German horror writers
German male classical composers
German male novelists
German male short story writers
German short story writers
German music critics
German Romantic composers
Mythopoeic writers
Writers from Königsberg
Romanticism
University of Königsberg alumni
Weird fiction writers
Writers of Gothic fiction
Neurological disease deaths in Germany | [
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Eusebius (Bruno) of Angers (died September 1, 1081) was bishop of Angers, France.
He first appears in the historical record as bishop of Angers at the synod of Rheims in 1049, and for a long time had been an adherent of Berengar's doctrine of the Lord's Supper. As such he was highly regarded by Berengar himself and by his opponents Theodwin of Liège, Durand of Troarne, and Humbert of Mourmoutiers. But when he recognized the strength of the opposition, he favored a compromise; at any rate he advised Berengar is 1054 to swear to the formula presented to him.
Nevertheless, Berengar considered him his friend many years later and requested him to silence a certain Galfrid Martini or to arrange a disputation. In his reply Eusebius not only regretted the whole controversy, but also stated that he would abide by the words of the Bible, according to which the bread and wine after the consecration become the body and blood of the Lord (see transubstantiation); if one asks how this can take place, the answer must be that it is not according to the order of nature but in accordance with the divine omnipotence; at any rate one must be careful not to give offense to the plain Christian. The epistle is a downright renunciation of Berengar in case he should still maintain his view.
In favor of the supposition that Eusebius changed his opinion from deference to the Count of Anjou, the decided opponent of Berengar and his doctrine, it can be adduced that he did not defend Berengar against the hostilities of the court, and that for a long time he sided with this violent prince. It is also possible that the fact impressed itself upon Eusebius that the religious consciousness of the time more and more opposed Berengar. Our knowledge, however, is too fragmentary to pass a very accurate sentence.
References
1081 deaths
11th-century Italian Roman Catholic bishops
Bishops of Angers
Year of birth unknown | [
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Edo (), also romanized as Jedo, Yedo or Yeddo, is the former name of Tokyo.
Edo, formerly a jōkamachi (castle town) centered on Edo Castle located in Musashi Province, became the de facto capital of Japan from 1603 as the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate. Edo grew to become one of the largest cities in the world under the Tokugawa.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868 the Meiji government renamed Edo as Tokyo (, "Eastern Capital") and relocated the Emperor from the historic capital of Kyoto to the city. The era of Tokugawa rule in Japan from 1603 to 1868 is known eponymously as the Edo period.
History
Before Tokugawa
Before the 10th century, there is no mention of Edo in historical records, but for a few settlements in the area. Edo first appears in the Azuma Kagami chronicles, that name for the area being probably used since the second half of the Heian period. Its development started in late 11th century with a branch of the called the , coming from the banks of the then-Iruma River, present day upstream of Arakawa river. A descendant of the head of the Chichibu clan settled in the area and took the name , likely based on the name used for the place, and founded the Edo clan. Shigetsugu built a fortified residence, probably around the tip of the Musashino terrace, which would become the Edo castle. Shigetsugu's son, , took the Taira's side against Minamoto no Yoritomo in 1180 but eventually surrendered to Minamoto and became a gokenin for the Kamakura shogunate. At the fall of the shogunate in the 14th century, the Edo clan took the side of the Southern court, and its influence declined during the Muromachi period.
In 1456, a vassal of the Ōgigayatsu branch of the Uesugi clan, started to build a castle on the former fortified residence of the Edo clan and took the name Ōta Dōkan. Dōkan lived in this castle until his assassination in 1486. Under Dōkan, with good water connections to Kamakura, Odawara and other parts of Kanto and the country, Edo expanded in a jokamachi, with the castle bordering a cove opening into Edo Bay (current Hibiya Park) and the town developing along the Hirakawa River that was flowing into the cove, as well as the stretch of land on the eastern side of the cove (roughly where current Tokyo Station is) called . Some priests and scholars fleeing Kyoto after the Ōnin War came to Edo during that period.
After the death of Dōkan, the castle became one of strongholds of the Uesugi clan, which fell to the Later Hōjō clan at the battle of Takanawahara in 1524, during the expansion of their rule over the Kantō area. When the Hōjō clan was finally defeated by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 1590, the Kanto area was given to rule to Toyotomi's senior officer Tokugawa Ieyasu, who took his residence in Edo.
Tokugawa era
Tokugawa Ieyasu emerged as the paramount warlord of the Sengoku period following his victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in October 1600. He formally founded the Tokugawa shogunate in 1603 and established his headquarters at Edo Castle. Edo became the center of political power and de facto capital of Japan, although the historic capital of Kyoto remained the de jure capital as the seat of the emperor. Edo transformed from a fishing village in Musashi Province in 1457 into the largest metropolis in the world with an estimated population of 1,000,000 by 1721.Edo was repeatedly and regularly devastated by fires, the Great fire of Meireki in 1657 being the most disastrous, with an estimated 100,000 victims and a vast portion of the city completely burnt. At the time, the population of Edo was around 300,000, and the impact of the fire was tremendous. The fire destroyed the central keep of Edo Castle, which was never rebuilt, and it influenced the urban planning afterwards to make the city more resilient with many empty areas to break spreading fires and wider streets. Reconstruction efforts expanded the city east of the Sumida River, and some daimyō residences were relocated to give more space to the city, especially in the direct vicinity of the shogun's residence, giving birth to a large green space beside the castle, present-day Fukiage gardens of the Imperial Palace. During the Edo period, there were about 100 major fires mostly begun by accident and often quickly escalating and spreading through neighborhoods of wooden nagaya which were heated with charcoal fires.
In 1868, the Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown in the Meiji Restoration by supporters of Emperor Meiji and his Imperial Court in Kyoto, ending Edo's status as the de facto capital of Japan. However, the new Meiji government soon renamed Edo to Tōkyō (東京, "Eastern Capital") and the city became the formal capital of Japan when the emperor moved his residence to the city.
Urbanism
Very quickly after its inception, the shogunate undertook major works in Edo that drastically changed the topography of the area, notably under the nationwide program of major civil works involving the now pacified daimyō workforce. The Hibiya cove facing the castle was soon filled after the arrival of Ieyasu, the Hirakawa river was diverted, and several protective moats and logistical canals were dug (including the Kanda river), to limit the risks of flooding. Landfill works on the bay began, with several areas reclaimed during the duration of the shogunate (notably the Tsukiji area). East of the city and of the Sumida River, a massive network of canals was dug.
Fresh water was a major issue, as direct wells would provide brackish water because of the location of the city over an estuary. The few fresh water ponds of the city were put to use, and a network of canals and underground wooden pipes bringing freshwater from the western side of the city and the Tama River was built. Some of this infrastructure was used until the 20th century.
General layout of the city
The city was laid out as a castle town around Edo Castle, which was positioned at the tip of the Musashino terrace. The area in the immediate proximity of the castle consisted of samurai and daimyō residences, whose families lived in Edo as part of the sankin-kōtai system; the daimyō made journeys in alternating years to Edo and used the residences for their entourages. The location of each residence was carefully attributed depending on their position as tozama, shinpan or fudai. It was this extensive organization of the city for the samurai class which defined the character of Edo, particularly in contrast to the two major cities of Kyoto and Osaka, neither of which were ruled by a daimyō or had a significant samurai population. Kyoto's character was defined by the Imperial Court, the court nobles, its Buddhist temples and its history; Osaka was the country's commercial center, dominated by the chōnin or the merchant class. On the contrary, the samurai and daimyō residences occupied up to 70% of the area of Edo. On the east and northeast sides of the castle lived the including the chōnin in a much more densely populated area than the samurai class area, organized in a series of gated communities called machi (町, "town" or "village"). This area, Shitamachi (下町, "lower town" or "lower towns"), was the center of urban and merchant culture. Shomin also lived along the main roads leading in and out of the city. The Sumida River, then called the Great River (大川, Ōkawa), ran on the eastern side of the city. The shogunate's official rice-storage warehouses and other official buildings were located here.
The marked the center of the city's commercial center and the starting point of the gokaidō (thus making it the de facto "center of the country"). Fishermen, craftsmen and other producers and retailers operated here. Shippers managed ships known as tarubune to and from Osaka and other cities, bringing goods into the city or transferring them from sea routes to river barges or land routes.
The northeastern corner of the city was considered dangerous in the traditional onmyōdō cosmology and was protected from evil by a number of temples including Sensō-ji and Kan'ei-ji, one of the two tutelary Bodaiji temples of the Tokugawa. A path and a canal, a short distance north of Sensō-ji, extended west from the Sumida riverbank leading along the northern edge of the city to the Yoshiwara pleasure district. Previously located near Ningyōchō, the district was rebuilt in this more remote location after the great fire of Meireki. Danzaemon, the hereditary position head of eta, or outcasts, who performed "unclean" works in the city resided nearby.
Temples and shrines occupied roughly 15% of the surface of the city, equivalent to the living areas of the townspeople, with however an average of 1/10th of its population. Temples and shrines were spread out over the city. Besides the large concentration in the northeast side to protect the city, the second Bodaiji of the Tokugawa, Zōjō-ji occupied a large area south of the castle.
Housing
Military caste
The samurai and daimyōs residences varied dramatically in size depending on their status. Some daimyōs could have several residences in Edo. The , was the main residence while the lord was in Edo and was used for official duties. It was not necessarily the largest of his residences, but the most convenient to commute to the castle. The , a bit further from the castle, could house the heir of the lord, his servants from his fief when he was in Edo for the sankin-kotai, or be a hiding residence if needed. The , if there was any, was on the outskirts of town, more of a pleasure retreat with gardens. The lower residence could also be used as a retreat for the lord if a fire had devastated the city. Some of the powerful daimyōs residences occupied vast grounds of several dozens of hectares.
Shonin
In a strict sense of the word, chōnin were only the townspeople who owned their residence, which was actually a minority. The shonin population mainly lived in semi-collective housings called , multi-rooms wooden dwellings, organized in enclosed , with communal facilities, such as wells connected to the city's fresh water distribution system, garbage collection area and communal bathrooms. A typical machi was of rectangular shape and could have a population of several hundreds.
The machi had curfew for the night with closing and guarded gates called opening on the in the machi. Two floor buildings and larger shops, reserved to the higher-ranking members of the society, were facing the main street. A machi would typically follow a grid pattern and smaller streets, , were opening on the main street, also with (sometimes) two-floor buildings, shop on the first floor, living quarter on the second floor, for the more well-off residents. Very narrow streets accessible through small gates called , would enter deeper inside the machi, where single floor nagayas, the were located. Rentals and smaller rooms for lower ranked shonin were located in those back housings.
Edo was nicknamed the , depicting the large number and diversity of those communities, but the actual number was closer to 1,700 by the 18th century.
Government and administration
Edo's municipal government was under the responsibility of the rōjū, the senior officials which oversaw the entire bakufu – the government of the Tokugawa shogunate. The administrative definition of Edo was called .
The Kanjō-bugyō (finance commissioners) were responsible for the financial matters of the shogunate, whereas the Jisha-Bugyō handled matters related to shrines and temples. The were samurai (at the very beginning of the shogunate daimyōs, later hatamoto) officials appointed to keep the order in the city, with the word designating both the heading magistrate, the magistrature and its organization. They were in charge of Edo's day-to-day administration, combining the role of police, judge and fire brigade. There were two offices, the South Machi-Bugyō and the North Machi-Bugyō, which had the same geographical jurisdiction in spite of their name but rotated roles on a monthly basis. Despite their extensive responsibilities, the teams of the Machi-Bugyō were rather small, with 2 offices of 125 people each. The Machi-Bugyō did not have jurisdiction over the samurai residential areas, which remained under the shogunate direct rule. The geographical jurisdiction of the Machi-Bugyō did not exactly coincide with the Gofunai, creating some complexity on the handling on the matters of the city.
The Machi-bugyō oversaw the numerous Machi where shonin lived through representatives called . Each Machi had a Machi leader called , who reported to a who himself was in charge of several Machis.
See also
Edo society
Fires in Edo
1703 Genroku earthquake
Edokko (native of Edo)
History of Tokyo
Iki (a Japanese aesthetic ideal)
Asakusa
Notes
References
Forbes, Andrew; Henley, David (2014). 100 Famous Views of Edo. Chiang Mai: Cognoscenti Books. ASIN: B00HR3RHUY
Gordon, Andrew. (2003). A Modern History of Japan from Tokugawa Times to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press. / (cloth); /.
Ponsonby-Fane, Richard. (1956). Kyoto: the Old Capital, 794–1869. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society.
Sansom, George. (1963). A History of Japan: 1615–1867. Stanford: Stanford University Press. /.
Akira Naito (Author), Kazuo Hozumi. Edo, the City that Became Tokyo: An Illustrated History. Kodansha International, Tokyo (2003).
Alternate spelling from 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article.
External links
A Trip to Old Edo
Fukagawa Edo Museum
Map of Bushū Toshima District, Edo from 1682
Edo period
History of Tokyo
Populated places established in the 1450s
1457 establishments in Asia
1450s establishments in Japan
1868 disestablishments in Japan | [
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The Euphrates () is the longest and one of the most historically important rivers of Western Asia. Together with the Tigris, it is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia (the "Land Between the Rivers"). Originating in Turkey, the Euphrates flows through Syria and Iraq to join the Tigris in the Shatt al-Arab, which empties into the Persian Gulf.
Etymology
The Ancient Greek form Euphrátēs (, as if from Greek εὖ "good" and φράζω "I announce or declare") was adapted from Old Persian 𐎢𐎳𐎼𐎠𐎬𐎢 Ufrātu, itself from Elamite 𒌑𒅁𒊏𒌅𒅖 ú-ip-ra-tu-iš. The Elamite name is ultimately derived from a name spelt in cuneiform as 𒌓𒄒𒉣 , which read as Sumerian is "Buranuna" and read as Akkadian is "Purattu"; many cuneiform signs have a Sumerian pronunciation and an Akkadian pronunciation, taken from a Sumerian word and an Akkadian word that mean the same. In Akkadian the river was called Purattu, which has been perpetuated in Semitic languages (cf. ; Pǝrāt) and in other nearby languages of the time (cf. Hurrian Puranti, Sabarian Uruttu). The Elamite, Akkadian, and possibly Sumerian forms are suggested to be from an unrecorded substrate language. Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov suggest the Proto-Sumerian *burudu "copper" (Sumerian urudu) as an origin, with an explanation that Euphrates was the river by which copper ore was transported in rafts, since Mesopotamia was the center of copper metallurgy during the period. The name is Yeprat in Armenian (), Perat in Hebrew (), in Turkish and in Kurdish. The Mandaic name is (), and is often mentioned as (pronounced ) in Mandaean scriptures such as the Ginza Rabba.
The earliest references to the Euphrates come from cuneiform texts found in Shuruppak and pre-Sargonic Nippur in southern Iraq and date to the mid-3rd millennium BCE. In these texts, written in Sumerian, the Euphrates is called Buranuna (logographic: UD.KIB.NUN). The name could also be written KIB.NUN.(NA) or dKIB.NUN, with the prefix "d" indicating that the river was a divinity. In Sumerian, the name of the city of Sippar in modern-day Iraq was also written UD.KIB.NUN, indicating a historically strong relationship between the city and the river.
Course
The Euphrates is the longest river of Western Asia. It emerges from the confluence of the Kara Su or Western Euphrates () and the Murat Su or Eastern Euphrates () upstream from the town of Keban in southeastern Turkey. Daoudy and Frenken put the length of the Euphrates from the source of the Murat River to the confluence with the Tigris at , of which is in Turkey, in Syria and in Iraq. The same figures are given by Isaev and Mikhailova. The length of the Shatt al-Arab, which connects the Euphrates and the Tigris with the Persian Gulf, is given by various sources as .
Both the Kara Su and the Murat Su rise northwest from Lake Van at elevations of and amsl, respectively. At the location of the Keban Dam, the two rivers, now combined into the Euphrates, have dropped to an elevation of amsl. From Keban to the Syrian–Turkish border, the river drops another over a distance of less than . Once the Euphrates enters the Upper Mesopotamian plains, its grade drops significantly; within Syria the river falls while over the last stretch between Hīt and the Shatt al-Arab the river drops only .
Discharge
The Euphrates receives most of its water in the form of rainfall and melting snow, resulting in peak volumes during the months April through May. Discharge in these two months accounts for 36 percent of the total annual discharge of the Euphrates, or even 60–70 percent according to one source, while low runoff occurs in summer and autumn. The average natural annual flow of the Euphrates has been determined from early- and mid-twentieth century records as at Keban, at Hīt and at Hindiya. However, these averages mask the high inter-annual variability in discharge; at Birecik, just north of the Syro–Turkish border, annual discharges have been measured that ranged from a low volume of in 1961 to a high of in 1963.
The discharge regime of the Euphrates has changed dramatically since the construction of the first dams in the 1970s. Data on Euphrates discharge collected after 1990 show the impact of the construction of the numerous dams in the Euphrates and of the increased withdrawal of water for irrigation. Average discharge at Hīt after 1990 has dropped to per second ( per year). The seasonal variability has equally changed. The pre-1990 peak volume recorded at Hīt was per second, while after 1990 it is only per second. The minimum volume at Hīt remained relatively unchanged, rising from per second before 1990 to per second afterward.
Tributaries
In Syria, three rivers add their water to the Euphrates; the Sajur, the Balikh and the Khabur. These rivers rise in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains along the Syro–Turkish border and add comparatively little water to the Euphrates. The Sajur is the smallest of these tributaries; emerging from two streams near Gaziantep and draining the plain around Manbij before emptying into the reservoir of the Tishrin Dam. The Balikh receives most of its water from a karstic spring near 'Ayn al-'Arus and flows due south until it reaches the Euphrates at the city of Raqqa. In terms of length, drainage basin and discharge, the Khabur is the largest of these three. Its main karstic springs are located around Ra's al-'Ayn, from where the Khabur flows southeast past Al-Hasakah, where the river turns south and drains into the Euphrates near Busayrah. Once the Euphrates enters Iraq, there are no more natural tributaries to the Euphrates, although canals connecting the Euphrates basin with the Tigris basin exist.
Drainage basin
The drainage basins of the Kara Su and the Murat River cover an area of and , respectively. Estimates of the area of the Euphrates drainage basin vary widely; from a low to a high . Recent estimates put the basin area at , and . The greater part of the Euphrates basin is located in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. According to both Daoudy and Frenken, Turkey's share is 28 percent, Syria's is 17 percent and that of Iraq is 40 percent. Isaev and Mikhailova estimate the percentages of the drainage basin lying within Turkey, Syria and Iraq at 33, 20 and 47 percent respectively. Some sources estimate that approximately 15 percent of the drainage basin is located within Saudi Arabia, while a small part falls inside the borders of Kuwait. Finally, some sources also include Jordan in the drainage basin of the Euphrates; a small part of the eastern desert () drains toward the east rather than to the west.
Natural history
The Euphrates flows through a number of distinct vegetation zones. Although millennia-long human occupation in most parts of the Euphrates basin has significantly degraded the landscape, patches of original vegetation remain. The steady drop in annual rainfall from the sources of the Euphrates toward the Persian Gulf is a strong determinant for the vegetation that can be supported. In its upper reaches the Euphrates flows through the mountains of Southeast Turkey and their southern foothills which support a xeric woodland. Plant species in the moister parts of this zone include various oaks, pistachio trees, and Rosaceae (rose/plum family). The drier parts of the xeric woodland zone supports less dense oak forest and Rosaceae. Here can also be found the wild variants of many cereals, including einkorn wheat, emmer wheat, oat and rye. South of this zone lies a zone of mixed woodland-steppe vegetation. Between Raqqa and the Syro–Iraqi border the Euphrates flows through a steppe landscape. This steppe is characterised by white wormwood (Artemisia herba-alba) and Chenopodiaceae. Throughout history, this zone has been heavily overgrazed due to the practicing of sheep and goat pastoralism by its inhabitants. Southeast of the border between Syria and Iraq starts true desert. This zone supports either no vegetation at all or small pockets of Chenopodiaceae or Poa sinaica. Although today nothing of it survives due to human interference, research suggests that the Euphrates Valley would have supported a riverine forest. Species characteristic of this type of forest include the Oriental plane, the Euphrates poplar, the tamarisk, the ash and various wetland plants.
Among the fish species in the Tigris–Euphrates basin, the family of the Cyprinidae are the most common, with 34 species out of 52 in total. Among the Cyprinids, the mangar has good sport fishing qualities, leading the British to nickname it "Tigris salmon." The Rafetus euphraticus is an endangered soft-shelled turtle that is limited to the Tigris–Euphrates river system.
The Neo-Assyrian palace reliefs from the 1st millennium BCE depict lion and bull hunts in fertile landscapes. Sixteenth to nineteenth century European travellers in the Syrian Euphrates basin reported on an abundance of animals living in the area, many of which have become rare or even extinct. Species like gazelle, onager and the now-extinct Arabian ostrich lived in the steppe bordering the Euphrates valley, while the valley itself was home to the wild boar. Carnivorous species include the gray wolf, the golden jackal, the red fox, the leopard and the lion. The Syrian brown bear can be found in the mountains of Southeast Turkey. The presence of European beaver has been attested in the bone assemblage of the prehistoric site of Abu Hureyra in Syria, but the beaver has never been sighted in historical times.
River
The Hindiya Barrage on the Iraqi Euphrates, based on plans by British civil engineer William Willcocks and finished in 1913, was the first modern water diversion structure built in the Tigris–Euphrates river system. The Hindiya Barrage was followed in the 1950s by the Ramadi Barrage and the nearby Abu Dibbis Regulator, which serve to regulate the flow regime of the Euphrates and to discharge excess flood water into the depression that is now Lake Habbaniyah. Iraq's largest dam on the Euphrates is the Haditha Dam; a earth-fill dam creating Lake Qadisiyah. Syria and Turkey built their first dams in the Euphrates in the 1970s. The Tabqa Dam in Syria was completed in 1973 while Turkey finished the Keban Dam, a prelude to the immense Southeastern Anatolia Project, in 1974. Since then, Syria has built two more dams in the Euphrates, the Baath Dam and the Tishrin Dam, and plans to build a fourth dam – the Halabiye Dam – between Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. The Tabqa Dam is Syria's largest dam and its reservoir (Lake Assad) is an important source of irrigation and drinking water. It was planned that should be irrigated from Lake Assad, but in 2000 only had been realized. Syria also built three smaller dams on the Khabur and its tributaries.
With the implementation of the Southeastern Anatolia Project (, or GAP) in the 1970s, Turkey launched an ambitious plan to harness the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates for irrigation and hydroelectricity production and provide an economic stimulus to its southeastern provinces. GAP affects a total area of and approximately 7 million people; representing about 10 percent of Turkey's total surface area and population, respectively. When completed, GAP will consist of 22 dams – including the Keban Dam – and 19 power plants and provide irrigation water to of agricultural land, which is about 20 percent of the irrigable land in Turkey. C. of this irrigated land is located in the Euphrates basin. By far the largest dam in GAP is the Atatürk Dam, located c. northwest of Şanlıurfa. This and dam was completed in 1992; thereby creating a reservoir that is the third-largest lake in Turkey. With a maximum capacity of , the Atatürk Dam reservoir is large enough to hold the entire annual discharge of the Euphrates. Completion of GAP was scheduled for 2010 but has been delayed because the World Bank has withheld funding due to the lack of an official agreement on water sharing between Turkey and the downstream states on the Euphrates and the Tigris.
Apart from barrages and dams, Iraq has also created an intricate network of canals connecting the Euphrates with Lake Habbaniyah, Lake Tharthar, and Abu Dibbis reservoir; all of which can be used to store excess floodwater. Via the Shatt al-Hayy, the Euphrates is connected with the Tigris. The largest canal in this network is the Main Outfall Drain or so-called "Third River;" constructed between 1953 and 1992. This canal is intended to drain the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris south of Baghdad to prevent soil salinization from irrigation. It also allows large freight barges to navigate up to Baghdad.
Environmental and social effects
The construction of the dams and irrigation schemes on the Euphrates has had a significant impact on the environment and society of each riparian country. The dams constructed as part of GAP – in both the Euphrates and the Tigris basins – have affected 382 villages and almost 200,000 people have been resettled elsewhere. The largest number of people was displaced by the building of the Atatürk Dam, which alone affected 55,300 people. A survey among those who were displaced showed that the majority were unhappy with their new situation and that the compensation they had received was considered insufficient. The flooding of Lake Assad led to the forced displacement of c. 4,000 families, who were resettled in other parts of northern Syria as part of a now abandoned plan to create an "Arab belt" along the borders with Turkey and Iraq.
Apart from the changes in the discharge regime of the river, the numerous dams and irrigation projects have also had other effects on the environment. The creation of reservoirs with large surfaces in countries with high average temperatures has led to increased evaporation; thereby reducing the total amount of water that is available for human use. Annual evaporation from reservoirs has been estimated at in Turkey, in Syria and in Iraq. Water quality in the Iraqi Euphrates is low because irrigation water tapped in Turkey and Syria flows back into the river, together with dissolved fertilizer chemicals used on the fields. The salinity of Euphrates water in Iraq has increased as a result of upstream dam construction, leading to lower suitability as drinking water. The many dams and irrigation schemes, and the associated large-scale water abstraction, have also had a detrimental effect on the ecologically already fragile Mesopotamian Marshes and on freshwater fish habitats in Iraq.
The inundation of large parts of the Euphrates valley, especially in Turkey and Syria, has led to the flooding of many archaeological sites and other places of cultural significance. Although concerted efforts have been made to record or save as much of the endangered cultural heritage as possible, many sites are probably lost forever. The combined GAP projects on the Turkish Euphrates have led to major international efforts to document the archaeological and cultural heritage of the endangered parts of the valley. Especially the flooding of Zeugma with its unique Roman mosaics by the reservoir of the Birecik Dam has generated much controversy in both the Turkish and international press. The construction of the Tabqa Dam in Syria led to a large international campaign coordinated by UNESCO to document the heritage that would disappear under the waters of Lake Assad. Archaeologists from numerous countries excavated sites ranging in date from the Natufian to the Abbasid period, and two minarets were dismantled and rebuilt outside the flood zone. Important sites that have been flooded or affected by the rising waters of Lake Assad include Mureybet, Emar and Abu Hureyra. A similar international effort was made when the Tishrin Dam was constructed, which led, among others, to the flooding of the important Pre-Pottery Neolithic B site of Jerf el-Ahmar. An archaeological survey and rescue excavations were also carried out in the area flooded by Lake Qadisiya in Iraq. Parts of the flooded area have recently become accessible again due to the drying up of the lake, resulting not only in new possibilities for archaeologists to do more research, but also providing opportunities for looting, which has been rampant elsewhere in Iraq in the wake of the 2003 invasion.
History
Palaeolithic to Chalcolithic periods
The early occupation of the Euphrates basin was limited to its upper reaches; that is, the area that is popularly known as the Fertile Crescent. Acheulean stone artifacts have been found in the Sajur basin and in the El Kowm oasis in the central Syrian steppe; the latter together with remains of Homo erectus that were dated to 450,000 years old. In the Taurus Mountains and the upper part of the Syrian Euphrates valley, early permanent villages such as Abu Hureyra – at first occupied by hunter-gatherers but later by some of the earliest farmers, Jerf el-Ahmar, Mureybet and Nevalı Çori became established from the eleventh millennium BCE onward. In the absence of irrigation, these early farming communities were limited to areas where rainfed agriculture was possible, that is, the upper parts of the Syrian Euphrates as well as Turkey. Late Neolithic villages, characterized by the introduction of pottery in the early 7th millennium BCE, are known throughout this area. Occupation of lower Mesopotamia started in the 6th millennium and is generally associated with the introduction of irrigation, as rainfall in this area is insufficient for dry agriculture. Evidence for irrigation has been found at several sites dating to this period, including Tell es-Sawwan. During the 5th millennium BCE, or late Ubaid period, northeastern Syria was dotted by small villages, although some of them grew to a size of over . In Iraq, sites like Eridu and Ur were already occupied during the Ubaid period. Clay boat models found at Tell Mashnaqa along the Khabur indicate that riverine transport was already practiced during this period. The Uruk period, roughly coinciding with the 4th millennium BCE, saw the emergence of truly urban settlements across Mesopotamia. Cities like Tell Brak and Uruk grew to over in size and displayed monumental architecture. The spread of southern Mesopotamian pottery, architecture and sealings far into Turkey and Iran has generally been interpreted as the material reflection of a widespread trade system aimed at providing the Mesopotamian cities with raw materials. Habuba Kabira on the Syrian Euphrates is a prominent example of a settlement that is interpreted as an Uruk colony.
Ancient history
During the Jemdet Nasr (3600–3100 BCE) and Early Dynastic periods (3100–2350 BCE), southern Mesopotamia experienced a growth in the number and size of settlements, suggesting strong population growth. These settlements, including Sumero-Akkadian sites like Sippar, Uruk, Adab and Kish, were organized in competing city-states. Many of these cities were located along canals of the Euphrates and the Tigris that have since dried up, but that can still be identified from remote sensing imagery. A similar development took place in Upper Mesopotamia, Subartu and Assyria, although only from the mid 3rd millennium and on a smaller scale than in Lower Mesopotamia. Sites like Ebla, Mari and Tell Leilan grew to prominence for the first time during this period.
Large parts of the Euphrates basin were for the first time united under a single ruler during the Akkadian Empire (2335–2154 BC) and Ur III empires, which controlled – either directly or indirectly through vassals – large parts of modern-day Iraq and northeastern Syria. Following their collapse, the Old Assyrian Empire (1975–1750 BCE) and Mari asserted their power over northeast Syria and northern Mesopotamia, while southern Mesopotamia was controlled by city-states like Isin, Kish and Larsa before their territories were absorbed by the newly emerged state of Babylonia under Hammurabi in the early to mid 18th century BCE.
In the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE, the Euphrates basin was divided between Kassite Babylon in the south and Mitanni, Assyria and the Hittite Empire in the north, with the Middle Assyrian Empire (1365–1020 BC) eventually eclipsing the Hittites, Mitanni and Kassite Babylonians. Following the end of the Middle Assyrian Empire in the late 11th century BCE, struggles broke out between Babylonia and Assyria over the control of the Iraqi Euphrates basin. The Neo-Assyrian Empire (935–605 BC) eventually emerged victorious out of this conflict and also succeeded in gaining control of the northern Euphrates basin in the first half of the 1st millennium BCE.
In the centuries to come, control of the wider Euphrates basin shifted from the Neo-Assyrian Empire (which collapsed between 612 and 599 BC) to the short lived Median Empire (612–546 BC) and equally brief Neo-Babylonian Empire (612–539 BC) in the last years of the 7th century BC, and eventually to the Achaemenid Empire (539–333 BC). The Achaemenid Empire was in turn overrun by Alexander the Great, who defeated the last king Darius III and died in Babylon in 323 BCE.
Subsequent to this, the region came under the control of the Seleucid Empire (312–150 BC), Parthian Empire (150–226 AD) (during which several Neo-Assyrian states such as Adiabene came to rule certain regions of the Euphrates), and was fought over by the Roman Empire, its succeeding Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Empire (226–638 AD), until the Islamic conquest of the mid 7th century AD. The Battle of Karbala took place near the banks of this river in 680 AD.
In the north, the river served as a border between Greater Armenia (331 BC–428 AD) and Lesser Armenia (the latter became a Roman province in the 1st century BC).
Modern era
After World War I, the borders in Southwest Asia were redrawn in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), when the Ottoman Empire was partitioned. Clause 109 of the treaty stipulated that the three riparian states of the Euphrates (at that time Turkey, France for its Syrian mandate and the United Kingdom for its mandate of Iraq) had to reach a mutual agreement on the use of its water and on the construction of any hydraulic installation. An agreement between Turkey and Iraq signed in 1946 required Turkey to report to Iraq on any hydraulic changes it made on the Tigris–Euphrates river system, and allowed Iraq to construct dams on Turkish territory to manage the flow of the Euphrates.
The river featured on the coat of arms of Iraq from 1932 to 1959.
Turkey and Syria completed their first dams on the Euphrates – the Keban Dam and the Tabqa Dam, respectively – within one year of each other and filling of the reservoirs commenced in 1975. At the same time, the area was hit by severe drought and river flow toward Iraq was reduced from in 1973 to in 1975. This led to an international crisis during which Iraq threatened to bomb the Tabqa Dam. An agreement was eventually reached between Syria and Iraq after intervention by Saudi Arabia and the Soviet Union. A similar crisis, although not escalating to the point of military threats, occurred in 1981 when the Keban Dam reservoir had to be refilled after it had been almost emptied to temporarily increase Turkey's hydroelectricity production. In 1984, Turkey unilaterally declared that it would ensure a flow of at least per second, or per year, into Syria, and in 1987 a bilateral treaty to that effect was signed between the two countries. Another bilateral agreement from 1989 between Syria and Iraq settles the amount of water flowing into Iraq at 60 percent of the amount that Syria receives from Turkey. In 2008, Turkey, Syria and Iraq instigated the Joint Trilateral Committee (JTC) on the management of the water in the Tigris–Euphrates basin and on 3 September 2009 a further agreement was signed to this effect.
On 15 April 2014, Turkey began to reduce the flow of the Euphrates into Syria and Iraq. The flow was cut off completely on 16 May 2014 resulting in the Euphrates terminating at the Turkish–Syrian border. This was in violation of an agreement reached in 1987 in which Turkey committed to releasing a minimum of of water per second at the Turkish–Syrian border.
During the Syrian civil war and the Iraqi Civil War, much of the Euphrates was controlled by the Islamic State from 2014 until 2017, when the terrorist group began losing land and was eventually defeated territorially in Syria at the Battle of Baghouz and in Iraq in the Western Iraq offensive respectively.
Economy
Throughout history, the Euphrates has been of vital importance to those living along its course. With the construction of large hydropower stations, irrigation schemes, and pipelines capable of transporting water over large distances, many more people now depend on the river for basic amenities such as electricity and drinking water than in the past. Syria's Lake Assad is the most important source of drinking water for the city of Aleppo, to the west of the river valley. The lake also supports a modest state-operated fishing industry. Through a newly restored power line, the Haditha Dam in Iraq provides electricity to Baghdad.
Notes
References
External links
Old maps of the Euphrates, from the Eran Laor Cartographic Collection, The National Library of Israel
International rivers of Asia
Mesopotamia
Rivers of Iraq
Rivers of Kurdistan
Rivers of Syria
Rivers of Turkey
Sites along the Silk Road
Torah places
Tur Abdin
Levant
Geography of Iraqi Kurdistan
Landforms of Şanlıurfa Province
Upper Mesopotamia
Hebrew Bible rivers
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Exxon Corporation, formerly known as the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey until 1973, was an American oil company and descendant of Standard Oil which merged with Mobil to form ExxonMobil in 1999. Once one of the Seven Sisters that dominated the global petroleum industry, Exxon was one of the largest companies in the world, being one of the top five companies on Fortune 500 between the first edition of the list and the year of its merger with Mobil and reaching the #1 spot on the list a few years between 1970 and 1995.
Today, Exxon is used as a brand name for some gas stations operated by the now-merged company, as well as for downstream operations as a, motor fuel and related products (the highest concentration of which are located in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas and in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern states).
History
Background
In 1959, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey secured full control of Humble Oil and restructured it into its U.S. marketing and refining division, to market nationwide under the Enco, Esso, and Humble brands. Enco was created as an acronym for the phrase "Energy Company". Humble introduced the Enco brand in 1960 in Oklahoma and surrounding states, to replace Humble's subsidiary Oklahoma and Pate brands. Humble also tried marketing under Enco in Ohio, but Standard Oil Company of Ohio (Sohio) protested that the Enco name and logo (a white oval with a blue border and red lettering) too closely resembled that of Esso. Consequently, stations in Ohio were rebranded as Humble and remained so until the Exxon brand came into use.
After the Enco brand was discontinued in Ohio, it was moved to other non-Esso states. In 1961, Humble stations in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas were rebranded to Enco. That same year, Enco appeared on former Carter stations in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest.
In 1963, Humble Oil and Tidewater Oil Company began negotiating a sale of Tidewater's West Coast refining and marketing operations. The sale would have given Humble Oil many existing Flying A stations and distributorships, as well as a refinery in California, the nation's fastest-growing gasoline market. However, the Justice Department objected to the sale on anti-trust grounds. (In 1966, Phillips Petroleum Company bought Tidewater's western properties and rebranded all Flying A outlets to Phillips 66.)
Humble Oil continued to expand its West Coast operations, adding California to its marketing territory, building many new Enco stations, and rebranding others. In 1967, Humble Oil purchased all remaining Signal stations from Standard Oil Company of California (Chevron) and rebranded them as Enco outlets, greatly increasing Enco's presence in California. Finally, in 1969, Humble Oil opened a new refinery in Benicia, California.
In 1966, the U.S. Justice Department ordered Humble Oil to "cease and desist" from using the Esso brand at stations in several southeastern states, following protests from Standard Oil of Kentucky (Kyso), which was a Standard Oil of California subsidiary in the process of rebranding its Standard stations to Chevron. By 1967, Humble Oil's Esso stations in the Southeast were rebranded to Enco.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Humble Oil continued to have difficulties promoting itself as a nationwide marketer of petroleum products, despite a number of high-profile marketing strategies. These included the popular "Put a Tiger in Your Tank" advertising campaign and accompanying tiger mascot created by American illustrator Bob Jones, to promote Enco Extra and Esso Extra gasolines. Humble Oil also used similar logotypes, use of the Humble name in all Enco and Esso advertising, and uniform designs for all stations regardless of brand. In addition, Humble Oil was a major promoter and broadcast sponsor for college football in the Pacific-8 (now Pac-12) and Southwestern conferences.
But Humble Oil still faced stiff competition from national brands such as Shell and Texaco, which at that time was the only company to market under one brand name in all 50 states. By the late 1960s, Humble officials realized that the time had come to develop a new brand name that could be used nationwide. At first, consideration was given to simply rebranding all stations as Enco, but that was shelved when it was learned that the word "Enco" is similar in pronunciation to the Japanese slang term enko, meaning "stalled car" (an abbreviation of enjin no kosho, "engine breakdown").
Prior to its purchase by Standard Oil of New Jersey, Humble Oil had conducted a study titled "Radiocarbon Evidence on the Dilution of Atmospheric and Oceanic Carbon by Carbon from Fossil Fuels" in 1957.
Exxon Corporation
The company changed its corporate name from Standard Oil of New Jersey to "Exxon Corporation". Once Exxon was officially constituted on January 1, 1973, the company replaced the Esso, Enco, and Humble brands in the United States. Exxon established as the new, unified brand name for all former Enco and Esso outlets. The Esso name was a trademark of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and attracted protests from other Standard Oil spinoffs because of its phonetic similarity to the acronym of the name of the parent company, Standard Oil. As a result, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was restricted from using Esso in the U.S., except in those states awarded to it in the 1911 Standard Oil antitrust settlement.
The company initially planned to change its name to "Exon", in keeping with the four-letter format of Enco and Esso. However, during the planning process, it was noted that James Exon was the governor of Nebraska. Renaming the company after a sitting governor seemed ill-advised. George T. Piercy, a senior member of the board of directors suggested adding an X resulting in the new EXXON name.
In states where it was restricted from using the Esso name, the company marketed under the Humble or Enco brands. The Humble brand was used at Texas stations for decades, as those operations were under the direction of Standard Oil Company of New Jersey affiliate Humble Oil & Refining Company. In the middle to late 1950s, the use of the Humble brand spread to other southwestern states, including Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
The rebranding came after successful test-marketing of the Exxon name, under two experimental logos, in the fall and winter of 1971–1972. Along with the new name, Exxon settled on a rectangular logo using red lettering and blue trim on a white background, similar to the familiar color scheme on the old Enco and Esso logos.
The unrestricted international use of the popular Esso brand prompted Exxon to continue using it outside the U.S. Esso is the only widely used Standard Oil descendant brand left in existence. Others, such as Chevron, maintain a few Standard-branded stations in specific states in order to retain their trademarks, and prevent others from using them.
On March 24, 1989, in what is regarded as one of the worst oil spills in American history, a tanker owned by Exxon, the Exxon Valdez, crashed into Bligh Reef, spilling its cargo of over ten million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound in Alaska and causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of seabirds and sea mammals. The ship was piloted by a captain with a history of drunk driving convictions, and Exxon was ordered by a jury to pay punitive damages in the amount of $5 billion. This judgment was eventually reduced, after multiple appeals, to just $500 million by 2008.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, in July 2020, Exxon announced deep spending and job position cuts in order to save an 8% shareholder dividend. According to Reifinitiv Eikon data, the company experienced a $2.63 billion loss and their shares were down by 35%. Later, in October 2020, Exxon released a statement which expanded on the planned cuts, stating that 15 percent of the company's global workforce would be fired over the next two years, including layoffs of 1,900 U.S. jobs, reducing the total global workforce by 14,000 employees. In February 2021, Exxon announced that in 2020 it registered a loss of $22.4 billion, adding that it was planning to invest $3 billion in the next four years.
Exxon Office Systems
Under the guidance of its paid consultants at Boston Consulting Group, Exxon announced in the 1970s that it would compete against IBM and Xerox. The mantra was "Information Is the Oil of the 21st Century". It launched Exxon Office Systems, and the early 1980s, Exxon retailed its fax machines and software through Sears. The venture failed since "the giant oil company failed to fully realize the subtleties of managing small high-tech companies." Exxon announced the closure of the venture at the end of 1984.
Recent years
In 1989, Exxon announced that it was moving its headquarters, including about 300 employees, from Manhattan, New York City to the Las Colinas area of Irving, Texas. Exxon sold the Exxon Building (1251 Avenue of the Americas), its former headquarters in Rockefeller Center, to a unit of Mitsui Real Estate Development Co. Ltd. in 1986 for $610 million. John Walsh, president of Exxon subsidiary Friendswood Development Company, stated that Exxon left New York because the costs were too high. In 2009 Exxon partnered with Turner Ridge Capital Management to develop and finance their U.S. alternative energy infrastructure.
In 2016, ExxonMobil successfully asked a U.S. federal court to lift the aforementioned trademark injunction that banned it from using the Esso brand in various states. By this time, as a result of numerous mergers and rebranding, the remaining Standard Oil companies that previously objected to the Esso name had been acquired by BP. ExxonMobil cited trademark surveys in which there was no longer possible confusion with the Esso name as it was more than seven decades before. BP also had no objection to lifting the ban. ExxonMobil did not specify whether they would now open new stations in the U.S. under the Esso name; they were primarily concerned about the additional expenses of having separate marketing, letterheads, packaging, and other materials that omit "Esso".
Corporate image
The rectangular Exxon logo, with the blue strip at the bottom and red lettering with the two 'X's interlinked together, was designed by noted industrial stylist Raymond Loewy. The interlinked 'X's are incorporated in the modern-day ExxonMobil corporate logo; in mid-2016, as part of a corporate rebranding accompanying the launch of ExxonMobil's "Synergy" fuel products, the mixed-case Exxon wordmark from the ExxonMobil corporate logo became the brand's main logo.
In 1985, Minolta introduced an autofocus SLR camera system named "Maxxum" in the United States. Originally, cameras (such as the Maxxum 7000) lenses and flashes used a logo with the X's crossed in 'MAXXUM'. Exxon considered this a violation of their trademark, and as a result, Minolta was allowed to distribute cameras already produced, but was forced to change the stylistic 'XX' and implement this as a change in new production. ExxonMobil similarly sued 21st Century Fox over its cable channel FXX, but the parties agreed to dismiss the suit in October 2015.
Branding
Exxon is ExxonMobil's primary retail gasoline brand in most of the United States, with the highest concentration of retail outlets located in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, and in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern states. The Exxon brand also has a market presence in the following metropolitan areas:
Atlanta
New Orleans
Baltimore
New York City Metro (New Jersey)
Birmingham
Philadelphia
Charlotte
Pittsburgh
Dallas
Raleigh
Houston
Richmond
Memphis
Miami
Virginia Beach/Norfolk/Newport News
Nashville
Washington, D.C.
Mobil is the company's primary retail gasoline brand in California, Florida, New York, New England, the Great Lakes, and the Midwest. Esso is ExxonMobil's primary gasoline brand worldwide except in Australia, Guam, Mexico, Nigeria, and New Zealand, where the Mobil brand is used exclusively. In Colombia, Canada, and Egypt, as well as formerly Japan and Malaysia, both the Esso and Mobil brands are used, in which the latter was rebranded as Petron in 2013, and ENEOS for the former in 2019, respectively. The Mobil brand is applied to each Esso fuel tanks in Hong Kong and Singapore.
References
External links
American brands
Automotive companies of the United States
Automotive fuel retailers
Companies based in Irving, Texas
Companies based in New York City
Convenience stores of the United States
Economy of the Southeastern United States
Energy companies established in 1973
ExxonMobil brands
ExxonMobil subsidiaries
Former components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average
Gas stations in the United States
Non-renewable resource companies established in 1973
Oil companies of the United States
Retail companies established in 1973
Rockefeller family
U.S. Synthetic Rubber Program | [
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Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968) was an English children's writer, whose books have been worldwide bestsellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Her books are still enormously popular and have been translated into 90 languages. As of June 2018, Blyton held 4th place for the most translated author. She wrote on a wide range of topics, including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical narratives, and is best remembered today for her Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven, The Five Find Outers, and Malory Towers books.
Her first book, Child Whispers, a 24-page collection of poems, was published in 1922. Following the commercial success of her early novels, such as Adventures of the Wishing-Chair (1937) and The Enchanted Wood (1939), Blyton went on to build a literary empire, sometimes producing 50 books a year, in addition to her prolific magazine and newspaper contributions. Her writing was unplanned and sprang largely from her unconscious mind: she typed her stories as events unfolded before her. The sheer volume of her work and the speed with which she produced it led to rumors that Blyton employed an army of ghost writers, a charge she vigorously denied.
Blyton's work became increasingly controversial among literary critics, teachers, and parents beginning in the 1950s, due to the alleged unchallenging nature of her writing and her themes, particularly in the Noddy series. Some libraries and schools banned her works, which the BBC refused to include in broadcasts from the 1930s until the 1950s because of their perceived lack of literary merit. Her books have been criticized as elitist, sexist, racist, xenophobic, and at odds with the more progressive environment that was emerging in post-World War II Britain, but they have continued to be bestsellers since her death in 1968.
She felt she had a responsibility to provide her readers with a strong moral framework, so she encouraged them to support worthy causes. In particular, through the clubs she set up or supported, she encouraged and organized them to raise funds for animal and pediatric charities.
The story of Blyton's life was dramatized in a BBC television film, entitled Enid, featuring Helena Bonham Carter in the title role and first broadcast in the United Kingdom on BBC Four in 2009. There have also been several adaptations of her books for stage, screen, and television.
Early life and education
Enid Blyton was born on 11 August 1897 in East Dulwich, South London, United Kingdom, the eldest of three children, to Thomas Carey Blyton (1870–1920), a cutlery salesman (recorded in the 1911 census with the occupation of "Mantle Manufacturer dealer [in] women's suits, skirts, etc.") and his wife Theresa Mary (née Harrison; 1874–1950). Enid's younger brothers, Hanly (1899–1983) and Carey (1902–1976), were born after the family had moved to a semi-detached house in Beckenham, then a village in Kent. A few months after her birth, Enid almost died from whooping cough, but was nursed back to health by her father, whom she adored. Thomas Blyton ignited Enid's interest in nature; in her autobiography she wrote that he "loved flowers and birds and wild animals, and knew more about them than anyone I had ever met". He also passed on his interest in gardening, art, music, literature, and theatre, and the pair often went on nature walks, much to the disapproval of Enid's mother, who showed little interest in her daughter's pursuits. Enid was devastated when he left the family shortly after her 13th birthday to live with another woman. Enid and her mother did not have a good relationship, and she did not attend either of her parents' funerals.
From 1907 to 1915, Blyton attended St Christopher's School in Beckenham, where she enjoyed physical activities and became school tennis champion and lacrosse captain. She was not keen on all the academic subjects, but excelled in writing and, in 1911, entered Arthur Mee's children's poetry competition. Mee offered to print her verses, encouraging her to produce more. Blyton's mother considered her efforts at writing to be a "waste of time and money", but she was encouraged to persevere by Mabel Attenborough, the aunt of school friend Mary Potter.
Blyton's father taught her to play the piano, which she mastered well enough for him to believe she might follow in his sister's footsteps and become a professional musician. Blyton considered enrolling at the Guildhall School of Music, but decided she was better suited to becoming a writer. After finishing school, in 1915, as head girl, she moved out of the family home to live with her friend Mary Attenborough, before going to stay with George and Emily Hunt at Seckford Hall, near Woodbridge, in Suffolk. Seckford Hall, with its allegedly haunted room and secret passageway, provided inspiration for her later writing. At Woodbridge Congregational Church, Blyton met Ida Hunt, who taught at Ipswich High School and suggested she train there as a teacher. Blyton was introduced to the children at the nursery school and, recognizing her natural affinity with them, enrolled in a National Froebel Union teacher training course at the school in September 1916. By this time, she had nearly terminated all contact with her family.
Blyton's manuscripts were rejected by publishers on many occasions, which only made her more determined to succeed, saying, "it is partly the struggle that helps you so much, that gives you determination, character, self-reliance –all things that help in any profession or trade, and most certainly in writing." In March 1916, her first poems were published in Nash's Magazine. She completed her teacher training course in December 1918 and, the following month, obtained a teaching appointment at Bickley Park School, a small, independent establishment for boys in Bickley, Kent. Two months later, Blyton received a teaching certificate with distinctions in zoology and principles of education; first class in botany, geography, practice and history of education, child hygiene, and classroom teaching; and second class in literature and elementary mathematics. In 1920, she moved to Southernhay, in Hook Road Surbiton, as nursery governess to the four sons of architect Horace Thompson and his wife Gertrude, with whom Blyton spent four happy years. With the shortage of area schools, neighboring children soon joined her charges, and a small school developed at the house.
Early writing career
In 1920, Blyton moved to Chessington and began writing in her spare time. The following year, she won the Saturday Westminster Review writing competition with her essay "On the Popular Fallacy that to the Pure All Things are Pure". Publications such as The Londoner, Home Weekly and The Bystander began to show an interest in her short stories and poems.
Blyton's first book, Child Whispers, a 24-page collection of poems, was published in 1922. Its illustrator, Enid's schoolfriend Phyllis Chase collaborated on several of her early works. Also in that year, Blyton began writing in annuals for Cassell and George Newnes, and her first piece of writing, "Peronel and his Pot of Glue", was accepted for publication in Teachers' World. Further boosting her success, in 1923, her poems appeared alongside those of Rudyard Kipling, Walter de la Mare, and G. K. Chesterton in a special issue of Teachers' World. Blyton's educational texts were influential in the 1920s and '30s, with her most sizable being the three-volume The Teacher's Treasury (1926), the six-volume Modern Teaching (1928), the ten-volume Pictorial Knowledge (1930), and the four-volume Modern Teaching in the Infant School (1932).
In July 1923, Blyton published Real Fairies, a collection of thirty-three poems written especially for the book with the exception of "Pretending", which had appeared earlier in Punch magazine. The following year, she published The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies, illustrated by Horace J. Knowles, and in 1926 the Book of Brownies. Several books of plays appeared in 1927, including A Book of Little Plays and The Play's the Thing with the illustrator Alfred Bestall.
In the 1930s, Blyton developed an interest in writing stories related to various myths, including those of ancient Greece and Rome; The Knights of the Round Table, Tales of Ancient Greece and Tales of Robin Hood were published in 1930. In Tales of Ancient Greece Blyton retold 16 well-known ancient Greek myths, but used the Latin rather than the Greek names of deities and invented conversations between characters. The Adventures of Odysseus, Tales of the Ancient Greeks and Persians and Tales of the Romans followed in 1934.
Commercial success
New series: 1934–1948
The first of twenty-eight books in Blyton's Old Thatch series, The Talking Teapot and Other Tales, was published in 1934, the same year as Brer Rabbit Retold; (note that Brer Rabbit originally featured in Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris), her first serial story and first full-length book, Adventures of the Wishing-Chair, followed in 1937. The Enchanted Wood, the first book in the Faraway Tree series, published in 1939, is about a magic tree inspired by the Norse mythology that had fascinated Blyton as a child. According to Blyton's daughter Gillian the inspiration for the magic tree came from "thinking up a story one day and suddenly she was walking in the enchanted wood and found the tree. In her imagination she climbed up through the branches and met Moon-Face, Silky, the Saucepan Man and the rest of the characters. She had all she needed." As in the Wishing-Chair series, these fantasy books typically involve children being transported into a magical world in which they meet fairies, goblins, elves, pixies and other mythological creatures.
Blyton's first full-length adventure novel, The Secret Island, was published in 1938, featuring the characters of Jack, Mike, Peggy and Nora. Described by The Glasgow Herald as a "Robinson Crusoe-style adventure on an island in an English lake", The Secret Island was a lifelong favourite of Gillian's and spawned the Secret series. The following year Blyton released her first book in the Circus series and her initial book in the Amelia Jane series, Naughty Amelia Jane! According to Gillian the main character was based on a large handmade doll given to her by her mother on her third birthday.
During the 1940s Blyton became a prolific author, her success enhanced by her "marketing, publicity and branding that was far ahead of its time". In 1940 Blyton published two books – Three Boys and a Circus and Children of Kidillin – under the pseudonym of Mary Pollock (middle name plus first married name), in addition to the eleven published under her own name that year. So popular were Pollock's books that one reviewer was prompted to observe that "Enid Blyton had better look to her laurels". But Blyton's readers were not so easily deceived and many complained about the subterfuge to her and her publisher, with the result that all six books published under the name of Mary Pollock – two in 1940 and four in 1943 – were reissued under Blyton's name. Later in 1940 Blyton published the first of her boarding school story books and the first novel in the Naughtiest Girl series, The Naughtiest Girl in the School, which followed the exploits of the mischievous schoolgirl Elizabeth Allen at the fictional Whyteleafe School. The first of her six novels in the St. Clare's series, The Twins at St. Clare's, appeared the following year, featuring the twin sisters Patricia and Isabel O'Sullivan.
In 1942 Blyton released the first book in the Mary Mouse series, Mary Mouse and the Dolls' House, about a mouse exiled from her mousehole who becomes a maid at a dolls' house. Twenty-three books in the series were produced between 1942 and 1964; 10,000 copies were sold in 1942 alone. The same year, Blyton published the first novel in the Famous Five series, Five on a Treasure Island, with illustrations by Eileen Soper. Its popularity resulted in twenty-one books between then and 1963, and the characters of Julian, Dick, Anne, George (Georgina) and Timmy the dog became household names in Britain. Matthew Grenby, author of Children's Literature, states that the five were involved with "unmasking hardened villains and solving serious crimes", although the novels were "hardly 'hard-boiled' thrillers". Blyton based the character of Georgina, a tomboy she described as "short-haired, freckled, sturdy, and snub-nosed" and "bold and daring, hot-tempered and loyal", on herself.
Blyton had an interest in biblical narratives, and retold Old and New Testament stories. The Land of Far-Beyond (1942) is a Christian parable along the lines of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1698), with contemporary children as the main characters. In 1943 she published The Children's Life of Christ, a collection of fifty-nine short stories related to the life of Jesus, with her own slant on popular biblical stories, from the Nativity and the Three Wise Men through to the trial, the crucifixion and the resurrection. Tales from the Bible was published the following year, followed by The Boy with the Loaves and Fishes in 1948.
The first book in Blyton's Five Find-Outers series, The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage, was published in 1943, as was the second book in the Faraway series, The Magic Faraway Tree, which in 2003 was voted 66th in the BBC's Big Read poll to find the UK's favourite book. Several of Blyton's works during this period have seaside themes; John Jolly by the Sea (1943), a picture book intended for younger readers, was published in a booklet format by Evans Brothers. Other books with a maritime theme include The Secret of Cliff Castle and Smuggler Ben, both attributed to Mary Pollock in 1943; The Island of Adventure, the first in the Adventure series of eight novels from 1944 onwards; and various novels of the Famous Five series such as Five on a Treasure Island (1942), Five on Kirrin Island Again (1947) and Five Go Down to the Sea (1953).
Capitalising on her success, with a loyal and ever-growing readership, Blyton produced a new edition of many of her series such as the Famous Five, the Five Find-Outers and St. Clare's every year in addition to many other novels, short stories and books. In 1946 Blyton launched the first in the Malory Towers series of six books based around the schoolgirl Darrell Rivers, First Term at Malory Towers, which became extremely popular, particularly with girls.
Peak output: 1949–1959
The first book in Blyton's Barney Mysteries series, The Rockingdown Mystery, was published in 1949, as was the first of her fifteen Secret Seven novels. The Secret Seven Society consists of Peter, his sister Janet, and their friends Colin, George, Jack, Pam and Barbara, who meet regularly in a shed in the garden to discuss peculiar events in their local community. Blyton rewrote the stories so they could be adapted into cartoons, which appeared in Mickey Mouse Weekly in 1951 with illustrations by George Brook. The French author Evelyne Lallemand continued the series in the 1970s, producing an additional twelve books, nine of which were translated into English by Anthea Bell between 1983 and 1987.
Blyton's Noddy, about a little wooden boy from Toyland, first appeared in the Sunday Graphic on 5 June 1949, and in November that year Noddy Goes to Toyland, the first of at least two dozen books in the series, was published. The idea was conceived by one of Blyton's publishers, Sampson, Low, Marston and Company, who in 1949 arranged a meeting between Blyton and the Dutch illustrator Harmsen van der Beek. Despite having to communicate via an interpreter, he provided some initial sketches of how Toyland and its characters would be represented. Four days after the meeting Blyton sent the text of the first two Noddy books to her publisher, to be forwarded to van der Beek. The Noddy books became one of her most successful and best-known series, and were hugely popular in the 1950s. An extensive range of sub-series, spin-offs and strip books were produced throughout the decade, including Noddy's Library, Noddy's Garage of Books, Noddy's Castle of Books, Noddy's Toy Station of Books and Noddy's Shop of Books.
In 1950 Blyton established the company Darrell Waters Ltd to manage her affairs. By the early 1950s she had reached the peak of her output, often publishing more than fifty books a year, and she remained extremely prolific throughout much of the decade. By 1955 Blyton had written her fourteenth Famous Five novel, Five Have Plenty of Fun, her fifteenth Mary Mouse book, Mary Mouse in Nursery Rhyme Land, her eighth book in the Adventure series, The River of Adventure, and her seventh Secret Seven novel, Secret Seven Win Through. She completed the sixth and final book of the Malory Towers series, Last Term at Malory Towers, in 1951.
Blyton published several further books featuring the character of Scamp the terrier, following on from The Adventures of Scamp, a novel she had released in 1943 under the pseudonym of Mary Pollock. Scamp Goes on Holiday (1952) and Scamp and Bimbo, Scamp at School, Scamp and Caroline and Scamp Goes to the Zoo (1954) were illustrated by Pierre Probst. She introduced the character of Bom, a stylish toy drummer dressed in a bright red coat and helmet, alongside Noddy in TV Comic in July 1956. A book series began the same year with Bom the Little Toy Drummer, featuring illustrations by R. Paul-Hoye, and followed with Bom and His Magic Drumstick (1957), Bom Goes Adventuring and Bom Goes to Ho Ho Village (1958), Bom and the Clown and Bom and the Rainbow (1959) and Bom Goes to Magic Town (1960). In 1958 she produced two annuals featuring the character, the first of which included twenty short stories, poems and picture strips.
Final works
Many of Blyton's series, including Noddy and The Famous Five, continued to be successful in the 1960s; by 1962, 26 million copies of Noddy had been sold. Blyton concluded several of her long-running series in 1963, publishing the last books of The Famous Five (Five Are Together Again) and The Secret Seven (Fun for the Secret Seven); she also produced three more Brer Rabbit books with the illustrator Grace Lodge: Brer Rabbit Again, Brer Rabbit Book, and Brer Rabbit's a Rascal. In 1962 many of her books were among the first to be published by Armada Books in paperback, making them more affordable to children.
After 1963 Blyton's output was generally confined to short stories and books intended for very young readers, such as Learn to Count with Noddy and Learn to Tell Time with Noddy in 1965, and Stories for Bedtime and the Sunshine Picture Story Book collection in 1966. Her declining health and a falling off in readership among older children have been put forward as the principal reasons for this change in trend. Blyton published her last book in the Noddy series, Noddy and the Aeroplane, in February 1964. In May the following year she published Mixed Bag, a song book with music written by her nephew Carey, and in August she released her last full-length books, The Man Who Stopped to Help and The Boy Who Came Back.
Magazine and newspaper contributions
Blyton cemented her reputation as a children's writer when in 1926 she took over the editing of Sunny Stories, a magazine that typically included the re-telling of legends, myths, stories and other articles for children. That same year she was given her own column in Teachers' World, entitled "From my Window". Three years later she began contributing a weekly page in the magazine, in which she published letters from her fox terrier dog Bobs. They proved to be so popular that in 1933 they were published in book form as Letters from Bobs, and sold ten thousand copies in the first week. Her most popular feature was "Round the Year with Enid Blyton", which consisted of forty-eight articles covering aspects of natural history such as weather, pond life, how to plant a school garden and how to make a bird table. Among Blyton's other nature projects was her monthly "Country Letter" feature that appeared in The Nature Lover magazine in 1935.
Sunny Stories was renamed Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories in January 1937, and served as a vehicle for the serialisation of Blyton's books. Her first Naughty Amelia Jane story, about an anti-heroine based on a doll owned by her daughter Gillian, was published in the magazine. Blyton stopped contributing in 1952, and it closed down the following year, shortly before the appearance of the new fortnightly Enid Blyton Magazine written entirely by Blyton. The first edition appeared on 18 March 1953, and the magazine ran until September 1959.
Noddy made his first appearance in the Sunday Graphic in 1949, the same year as Blyton's first daily Noddy strip for the London Evening Standard. It was illustrated by van der Beek until his death in 1953.
Writing style and technique
Blyton worked in a wide range of fictional genres, from fairy tales to animal, nature, detective, mystery, and circus stories, but she often "blurred the boundaries" in her books, and encompassed a range of genres even in her short stories. In a 1958 article published in The Author, she wrote that there were a "dozen or more different types of stories for children", and she had tried them all, but her favourites were those with a family at their centre.
In a letter to the psychologist Peter McKellar, Blyton describes her writing technique:
In another letter to McKellar she describes how in just five days she wrote the 60,000-word book The River of Adventure, the eighth in her Adventure Series, by listening to what she referred to as her "under-mind", which she contrasted with her "upper conscious mind". Blyton was unwilling to conduct any research or planning before beginning work on a new book, which coupled with the lack of variety in her life according to Druce almost inevitably presented the danger that she might unconsciously, and clearly did, plagiarise the books she had read, including her own. Gillian has recalled that her mother "never knew where her stories came from", but that she used to talk about them "coming from her 'mind's eye", as did William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens. Blyton had "thought it was made up of every experience she'd ever had, everything she's seen or heard or read, much of which had long disappeared from her conscious memory" but never knew the direction her stories would take. Blyton further explained in her biography that "If I tried to think out or invent the whole book, I could not do it. For one thing, it would bore me and for another, it would lack the 'verve' and the extraordinary touches and surprising ideas that flood out from my imagination."
Blyton's daily routine varied little over the years. She usually began writing soon after breakfast, with her portable typewriter on her knee and her favourite red Moroccan shawl nearby; she believed that the colour red acted as a "mental stimulus" for her. Stopping only for a short lunch break she continued writing until five o'clock, by which time she would usually have produced 6,000–10,000 words.
A 2000 article in The Malay Mail considers Blyton's children to have "lived in a world shaped by the realities of post-war austerity", enjoying freedom without the political correctness of today, which serves modern readers of Blyton's novels with a form of escapism. Brandon Robshaw of The Independent refers to the Blyton universe as "crammed with colour and character", "self-contained and internally consistent", noting that Blyton exemplifies a strong mistrust of adults and figures of authority in her works, creating a world in which children govern. Gillian noted that in her mother's adventure, detective and school stories for older children, "the hook is the strong storyline with plenty of cliffhangers, a trick she acquired from her years of writing serialised stories for children's magazines. There is always a strong moral framework in which bravery and loyalty are (eventually) rewarded". Blyton herself wrote that "my love of children is the whole foundation of all my work".
Victor Watson, Assistant Director of Research at Homerton College, Cambridge, believes that Blyton's works reveal an "essential longing and potential associated with childhood", and notes how the opening pages of The Mountain of Adventure present a "deeply appealing ideal of childhood". He argues that Blyton's work differs from that of many other authors in its approach, describing the narrative of The Famous Five series for instance as "like a powerful spotlight, it seeks to illuminate, to explain, to demystify. It takes its readers on a roller-coaster story in which the darkness is always banished; everything puzzling, arbitrary, evocative is either dismissed or explained". Watson further notes how Blyton often used minimalist visual descriptions and introduced a few careless phrases such as "gleamed enchantingly" to appeal to her young readers.
From the mid-1950s rumours began to circulate that Blyton had not written all the books attributed to her, a charge she found particularly distressing. She published an appeal in her magazine asking children to let her know if they heard such stories and, after one mother informed her that she had attended a parents' meeting at her daughter's school during which a young librarian had repeated the allegation, Blyton decided in 1955 to begin legal proceedings. The librarian was eventually forced to make a public apology in open court early the following year, but the rumours that Blyton operated "a 'company' of ghost writers" persisted, as some found it difficult to believe that one woman working alone could produce such a volume of work.
Enid's Conservative personal politics were often in view in her fiction. In The Mystery of the Missing Necklace (a The Five Find-Outers installment), she uses the character of young Elizabeth ("Bets") to give a statement praising Winston Churchill and describing the politician as a "statesman".
Charitable work
Blyton felt a responsibility to provide her readers with a positive moral framework, and she encouraged them to support worthy causes. Her view, expressed in a 1957 article, was that children should help animals and other children rather than adults:
Blyton and the members of the children's clubs she promoted via her magazines raised a great deal of money for various charities; according to Blyton, membership of her clubs meant "working for others, for no reward". The largest of the clubs she was involved with was the Busy Bees, the junior section of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, which Blyton had actively supported since 1933. The club had been set up by Maria Dickin in 1934, and after Blyton publicised its existence in the Enid Blyton Magazine it attracted 100,000 members in three years. Such was Blyton's popularity among children that after she became Queen Bee in 1952 more than 20,000 additional members were recruited in her first year in office. The Enid Blyton Magazine Club was formed in 1953. Its primary objective was to raise funds to help those children with cerebral palsy who attended a centre in Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, London, by furnishing an on-site hostel among other things.
The Famous Five series gathered such a following that readers asked Blyton if they might form a fan club. She agreed, on condition that it serve a useful purpose, and suggested that it could raise funds for the Shaftesbury Society Babies' Home in Beaconsfield, on whose committee she had served since 1948. The club was established in 1952, and provided funds for equipping a Famous Five Ward at the home, a paddling pool, sun room, summer house, playground, birthday and Christmas celebrations, and visits to the pantomime. By the late 1950s Blyton's clubs had a membership of 500,000, and raised £35,000 in the six years of the Enid Blyton Magazine'''s run.
By 1974 the Famous Five Club had a membership of 220,000, and was growing at the rate of 6,000 new members a year. The Beaconsfield home it was set up to support closed in 1967, but the club continued to raise funds for other paediatric charities, including an Enid Blyton bed at Great Ormond Street Hospital and a mini-bus for disabled children at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
Jigsaw puzzle and games
Blyton capitalised upon her commercial success as an author by negotiating agreements with jigsaw puzzle and games manufacturers from the late 1940s onwards; by the early 1960s some 146 different companies were involved in merchandising Noddy alone. In 1948 Bestime released four jigsaw puzzles featuring her characters, and the first Enid Blyton board game appeared, Journey Through Fairyland, created by BGL. The first card game, Faraway Tree, appeared from Pepys in 1950. In 1954 Bestime released the first four jigsaw puzzles of the Secret Seven, and the following year a Secret Seven card game appeared.
Bestime released the Little Noddy Car Game in 1953 and the Little Noddy Leap Frog Game in 1955, and in 1956 American manufacturer Parker Brothers released Little Noddy's Taxi Game, a board game which features Noddy driving about town, picking up various characters. Bestime released its Plywood Noddy Jigsaws series in 1957 and a Noddy jigsaw series featuring cards appeared from 1963, with illustrations by Robert Lee. Arrow Games became the chief producer of Noddy jigsaws in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Whitman manufactured four new Secret Seven jigsaw puzzles in 1975, and produced four new Malory Towers ones two years later. In 1979 the company released a Famous Five adventure board game, Famous Five Kirrin Island Treasure. Stephen Thraves wrote eight Famous Five adventure game books, published by Hodder & Stoughton in the 1980s. The first adventure game book of the series, The Wreckers' Tower Game, was published in October 1984.
Personal life
On 28 August 1924, Blyton married Major Hugh Alexander Pollock, DSO (1888–1968) at Bromley Register Office, without inviting her family. They married shortly after his divorce from his first wife, with whom he had two sons, one of them already deceased. Pollock was editor of the book department in the publishing firm George Newnes, which became Blyton's regular publisher. It was he who requested her to write a book about animals, resulting in The Zoo Book, completed in the month before their marriage. They initially lived in a flat in Chelsea before moving to Elfin Cottage in Beckenham in 1926 and then to Old Thatch in Bourne End (called Peterswood in her books) in 1929. Blyton's first daughter, Gillian, was born on 15 July 1931, and, after a miscarriage in 1934, she gave birth to a second daughter, Imogen, on 27 October 1935.
In 1938, she and her family moved to a house in Beaconsfield, named Green Hedges by Blyton's readers, following a competition in her magazine. By the mid-1930s, Pollock had become a secret alcoholic, withdrawing increasingly from public life—possibly triggered through his meetings, as a publisher, with Winston Churchill, which may have reawakened the trauma Pollock suffered during the World War I. With the outbreak of World War II, he became involved in the Home Guard and also re-encountered Ida Crowe, an aspiring writer 19 years his junior, whom he had first met years earlier. He made her an offer to join him as secretary in his posting to a Home Guard training center at Denbies, a Gothic mansion in Surrey belonging to Lord Ashcombe, and they began a romantic relationship. Blyton's marriage to Pollock was troubled for years, and according to Crowe's memoir, she had a series of affairs, including a lesbian relationship with one of the children's nannies. In 1941, Blyton met Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters, a London surgeon with whom she began a serious affair. Pollock discovered the liaison, and threatened to initiate divorce proceedings. Due to fears that exposure of her adultery would ruin her public image, it was ultimately agreed that Blyton would instead file for divorce against Pollock. According to Crowe's memoir, Blyton promised that if he admitted to infidelity, she would allow him parental access to their daughters; but after the divorce, he was denied contact with them, and Blyton made sure he was subsequently unable to find work in publishing. Pollock, having married Crowe on 26 October 1943, eventually resumed his heavy drinking and was forced to petition for bankruptcy in 1950.
Blyton and Darrell Waters married at the City of Westminster Register Office on 20 October 1943. She changed the surname of her daughters to Darrell Waters and publicly embraced her new role as a happily married and devoted doctor's wife. After discovering she was pregnant in the spring of 1945, Blyton miscarried five months later, following a fall from a ladder. The baby would have been Darrell Waters's first child and the son for which they both longed.
Her love of tennis included playing naked, with nude tennis "a common practice in those days among the more louche members of the middle classes".
Blyton's health began to deteriorate in 1957, when, during a round of golf, she started to feel faint and breathless, and, by 1960, she was displaying signs of dementia. Her agent, George Greenfield, recalled that it was "unthinkable" for the "most famous and successful of children's authors with her enormous energy and computerlike memory" to be losing her mind and suffering from what is now known as Alzheimer's disease in her mid-60s. Worsening Blyton's situation was her husband's declining health throughout the 1960s; he suffered from severe arthritis in his neck and hips, deafness, and became increasingly ill-tempered and erratic until his death on 15 September 1967.
The story of Blyton's life was dramatised in a BBC film entitled Enid, which aired in the United Kingdom on BBC Four on 16 November 2009. Helena Bonham Carter, who played the title role, described Blyton as "a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an extremely canny businesswoman" who "knew how to brand herself, right down to the famous signature".
Death and legacy
During the months following her husband's death, Blyton became increasingly ill and moved into a nursing home three months before her death. She died in her sleep of Alzheimer's disease at the Greenways Nursing Home, Hampstead, North London, on 28 November 1968, aged 71. A memorial service was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly and she was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, where her ashes remain. Blyton's home, Green Hedges, was auctioned on 26 May 1971 and demolished in 1973; the site is now occupied by houses and a street named Blyton Close. An English Heritage blue plaque commemorates Blyton at Hook Road in Chessington, where she lived from 1920 to 1924. In 2014, a plaque recording her time as a Beaconsfield resident from 1938 until her death in 1968 was unveiled in the town hall gardens, next to small iron figures of Noddy and Big Ears.
Since her death and the publication of her daughter Imogen's 1989 autobiography, A Childhood at Green Hedges, Blyton has emerged as an emotionally immature, unstable and often malicious figure. Imogen considered her mother to be "arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult I pitied her." Blyton's eldest daughter Gillian remembered her rather differently however, as "a fair and loving mother, and a fascinating companion".
The Enid Blyton Trust for Children was established in 1982, with Imogen as its first chairman, and in 1985 it established the National Library for the Handicapped Child. Enid Blyton's Adventure Magazine began publication in September 1985 and, on 14 October 1992, the BBC began publishing Noddy Magazine and released the Noddy CD-Rom in October 1996.
The first Enid Blyton Day was held at Rickmansworth on 6 March 1993 and, in October 1996, the Enid Blyton award, The Enid, was given to those who have made outstanding contributions towards children. The Enid Blyton Society was formed in early 1995, to provide "a focal point for collectors and enthusiasts of Enid Blyton" through its thrice-annual Enid Blyton Society Journal, its annual Enid Blyton Day and its website. On 16 December 1996, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about Blyton, Secret Lives. To celebrate her centenary in 1997, exhibitions were put on at the London Toy & Model Museum (now closed), Hereford and Worcester County Museum and Bromley Library and, on 9 September, the Royal Mail issued centenary stamps.
The London-based entertainment and retail company Trocadero plc purchased Blyton's Darrell Waters Ltd in 1995 for £14.6 million and established a subsidiary, Enid Blyton Ltd, to handle all intellectual properties, character brands and media in Blyton's works. The group changed its name to Chorion in 1998 but, after financial difficulties in 2012, sold its assets. Hachette UK acquired from Chorion world rights in the Blyton estate in March 2013, including The Famous Five series but excluding the rights to Noddy, which had been sold to DreamWorks Classics (formerly Classic Media, now a subsidiary of DreamWorks Animation) in 2012.
Blyton's granddaughter, Sophie Smallwood, wrote a new Noddy book to celebrate the character's 60th birthday, 46 years after the last book was published; Noddy and the Farmyard Muddle (2009) was illustrated by Robert Tyndall. In February 2011, the manuscript of a previously unknown Blyton novel, Mr Tumpy's Caravan, was discovered by the archivist at Seven Stories, National Centre for Children's Books in a collection of papers belonging to Blyton's daughter Gillian, purchased by Seven Stories in 2010 following her death. It was initially thought to belong to a comic strip collection of the same name published in 1949, but it appears to be unrelated and is believed to be something written in the 1930s, which had been rejected by a publisher.
In a 1982 survey of 10,000 eleven-year-old children, Blyton was voted their most popular writer. She is the world's fourth most-translated author, behind Agatha Christie, Jules Verne and William Shakespeare with her books being translated into 90 languages. From 2000 to 2010, Blyton was listed as a Top Ten author, selling almost 8 million copies (worth £31.2 million) in the UK alone. In 2003, The Magic Faraway Tree was voted 66th in the BBC's Big Read. In the 2008 Costa Book Awards, Blyton was voted Britain's best-loved author. Her books continue to be very popular among children in Commonwealth nations such as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malta, New Zealand and Australia, and around the world. They have also seen a surge of popularity in China, where they are "big with every generation". In March 2004, Chorion and the Chinese publisher Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press negotiated an agreement over the Noddy franchise, which included bringing the character to an animated series on television, with a potential audience of a further 95 million children under the age of five. Chorion spent around £10 million digitising Noddy and, as of 2002, had made television agreements with at least 11 countries worldwide.
Novelists influenced by Blyton include the crime writer Denise Danks, whose fictional detective Georgina Powers is based on George from the Famous Five. Peter Hunt's A Step off the Path (1985) is also influenced by the Famous Five, and the St. Clare's and Malory Towers series provided the inspiration for Jacqueline Wilson's Double Act (1996) and Adèle Geras's Egerton Hall trilogy (1990–92) respectively. Blyton was important to Stieg Larsson. "The series Stieg Larsson most often mentioned were the Famous Five and the Adventure books."
Critical backlash
A.H. Thompson, who compiled an extensive overview of censorship efforts in the United Kingdom's public libraries, dedicated an entire chapter to "The Enid Blyton Affair", and wrote of her in 1975:
Blyton's range of plots and settings has been described as limited, repetitive and continually recycled. Many of her books were critically assessed by teachers and librarians, deemed unfit for children to read, and removed from syllabuses and public libraries. Responding to claims that her moral views were "dependably predictable", Blyton commented that "most of you could write down perfectly correctly all the things that I believe in and stand for – you have found them in my books, and a writer's books are always a faithful reflection of himself".
From the 1930s to the 1950s the BBC operated a de facto ban on dramatising Blyton's books for radio, considering her to be a "second-rater" whose work was without literary merit. The children's literary critic Margery Fisher likened Blyton's books to "slow poison", and Jean E. Sutcliffe of the BBC's schools broadcast department wrote of Blyton's ability to churn out "mediocre material", noting that "her capacity to do so amounts to genius ... anyone else would have died of boredom long ago". Michael Rosen, Children's Laureate from 2007 until 2009, wrote that "I find myself flinching at occasional bursts of snobbery and the assumed level of privilege of the children and families in the books." The children's author Anne Fine presented an overview of the concerns about Blyton's work and responses to them on BBC Radio 4 in November 2008, in which she noted the "drip, drip, drip of disapproval" associated with the books. Blyton's response to her critics was that she was uninterested in the views of anyone over the age of 12, stating that half the attacks on her work were motivated by jealousy and the rest came from "stupid people who don't know what they're talking about because they've never read any of my books".
Despite criticism by contemporaries that her work's quality began to suffer in the 1950s at the expense of its increasing volume, Blyton nevertheless capitalised on being generally regarded at the time as "a more 'savoury', English alternative" to what some considered an "invasion" of Britain by American culture, in the form of "rock music, horror comics, television, teenage culture, delinquency, and Disney".
According to British academic Nicholas Tucker, the works of Enid Blyton have been "banned from more public libraries over the years than is the case with any other adult or children's author", though such attempts to quell the popularity of her books over the years seem to have been largely unsuccessful, and "she still remains very widely read".
Simplicity
Some librarians felt that Blyton's restricted use of language, a conscious product of her teaching background, was prejudicial to an appreciation of more literary qualities. In a scathing article published in Encounter in 1958, the journalist Colin Welch remarked that it was "hard to see how a diet of Miss Blyton could help with the 11-plus or even with the Cambridge English Tripos", but reserved his harshest criticism for Blyton's Noddy, describing him as an "unnaturally priggish ... sanctimonious ... witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll."
The author and educational psychologist Nicholas Tucker notes that it was common to see Blyton cited as people's favourite or least favourite author according to their age, and argues that her books create an "encapsulated world for young readers that simply dissolves with age, leaving behind only memories of excitement and strong identification". Fred Inglis considers Blyton's books to be technically easy to read, but to also be "emotionally and cognitively easy". He mentions that the psychologist Michael Woods believed that Blyton was different from many other older authors writing for children in that she seemed untroubled by presenting them with a world that differed from reality. Woods surmised that Blyton "was a child, she thought as a child, and wrote as a child ... the basic feeling is essentially pre-adolescent ... Enid Blyton has no moral dilemmas ... Inevitably Enid Blyton was labelled by rumour a child-hater. If true, such a fact should come as no surprise to us, for as a child herself all other children can be nothing but rivals for her." Inglis argues though that Blyton was clearly devoted to children and put an enormous amount of energy into her work, with a powerful belief in "representing the crude moral diagrams and garish fantasies of a readership". Blyton's daughter Imogen has stated that she "loved a relationship with children through her books", but real children were an intrusion, and there was no room for intruders in the world that Blyton occupied through her writing.
Accusations of racism, xenophobia and sexism
Accusations of racism in Blyton's books were first made by Lena Jeger in a Guardian article published in 1966. In the context of discussing possible moves to restrict publications inciting racial hatred, Jeger was critical of Blyton's The Little Black Doll, originally published in 1937. Sambo, the black doll of the title, is hated by his owner and other toys owing to his "ugly black face", and runs away. A shower of "magic rain" washes his face clean, after which he is welcomed back home with his now pink face. Jamaica Kincaid also considers the Noddy books to be "deeply racist" because of the blonde children and the black golliwogs. In Blyton's 1944 novel The Island of Adventure, a black servant named Jo-Jo is very intelligent, but is particularly cruel to the children.
Accusations of xenophobia were also made. As George Greenfield observed, "Enid was very much part of that between the wars middle class which believed that foreigners were untrustworthy or funny or sometimes both". The publisher Macmillan conducted an internal assessment of Blyton's The Mystery That Never Was, submitted to them at the height of her fame in 1960. The review was carried out by the author and books editor Phyllis Hartnoll, in whose view "There is a faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia in the author's attitude to the thieves; they are 'foreign' ... and this seems to be regarded as sufficient to explain their criminality." Macmillan rejected the manuscript, but it was published by William Collins in 1961, and then again in 1965 and 1983.
Blyton's depictions of boys and girls are considered by many critics to be sexist. In a Guardian article published in 2005 Lucy Mangan proposed that The Famous Five series depicts a power struggle between Julian, Dick and George (Georgina), in which the female characters either act like boys or are talked down to, as when Dick lectures George: "it's really time you gave up thinking you're as good as a boy".
Revisions to later editions
To address criticisms levelled at Blyton's work some later editions have been altered to reflect more politically progressive attitudes towards issues such as race, gender, violence between young persons, the treatment of children by adults, and legal changes in Britain as to what is allowable for young children to do in the years since the stories were originally written (e.g. purchasing fireworks); modern reprints of the Noddy series substitute teddy bears or goblins for golliwogs, for instance. The golliwogs who steal Noddy's car and dump him naked in the Dark Wood in Here Comes Noddy Again are replaced by goblins in the 1986 revision, who strip Noddy only of his shoes and hat and return at the end of the story to apologise.The Faraway Tree's Dame Slap, who made regular use of corporal punishment, was changed to Dame Snap who no longer did so, and the names of Dick and Fanny in the same series were changed to Rick and Frannie. Characters in the Malory Towers and St. Clare's series are no longer spanked or threatened with a spanking, but are instead scolded. References to George's short hair making her look like a boy were removed in revisions to Five on a Hike Together, reflecting the idea that girls need not have long hair to be considered feminine or normal. Anne of The Famous Five stating that boys cannot wear pretty dresses or like girls' dolls was removed. In The Adventurous Four, the names of the young twin girls were changed from Jill and Mary to Pippa and Zoe.
In 2010 Hodder, the publisher of the Famous Five series, announced its intention to update the language used in the books, of which it sold more than half a million copies a year. The changes, which Hodder described as "subtle", mainly affect the dialogue rather than the narrative. For instance, "school tunic" becomes "uniform", "mother and father" and "mother and daddy" (this latter one used by young female characters and deemed sexist) become "mum and dad", "bathing" is replaced by "swimming", and "jersey" by "jumper". Some commentators see the changes as necessary to encourage modern readers, whereas others regard them as unnecessary and patronising. In 2016 Hodder's parent company Hachette announced that they would abandon the revisions as, based on feedback, they had not been a success.
Stage, film and television adaptations
In 1954 Blyton adapted Noddy for the stage, producing the Noddy in Toyland pantomime in just two or three weeks. The production was staged at the 2660-seat Stoll Theatre in Kingsway, London at Christmas. Its popularity resulted in the show running during the Christmas season for five or six years. Blyton was delighted with its reception by children in the audience, and attended the theatre three or four times a week. TV adaptations of Noddy since 1954 include one in the 1970s narrated by Richard Briers. In 1955 a stage play based on the Famous Five was produced, and in January 1997 the King's Head Theatre embarked on a six-month tour of the UK with The Famous Five Musical, to commemorate Blyton's centenary. On 21 November 1998 The Secret Seven Save the World was first performed at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff.
There have also been several film and television adaptations of the Famous Five: by the Children's Film Foundation in 1957 and 1964, Southern Television in 1978–79, and Zenith Productions in 1995–97. The series was also adapted for the German film Fünf Freunde, directed by Mike Marzuk and released in 2011.
The Comic Strip, a group of British comedians, produced two extreme parodies of the Famous Five for Channel 4 television: Five Go Mad in Dorset, broadcast in 1982, and Five Go Mad on Mescalin, broadcast the following year. A third in the series, Five Go to Rehab, was broadcast on Sky in 2012.
Blyton's The Faraway Tree series of books has also been adapted to television and film. On 29 September 1997 the BBC began broadcasting an animated series called The Enchanted Lands, based on the series. It was announced in October 2014 that a deal had been signed with publishers Hachette for "The Faraway Tree" series to be adapted into a live-action film by director Sam Mendes’ production company. Marlene Johnson, head of children's books at Hachette, said: "Enid Blyton was a passionate advocate of children’s storytelling, and The Magic Faraway Tree is a fantastic example of her creative imagination."
Blyton's Malory Towers has been adapted into a musical of the same name by Emma Rice's theatre company. It was scheduled to do a UK spring tour in 2020 which has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2019, Malory Towers was adapted as a 13 part TV series for the BBC. It is made partly in Toronto and partly in the UK in association with Canada's Family Channel. The series went to air in the UK from April 2020.
Papers
Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle upon Tyne, holds the largest public collection of Blyton's papers and typescripts. The Seven Stories collection contains a significant number of Blyton's typescripts, including the previously unpublished novel, Mr Tumpy's Caravan'', as well as personal papers and diaries. The purchase of the material in 2010 was made possible by special funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, and two private donations.
See also
Enid Blyton bibliography
Enid Blyton Society
Enid Blyton's illustrators
References
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
Watch and listen to BBC archive programmes about Enid Blyton
Enid Blyton letters from the BBC archive
Enid Blyton Collection
Newsreel footage of Enid Blyton at home with her family, 1946
The Enid Blyton Collection at Seven Stories
Seven Stories' Enid Blyton Blog
1897 births
1968 deaths
English children's writers
20th-century English novelists
20th-century English women writers
Writers from London
People from East Dulwich
People from Hampstead
Deaths from Alzheimer's disease
Neurological disease deaths in England
Golders Green Crematorium
English women novelists
Women mystery writers
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Enthalpy , a property of a thermodynamic system, is the sum of the system's internal energy and the product of its pressure and volume. It is a state function used in many measurements in chemical, biological, and physical systems at a constant pressure, which is conveniently provided by the large ambient atmosphere. The pressure–volume term expresses the work required to establish the system's physical dimensions, i.e. to make room for it by displacing its surroundings. The pressure-volume term is very small for solids and liquids at common conditions, and fairly small for gases. Therefore, enthalpy is a stand-in for energy in chemical systems; bond, lattice, solvation and other "energies" in chemistry are actually enthalpy differences. As a state function, enthalpy depends only on the final configuration of internal energy, pressure, and volume, not on the path taken to achieve it.
In the International System of Units (SI), the unit of measurement for enthalpy is the joule. Other historical conventional units still in use include the calorie and the British thermal unit (BTU).
The total enthalpy of a system cannot be measured directly because the internal energy contains components that are unknown, not easily accessible, or are not of interest in thermodynamics. In practice, a change in enthalpy is the preferred expression for measurements at constant pressure because it simplifies the description of energy transfer. When transfer of matter into or out of the system is also prevented and no electrical or shaft work is done, at constant pressure the enthalpy change equals the energy exchanged with the environment by heat.
In chemistry, the standard enthalpy of reaction is the enthalpy change when reactants in their standard states (; usually ) change to products in their standard states. This quantity is the standard heat of reaction at constant pressure and temperature, but it can be measured by calorimetric methods even if the temperature does vary during the measurement, provided that the initial and final pressure and temperature correspond to the standard state. The value does not depend on the path from initial to final state because enthalpy is a state function.
Enthalpies of chemical substances are usually listed for pressure as a standard state. Enthalpies and enthalpy changes for reactions vary as a function of temperature, but tables generally list the standard heats of formation of substances at . For endothermic (heat-absorbing) processes, the change is a positive value; for exothermic (heat-releasing) processes it is negative.
The enthalpy of an ideal gas is independent of its pressure or volume, and depends only on its temperature, which correlates to its thermal energy. Real gases at common temperatures and pressures often closely approximate this behavior, which simplifies practical thermodynamic design and analysis.
Definition
The enthalpy of a thermodynamic system is defined as the sum of its internal energy and the product of its pressure and volume:
,
where is the internal energy, is pressure, and is the volume of the system.
Enthalpy is an extensive property; it is proportional to the size of the system (for homogeneous systems). As intensive properties, the specific enthalpy is referenced to a unit of mass of the system, and the molar enthalpy , where is the number of moles. For inhomogeneous systems the enthalpy is the sum of the enthalpies of the component subsystems:
where
is the total enthalpy of all the subsystems,
refers to the various subsystems,
refers to the enthalpy of each subsystem.
A closed system may lie in thermodynamic equilibrium in a static gravitational field, so that its pressure varies continuously with altitude, while, because of the equilibrium requirement, its temperature is invariant with altitude. (Correspondingly, the system's gravitational potential energy density also varies with altitude.) Then the enthalpy summation becomes an integral:
where
("rho") is density (mass per unit volume),
is the specific enthalpy (enthalpy per unit mass),
represents the enthalpy density (enthalpy per unit volume),
denotes an infinitesimally small element of volume within the system, for example, the volume of an infinitesimally thin horizontal layer, the integral therefore represents the sum of the enthalpies of all the elements of the volume.
The enthalpy of a closed homogeneous system is its energy function , with its entropy and its pressure as natural state variables which provide a differential relation for dH of the simplest form, derived as follows. We start from the first law of thermodynamics for closed systems for an infinitesimal process:
where
is a small amount of heat added to the system,
is a small amount of work performed by the system.
In a homogeneous system in which only reversible processes or pure heat transfer are considered, the second law of thermodynamics gives , with the absolute temperature and the infinitesimal change in entropy of the system. Furthermore, if only work is done, . As a result,
Adding to both sides of this expression gives
or
So
and the coefficients of the natural variable differentials dS and dp are just the single variables T and V.
Other expressions
The above expression of in terms of entropy and pressure may be unfamiliar to some readers. There are also expressions in terms of more directly measurable variables such as temperature and pressure:
Here is the heat capacity at constant pressure and is the coefficient of (cubic) thermal expansion:
With this expression one can, in principle, determine the enthalpy if and are known as functions of and . However the expression is more complicated than because T is not a natural variable for the enthalpy H.
At constant pressure, dP = 0 so that For an ideal gas, dH reduces to this form even if the process involves a pressure change, because ,.
In a more general form, the first law describes the internal energy with additional terms involving the chemical potential and the number of particles of various types. The differential statement for then becomes
where is the chemical potential per particle for an -type particle, and is the number of such particles. The last term can also be written as (with the number of moles of component added to the system and, in this case, the molar chemical potential) or as (with the mass of component added to the system and, in this case, the specific chemical potential).
Characteristic functions and natural state variables
The enthalpy, , expresses the thermodynamics of a system in the energy representation. As a function of state, its arguments include both one intensive and several extensive state variables. The state variables , , and are said to be the natural state variables in this representation. They are suitable for describing processes in which they are determined by factors in the surroundings. For example, when a virtual parcel of atmospheric air moves to a different altitude, the pressure surrounding it changes, and the process is often so rapid that there is too little time for heat transfer. This is the basis of the so-called adiabatic approximation that is used in meteorology.
Conjugate with the enthalpy, with these arguments, the other characteristic function of state of a thermodynamic system is its entropy, as a function, , of the same list of variables of state, except that the entropy, , is replaced in the list by the enthalpy, . It expresses the entropy representation. The state variables , , and are said to be the natural state variables in this representation. They are suitable for describing processes in which they are experimentally controlled. For example, and can be controlled by allowing heat transfer, and by varying only the external pressure on the piston that sets the volume of the system.
Physical interpretation
The term is the energy of the system, and the term can be interpreted as the work that would be required to "make room" for the system if the pressure of the environment remained constant. When a system, for example, moles of a gas of volume at pressure and temperature , is created or brought to its present state from absolute zero, energy must be supplied equal to its internal energy plus , where is the work done in pushing against the ambient (atmospheric) pressure.
In physics and statistical mechanics it may be more interesting to study the internal properties of a constant-volume system and therefore the internal energy is used. In chemistry, experiments are often conducted at constant atmospheric pressure, and the pressure–volume work represents a small, well-defined energy exchange with the atmosphere, so that is the appropriate expression for the heat of reaction. For a heat engine, the change in its enthalpy after a full cycle is equal to zero, since the final and initial state are equal.
Relationship to heat
In order to discuss the relation between the enthalpy increase and heat supply, we return to the first law for closed systems, with the physics sign convention: , where the heat is supplied by conduction, radiation, Joule heating, or friction from stirring by a shaft with paddles or by an externally driven magnetic field acting on an internal rotor (which is surroundings-based work, but contributes to system-based heat). We apply it to the special case with a constant pressure at the surface. In this case the work is given by (where is the pressure at the surface, is the increase of the volume of the system). Cases of long range electromagnetic interaction require further state variables in their formulation, and are not considered here. In this case the first law reads:
Now,
So
If the system is under constant pressure, and consequently, the increase in enthalpy of the system is equal to the heat added or given off:
This is why the now-obsolete term heat content was used in the 19th century.
Applications
In thermodynamics, one can calculate enthalpy by determining the requirements for creating a system from "nothingness"; the mechanical work required, , differs based upon the conditions that obtain during the creation of the thermodynamic system.
Energy must be supplied to remove particles from the surroundings to make space for the creation of the system, assuming that the pressure remains constant; this is the term. The supplied energy must also provide the change in internal energy, , which includes activation energies, ionization energies, mixing energies, vaporization energies, chemical bond energies, and so forth. Together, these constitute the change in the enthalpy . For systems at constant pressure, with no external work done other than the work, the change in enthalpy is the heat received by the system.
For a simple system with a constant number of particles at constant pressure, the difference in enthalpy is the maximum amount of thermal energy derivable from an isobaric thermodynamic process.
Heat of reaction
The total enthalpy of a system cannot be measured directly; the enthalpy change of a system is measured instead. Enthalpy change is defined by the following equation:
where
is the "enthalpy change",
is the final enthalpy of the system (in a chemical reaction, the enthalpy of the products or the system at equilibrium),
is the initial enthalpy of the system (in a chemical reaction, the enthalpy of the reactants).
For an exothermic reaction at constant pressure, the system's change in enthalpy, , is negative due to the products of the reaction having a smaller enthalpy than the reactants, and equals the heat released in the reaction if no electrical or shaft work is done. In other words, the overall decrease in enthalpy is achieved by the generation of heat. Conversely, for a constant-pressure endothermic reaction, is positive and equal to the heat absorbed in the reaction.
From the definition of enthalpy as , the enthalpy change at constant pressure is . However for most chemical reactions, the work term is much smaller than the internal energy change , which is approximately equal to . As an example, for the combustion of carbon monoxide 2 CO(g) + O2(g) → 2 CO2(g), and . Since the differences are so small, reaction enthalpies are often described as reaction energies and analyzed in terms of bond energies.
Specific enthalpy
The specific enthalpy of a uniform system is defined as where is the mass of the system. The SI unit for specific enthalpy is joule per kilogram. It can be expressed in other specific quantities by , where is the specific internal energy, is the pressure, and is specific volume, which is equal to , where is the density.
Enthalpy changes
An enthalpy change describes the change in enthalpy observed in the constituents of a thermodynamic system when undergoing a transformation or chemical reaction. It is the difference between the enthalpy after the process has completed, i.e. the enthalpy of the products assuming that the reaction goes to completion, and the initial enthalpy of the system, namely the reactants. These processes are specified solely by their initial and final states, so that the enthalpy change for the reverse is the negative of that for the forward process.
A common standard enthalpy change is the enthalpy of formation, which has been determined for a large number of substances. Enthalpy changes are routinely measured and compiled in chemical and physical reference works, such as the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. The following is a selection of enthalpy changes commonly recognized in thermodynamics.
When used in these recognized terms the qualifier change is usually dropped and the property is simply termed enthalpy of 'process. Since these properties are often used as reference values it is very common to quote them for a standardized set of environmental parameters, or standard conditions, including:
A pressure of one atmosphere (1 atm or 101.325 kPa) or 1 bar
A temperature of 25 °C or 298.15 K
A concentration of 1.0 M when the element or compound is present in solution
Elements or compounds in their normal physical states, i.e. standard state
For such standardized values the name of the enthalpy is commonly prefixed with the term standard, e.g. standard enthalpy of formation.
Chemical properties:
Enthalpy of reaction, defined as the enthalpy change observed in a constituent of a thermodynamic system when one mole of substance reacts completely.
Enthalpy of formation, defined as the enthalpy change observed in a constituent of a thermodynamic system when one mole of a compound is formed from its elementary antecedents.
Enthalpy of combustion, defined as the enthalpy change observed in a constituent of a thermodynamic system when one mole of a substance burns completely with oxygen.
Enthalpy of hydrogenation, defined as the enthalpy change observed in a constituent of a thermodynamic system when one mole of an unsaturated compound reacts completely with an excess of hydrogen to form a saturated compound.
Enthalpy of atomization, defined as the enthalpy change required to separate one mole of a substance into its constituent atoms completely.
Enthalpy of neutralization, defined as the enthalpy change observed in a constituent of a thermodynamic system when one mole of water is formed when an acid and a base react.
Standard Enthalpy of solution, defined as the enthalpy change observed in a constituent of a thermodynamic system when one mole of a solute is dissolved completely in an excess of solvent, so that the solution is at infinite dilution.
Standard enthalpy of Denaturation (biochemistry), defined as the enthalpy change required to denature one mole of compound.
Enthalpy of hydration, defined as the enthalpy change observed when one mole of gaseous ions are completely dissolved in water forming one mole of aqueous ions.
Physical properties:
Enthalpy of fusion, defined as the enthalpy change required to completely change the state of one mole of substance from solid to liquid.
Enthalpy of vaporization, defined as the enthalpy change required to completely change the state of one mole of substance from liquid to gas.
Enthalpy of sublimation, defined as the enthalpy change required to completely change the state of one mole of substance from solid to gas.
Lattice enthalpy, defined as the energy required to separate one mole of an ionic compound into separated gaseous ions to an infinite distance apart (meaning no force of attraction).
Enthalpy of mixing, defined as the enthalpy change upon mixing of two (non-reacting) chemical substances.
Open systems
In thermodynamic open systems, mass (of substances) may flow in and out of the system boundaries. The first law of thermodynamics for open systems states: The increase in the internal energy of a system is equal to the amount of energy added to the system by mass flowing in and by heating, minus the amount lost by mass flowing out and in the form of work done by the system:
where is the average internal energy entering the system, and is the average internal energy leaving the system.
The region of space enclosed by the boundaries of the open system is usually called a control volume, and it may or may not correspond to physical walls. If we choose the shape of the control volume such that all flow in or out occurs perpendicular to its surface, then the flow of mass into the system performs work as if it were a piston of fluid pushing mass into the system, and the system performs work on the flow of mass out as if it were driving a piston of fluid. There are then two types of work performed: flow work described above, which is performed on the fluid (this is also often called work), and shaft work, which may be performed on some mechanical device such as a turbine or pump.
These two types of work are expressed in the equation
Substitution into the equation above for the control volume (cv) yields:
The definition of enthalpy, , permits us to use this thermodynamic potential to account for both internal energy and work in fluids for open systems:
If we allow also the system boundary to move (e.g. due to moving pistons), we get a rather general form of the first law for open systems. In terms of time derivatives it reads:
with sums over the various places where heat is supplied, mass flows into the system, and boundaries are moving. The terms represent enthalpy flows, which can be written as
with the mass flow and the molar flow at position respectively. The term represents the rate of change of the system volume at position that results in power done by the system. The parameter represents all other forms of power done by the system such as shaft power, but it can also be, say, electric power produced by an electrical power plant.
Note that the previous expression holds true only if the kinetic energy flow rate is conserved between system inlet and outlet. Otherwise, it has to be included in the enthalpy balance. During steady-state operation of a device (see turbine, pump, and engine), the average may be set equal to zero. This yields a useful expression for the average power generation for these devices in the absence of chemical reactions:
where the angle brackets denote time averages. The technical importance of the enthalpy is directly related to its presence in the first law for open systems, as formulated above.
Diagrams
The enthalpy values of important substances can be obtained using commercial software. Practically all relevant material properties can be obtained either in tabular or in graphical form. There are many types of diagrams, such as diagrams, which give the specific enthalpy as function of temperature for various pressures, and diagrams, which give as function of for various . One of the most common diagrams is the temperature–specific entropy diagram ( diagram). It gives the melting curve and saturated liquid and vapor values together with isobars and isenthalps. These diagrams are powerful tools in the hands of the thermal engineer.
Some basic applications
The points a through h in the figure play a role in the discussion in this section.
{|class="wikitable" style="text-align:center"
!Point!! (K)!! (bar)!! ()!! (kJ/kg)
|-
|a||300||1||6.85||461
|-
|b||380||2||6.85||530
|-
|c||300||200||5.16||430
|-
|d||270||1||6.79||430
|-
|e||108||13||3.55||100
|-
|f||77.2||1||3.75||100
|-
|g||77.2||1||2.83||28
|-
|h||77.2||1||5.41||230
|}
Points e and g are saturated liquids, and point h is a saturated gas.
Throttling
One of the simple applications of the concept of enthalpy is the so-called throttling process, also known as Joule–Thomson expansion. It concerns a steady adiabatic flow of a fluid through a flow resistance (valve, porous plug, or any other type of flow resistance) as shown in the figure. This process is very important, since it is at the heart of domestic refrigerators, where it is responsible for the temperature drop between ambient temperature and the interior of the refrigerator. It is also the final stage in many types of liquefiers.
For a steady state flow regime, the enthalpy of the system (dotted rectangle) has to be constant. Hence
Since the mass flow is constant, the specific enthalpies at the two sides of the flow resistance are the same:
that is, the enthalpy per unit mass does not change during the throttling. The consequences of this relation can be demonstrated using the diagram above. Point c is at 200 bar and room temperature (300 K). A Joule–Thomson expansion from 200 bar to 1 bar follows a curve of constant enthalpy of roughly 425 kJ/kg (not shown in the diagram) lying between the 400 and 450 kJ/kg isenthalps and ends in point d, which is at a temperature of about 270 K. Hence the expansion from 200 bar to 1 bar cools nitrogen from 300 K to 270 K. In the valve, there is a lot of friction, and a lot of entropy is produced, but still the final temperature is below the starting value.
Point e is chosen so that it is on the saturated liquid line with = 100 kJ/kg. It corresponds roughly with = 13 bar and = 108 K. Throttling from this point to a pressure of 1 bar ends in the two-phase region (point f). This means that a mixture of gas and liquid leaves the throttling valve. Since the enthalpy is an extensive parameter, the enthalpy in f () is equal to the enthalpy in g () multiplied by the liquid fraction in f () plus the enthalpy in h () multiplied by the gas fraction in f . So
With numbers: , so = 0.64. This means that the mass fraction of the liquid in the liquid–gas mixture that leaves the throttling valve is 64%.
Compressors
A power is applied e.g. as electrical power. If the compression is adiabatic, the gas temperature goes up. In the reversible case it would be at constant entropy, which corresponds with a vertical line in the diagram. For example, compressing nitrogen from 1 bar (point a) to 2 bar (point b''') would result in a temperature increase from 300 K to 380 K. In order to let the compressed gas exit at ambient temperature , heat exchange, e.g. by cooling water, is necessary. In the ideal case the compression is isothermal. The average heat flow to the surroundings is . Since the system is in the steady state the first law gives
The minimal power needed for the compression is realized if the compression is reversible. In that case the second law of thermodynamics for open systems gives
Eliminating gives for the minimal power
For example, compressing 1 kg of nitrogen from 1 bar to 200 bar costs at least . With the data, obtained with the diagram, we find a value of 476 kJ/kg.
The relation for the power can be further simplified by writing it as
With , this results in the final relation
History and etymology
The term enthalpy was coined relatively late in the history of thermodynamics, in the early 20th century. Energy was introduced in a modern sense by Thomas Young in 1802, while entropy was coined by Rudolf Clausius in 1865. Energy uses the root of the Greek word (ergon), meaning "work", to express the idea of capacity to perform work. Entropy uses the Greek word (tropē) meaning transformation or turning. Enthalpy uses the root of the Greek word (thalpos) "warmth, heat".
The term expresses the obsolete concept of heat content, as refers to the amount of heat gained in a process at constant pressure only, but not in the general case when pressure is variable.
Josiah Willard Gibbs used the term "a heat function for constant pressure" for clarity.
Introduction of the concept of "heat content" is associated with Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron and Rudolf Clausius (Clausius–Clapeyron relation, 1850).
The term enthalpy first appeared in print in 1909. It is attributed to Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, who most likely introduced it orally the year before, at the first meeting of the Institute of Refrigeration in Paris.
It gained currency only in the 1920s, notably with the Mollier Steam Tables and Diagrams'', published in 1927.
Until the 1920s, the symbol was used, somewhat inconsistently, for "heat" in general.
The definition of as strictly limited to enthalpy or "heat content at constant pressure" was formally proposed by Alfred W. Porter in 1922.
See also
Standard enthalpy change of formation (data table)
Calorimetry
Calorimeter
Departure function
Hess's law
Isenthalpic process
Laws of thermodynamics
Stagnation enthalpy
Thermodynamic databases for pure substances
Notes
References
Bibliography
External links
Enthalpy – Eric Weisstein's World of Physics
Enthalpy – Georgia State University
Enthalpy example calculations – Texas A&M University Chemistry Department
State functions
Energy (physics)
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An emulsion is a mixture of two or more liquids that are normally immiscible (unmixable or unblendable) owing to liquid-liquid phase separation. Emulsions are part of a more general class of two-phase systems of matter called colloids. Although the terms colloid and emulsion are sometimes used interchangeably, emulsion should be used when both phases, dispersed and continuous, are liquids. In an emulsion, one liquid (the dispersed phase) is dispersed in the other (the continuous phase). Examples of emulsions include vinaigrettes, homogenized milk, liquid biomolecular condensates, and some cutting fluids for metal working.
Two liquids can form different types of emulsions. As an example, oil and water can form, first, an oil-in-water emulsion, in which the oil is the dispersed phase, and water is the continuous phase. Second, they can form a water-in-oil emulsion, in which water is the dispersed phase and oil is the continuous phase. Multiple emulsions are also possible, including a "water-in-oil-in-water" emulsion and an "oil-in-water-in-oil" emulsion.
Emulsions, being liquids, do not exhibit a static internal structure. The droplets dispersed in the continuous phase (sometimes referred to as the "dispersion medium") are usually assumed to be statistically distributed to produce roughly spherical droplets.
The term "emulsion" is also used to refer to the photo-sensitive side of photographic film. Such a photographic emulsion consists of silver halide colloidal particles dispersed in a gelatin matrix. Nuclear emulsions are similar to photographic emulsions, except that they are used in particle physics to detect high-energy elementary particles.
Etymology
The word "emulsion" comes from the Latin emulgere "to milk out", from ex "out" + mulgere "to milk", as milk is an emulsion of fat and water, along with other components, including colloidal casein micelles (a type of secreted biomolecular condensate).
Appearance and properties
Emulsions contain both a dispersed and a continuous phase, with the boundary between the phases called the "interface". Emulsions tend to have a cloudy appearance because the many phase interfaces scatter light as it passes through the emulsion. Emulsions appear white when all light is scattered equally. If the emulsion is dilute enough, higher-frequency (low-wavelength) light will be scattered more, and the emulsion will appear bluer – this is called the "Tyndall effect". If the emulsion is concentrated enough, the color will be distorted toward comparatively longer wavelengths, and will appear more yellow. This phenomenon is easily observable when comparing skimmed milk, which contains little fat, to cream, which contains a much higher concentration of milk fat. One example would be a mixture of water and oil.
Two special classes of emulsions – microemulsions and nanoemulsions, with droplet sizes below 100 nm – appear translucent. This property is due to the fact that light waves are scattered by the droplets only if their sizes exceed about one-quarter of the wavelength of the incident light. Since the visible spectrum of light is composed of wavelengths between 390 and 750 nanometers (nm), if the droplet sizes in the emulsion are below about 100 nm, the light can penetrate through the emulsion without being scattered. Due to their similarity in appearance, translucent nanoemulsions and microemulsions are frequently confused. Unlike translucent nanoemulsions, which require specialized equipment to be produced, microemulsions are spontaneously formed by "solubilizing" oil molecules with a mixture of surfactants, co-surfactants, and co-solvents. The required surfactant concentration in a microemulsion is, however, several times higher than that in a translucent nanoemulsion, and significantly exceeds the concentration of the dispersed phase. Because of many undesirable side-effects caused by surfactants, their presence is disadvantageous or prohibitive in many applications. In addition, the stability of a microemulsion is often easily compromised by dilution, by heating, or by changing pH levels.
Common emulsions are inherently unstable and, thus, do not tend to form spontaneously. Energy input – through shaking, stirring, homogenizing, or exposure to power ultrasound – is needed to form an emulsion. Over time, emulsions tend to revert to the stable state of the phases comprising the emulsion. An example of this is seen in the separation of the oil and vinegar components of vinaigrette, an unstable emulsion that will quickly separate unless shaken almost continuously. There are important exceptions to this rule – microemulsions are thermodynamically stable, while translucent nanoemulsions are kinetically stable.
Whether an emulsion of oil and water turns into a "water-in-oil" emulsion or an "oil-in-water" emulsion depends on the volume fraction of both phases and the type of emulsifier (surfactant) (see Emulsifier, below) present.
Instability
Emulsion stability refers to the ability of an emulsion to resist change in its properties over time. There are four types of instability in emulsions: flocculation, coalescence, creaming/sedimentation, and Ostwald ripening. Flocculation occurs when there is an attractive force between the droplets, so they form flocs, like bunches of grapes. This process can be desired, if controlled in its extent, to tune physical properties of emulsions such as their flow behaviour. Coalescence occurs when droplets bump into each other and combine to form a larger droplet, so the average droplet size increases over time. Emulsions can also undergo creaming, where the droplets rise to the top of the emulsion under the influence of buoyancy, or under the influence of the centripetal force induced when a centrifuge is used. Creaming is a common phenomenon in dairy and non-dairy beverages (i.e. milk, coffee milk, almond milk, soy milk) and usually does not change the droplet size. Sedimentation is the opposite phenomenon of creaming and normally observed in water-in-oil emulsions. Sedimentation happens when the dispersed phase is denser than the continuous phase and the gravitational forces pull the denser globules towards the bottom of the emulsion. Similar to creaming, sedimentation follows Stokes' law.
An appropriate "surface active agent" (or "surfactant") can increase the kinetic stability of an emulsion so that the size of the droplets does not change significantly with time. The stability of an emulsion, like a suspension, can be studied in terms of zeta potential, which indicates the repulsion between droplets or particles. If the size and dispersion of droplets does not change over time, it is said to be stable. For example, oil-in-water emulsions containing mono- and diglycerides and milk protein as surfactant showed that stable oil droplet size over 28 days storage at 25°C.
Monitoring physical stability
The stability of emulsions can be characterized using techniques such as light scattering, focused beam reflectance measurement, centrifugation, and rheology. Each method has advantages and disadvantages.
Accelerating methods for shelf life prediction
The kinetic process of destabilization can be rather long – up to several months, or even years for some products. Often the formulator must accelerate this process in order to test products in a reasonable time during product design. Thermal methods are the most commonly used – these consist of increasing the emulsion temperature to accelerate destabilization (if below critical temperatures for phase inversion or chemical degradation). Temperature affects not only the viscosity but also the interfacial tension in the case of non-ionic surfactants or, on a broader scope, interactions between droplets within the system. Storing an emulsion at high temperatures enables the simulation of realistic conditions for a product (e.g., a tube of sunscreen emulsion in a car in the summer heat), but also accelerates destabilization processes up to 200 times.
Mechanical methods of acceleration, including vibration, centrifugation, and agitation, can also be used.
These methods are almost always empirical, without a sound scientific basis.
Emulsifiers
An emulsifier (also known as an "emulgent") is a substance that stabilizes an emulsion by increasing its kinetic stability. Emulsifiers are part of a broader group of compounds known as surfactants, or "surface active agents". Surfactants (emulsifiers) are compounds that are typically amphiphilic, meaning they have a polar or hydrophilic (i.e. water-soluble) part and a non-polar (i.e. hydrophobic or lipophilic) part. Because of this, emulsifiers tend to have more or less solubility either in water or in oil. Emulsifiers that are more soluble in water (and conversely, less soluble in oil) will generally form oil-in-water emulsions, while emulsifiers that are more soluble in oil will form water-in-oil emulsions.
Examples of food emulsifiers are:
Egg yolk – in which the main emulsifying and thickening agent is lecithin. In fact, lecithos is the Greek word for egg yolk.
Mustard – where a variety of chemicals in the mucilage surrounding the seed hull act as emulsifiers
Soy lecithin is another emulsifier and thickener
Pickering stabilization – uses particles under certain circumstances
Sodium phosphates – not directly an emulsifier, but modifies behavior of other molecules, e.g. casein
Mono- and diglycerides – a common emulsifier found in many food products (coffee creamers, ice-creams, spreads, breads, cakes)
Sodium stearoyl lactylate
DATEM (diacetyl tartaric acid esters of mono- and diglycerides) – an emulsifier used primarily in baking
Simple cellulose – a particulate emulsifier derived from plant material using only water
Proteins – those with both hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions, e.g. sodium caseinate, as in meltable cheese product
Detergents are another class of surfactant, and will interact physically with both oil and water, thus stabilizing the interface between the oil and water droplets in suspension. This principle is exploited in soap, to remove grease for the purpose of cleaning. Many different emulsifiers are used in pharmacy to prepare emulsions such as creams and lotions. Common examples include emulsifying wax, polysorbate 20, and ceteareth 20.
Sometimes the inner phase itself can act as an emulsifier, and the result is a nanoemulsion, where the inner state disperses into "nano-size" droplets within the outer phase. A well-known example of this phenomenon, the "ouzo effect", happens when water is poured into a strong alcoholic anise-based beverage, such as ouzo, pastis, absinthe, arak, or raki. The anisolic compounds, which are soluble in ethanol, then form nano-size droplets and emulsify within the water. The resulting color of the drink is opaque and milky white.
Mechanisms of emulsification
A number of different chemical and physical processes and mechanisms can be involved in the process of emulsification:
Surface tension theory – according to this theory, emulsification takes place by reduction of interfacial tension between two phases
Repulsion theory – the emulsifying agent creates a film over one phase that forms globules, which repel each other. This repulsive force causes them to remain suspended in the dispersion medium
Viscosity modification – emulgents like acacia and tragacanth, which are hydrocolloids, as well as PEG (or polyethylene glycol), glycerine, and other polymers like CMC (carboxymethyl cellulose), all increase the viscosity of the medium, which helps create and maintain the suspension of globules of dispersed phase
Uses
In food
Oil-in-water emulsions are common in food products:
Crema (foam) in espresso – coffee oil in water (brewed coffee), unstable colloid
Mayonnaise and Hollandaise sauces – these are oil-in-water emulsions stabilized with egg yolk lecithin, or with other types of food additives, such as sodium stearoyl lactylate
Homogenized milk – an emulsion of milk fat in water, with milk proteins as the emulsifier
Vinaigrette – an emulsion of vegetable oil in vinegar, if this is prepared using only oil and vinegar (i.e., without an emulsifier), an unstable emulsion results
Water-in-oil emulsions are less common in food, but still exist:
Butter – an emulsion of water in butterfat
Margarine
Other foods can be turned into products similar to emulsions, for example meat emulsion is a suspension of meat in liquid that is similar to true emulsions.
In health care
In pharmaceutics, hairstyling, personal hygiene, and cosmetics, emulsions are frequently used. These are usually oil and water emulsions but dispersed, and which is continuous depends in many cases on the pharmaceutical formulation. These emulsions may be called creams, ointments, liniments (balms), pastes, films, or liquids, depending mostly on their oil-to-water ratios, other additives, and their intended route of administration. The first 5 are topical dosage forms, and may be used on the surface of the skin, transdermally, ophthalmically, rectally, or vaginally. A highly liquid emulsion may also be used orally, or may be injected in some cases.
Microemulsions are used to deliver vaccines and kill microbes. Typical emulsions used in these techniques are nanoemulsions of soybean oil, with particles that are 400–600 nm in diameter. The process is not chemical, as with other types of antimicrobial treatments, but mechanical. The smaller the droplet the greater the surface tension and thus the greater the force required to merge with other lipids. The oil is emulsified with detergents using a high-shear mixer to stabilize the emulsion so, when they encounter the lipids in the cell membrane or envelope of bacteria or viruses, they force the lipids to merge with themselves. On a mass scale, in effect this disintegrates the membrane and kills the pathogen. The soybean oil emulsion does not harm normal human cells, or the cells of most other higher organisms, with the exceptions of sperm cells and blood cells, which are vulnerable to nanoemulsions due to the peculiarities of their membrane structures. For this reason, these nanoemulsions are not currently used intravenously (IV). The most effective application of this type of nanoemulsion is for the disinfection of surfaces. Some types of nanoemulsions have been shown to effectively destroy HIV-1 and tuberculosis pathogens on non-porous surfaces.
In firefighting
Emulsifying agents are effective at extinguishing fires on small, thin-layer spills of flammable liquids (class B fires). Such agents encapsulate the fuel in a fuel-water emulsion, thereby trapping the flammable vapors in the water phase. This emulsion is achieved by applying an aqueous surfactant solution to the fuel through a high-pressure nozzle. Emulsifiers are not effective at extinguishing large fires involving bulk/deep liquid fuels, because the amount of emulsifier agent needed for extinguishment is a function of the volume of the fuel, whereas other agents such as aqueous film-forming foam need cover only the surface of the fuel to achieve vapor mitigation.
Chemical synthesis
Emulsions are used to manufacture polymer dispersions – polymer production in an emulsion 'phase' has a number of process advantages, including prevention of coagulation of product. Products produced by such polymerisations may be used as the emulsions – products including primary components for glues and paints. Synthetic latexes (rubbers) are also produced by this process.
See also
Emulsion dispersion
Emulsified fuel
Homogenizer
Liquid whistle
Miniemulsion
Pickering emulsion
Rheology
Water-in-water emulsion
References
Other sources
Handbook of Nanostructured Materials and Nanotechnology; Nalwa, H.S., Ed.; Academic Press: New York, NY, USA, 2000; Volume 5, pp. 501–575
Chemical mixtures
Colloidal chemistry
Colloids
Condensed matter physics
Dosage forms
Drug delivery devices
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Edward Gibbon (; 8 May 173716 January 1794) was an English historian, writer, and member of parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organised religion.
Early life: 1737–1752
Edward Gibbon was born in 1737, the son of Edward and Judith Gibbon at Lime Grove, in the town of Putney, Surrey. He had six siblings, five brothers and one sister, all of whom died in infancy. His grandfather, also named Edward, had lost his assets as a result of the South Sea bubble stock-market collapse in 1720, but eventually regained much of his wealth. Gibbon's father was thus able to inherit a substantial estate. One of his grandparents, Catherine Acton, descended from Sir Walter Acton, 2nd Baronet.
As a youth, Gibbon's health was under constant threat. He described himself as "a puny child, neglected by my Mother, starved by my nurse". At age nine, he was sent to Dr. Woddeson's school at Kingston upon Thames (now Kingston Grammar School), shortly after which his mother died. He then took up residence in the Westminster School boarding house, owned by his adored "Aunt Kitty", Catherine Porten. Soon after she died in 1786, he remembered her as rescuing him from his mother's disdain, and imparting "the first rudiments of knowledge, the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books which is still the pleasure and glory of my life". From 1747 Gibbon spent time at the family home in Buriton. By 1751, Gibbon's reading was already extensive and certainly pointed toward his future pursuits: Laurence Echard's Roman History (1713), William Howel(l)'s An Institution of General History (1680–85), and several of the 65 volumes of the acclaimed Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time (1747–1768).
Career
Oxford, Lausanne, and a religious journey: 1752–1758
Following a stay at Bath in 1752 to improve his health, at the age of 15, Gibbon was sent by his father to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was enrolled as a gentleman-commoner. He was ill-suited, however, to the college atmosphere, and later rued his 14 months there as the "most idle and unprofitable" of his life. Because he himself says so in his autobiography, it used to be thought that his penchant for "theological controversy" (his aunt's influence) fully bloomed when he came under the spell of the deist or rationalist theologian Conyers Middleton (1683–1750), the author of Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers (1749). In that tract, Middleton denied the validity of such powers; Gibbon promptly objected, or so the argument used to run. The product of that disagreement, with some assistance from the work of Catholic Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704), and that of the Elizabethan Jesuit Robert Parsons (1546–1610), yielded the most memorable event of his time at Oxford: his conversion to Roman Catholicism on 8 June 1753. He was further "corrupted" by the 'free thinking' deism of the playwright/poet couple David and Lucy Mallet; and finally Gibbon's father, already "in despair," had had enough. David Womersley has shown, however, that Gibbon's claim to having been converted by a reading of Middleton is very unlikely, and was introduced only into the final draft of the "Memoirs" in 1792–93. Bowersock suggests that Gibbon fabricated the Middleton story retrospectively in his anxiety about the impact of the French Revolution and Edmund Burke's claim that it was provoked by the French philosophes, so influential on Gibbon.
Within weeks of his conversion, the adolescent was removed from Oxford and sent to live under the care and tutelage of Daniel Pavillard, Reformed pastor of Lausanne, Switzerland. There, he made one of his life's two great friendships, that of Jacques Georges Deyverdun (the French-language translator of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther), and that of John Baker Holroyd (later Lord Sheffield). Just a year and a half later, after his father threatened to disinherit him, on Christmas Day, 1754, he reconverted to Protestantism. "The various articles of the Romish creed," he wrote, "disappeared like a dream". He remained in Lausanne for five intellectually productive years, a period that greatly enriched Gibbon's already immense aptitude for scholarship and erudition: he read Latin literature; travelled throughout Switzerland studying its cantons' constitutions; and studied the works of Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, Pierre Bayle, and Blaise Pascal.
Thwarted romance
He also met the one romance in his life: the daughter of the pastor of Crassy, a young woman named Suzanne Curchod, who was later to become the wife of Louis XVI's finance minister Jacques Necker, and the mother of Madame de Staël. The two developed a warm affinity; Gibbon proceeded to propose marriage, but ultimately this was out of the question, blocked both by his father's staunch disapproval and Curchod's equally staunch reluctance to leave Switzerland. Gibbon returned to England in August 1758 to face his father. No refusal of the elder's wishes could be allowed. Gibbon put it this way: "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son." He proceeded to cut off all contact with Curchod, even as she vowed to wait for him. Their final emotional break apparently came at Ferney, France, in early 1764, though they did see each other at least one more time a year later.
First fame and the Grand tour: 1758–1765
Upon his return to England, Gibbon published his first book, Essai sur l'Étude de la Littérature in 1761, which produced an initial taste of celebrity and distinguished him, in Paris at least, as a man of letters. From 1759 to 1770, Gibbon served on active duty and in reserve with the South Hampshire Militia, his deactivation in December 1762 coinciding with the militia's dispersal at the end of the Seven Years' War. The following year, he returned, via Paris, to Lausanne, where he made the acquaintance of a "prudent worthy young man" William Guise. On 18 April 1764, he and Guise set off for Italy, crossed the Alps, and after spending the summer in Florence arrived in Rome, via Lucca, Pisa, Livorno and Siena, in early October.<ref>Edward Chaney, "Reiseerlebnis und 'Traumdeutung' bei Edward Gibbon und William Beckford", Europareisen politisch-sozialer Eliten im 18.Jahrhundert, eds. J. Rees, W. Siebers and H. Tilgner (Berlin 2002), pp.244-45; cf. Chaney, "Gibbon, Beckford and the Interpretation of Dreams," pp. 40-41. </ref> In his autobiography, Gibbon vividly records his rapture when he finally neared "the great object of [my] pilgrimage":
...at the distance of twenty-five years I can neither forget nor express the strong emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal City. After a sleepless night, I trod, with a lofty step the ruins of the Forum; each memorable spot where Romulus stood, or Tully spoke, or Caesar fell, was at once present to my eye; and several days of intoxication were lost or enjoyed before I could descend to a cool and minute investigation.
Here, Gibbon first conceived the idea of composing a history of the city, later extended to the entire empire, a moment he described later as his "Capitoline vision":
It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted fryars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.
Womersley (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, p. 12) notes the existence of "good reasons" to doubt the statement's accuracy. Elaborating, Pocock ("Classical History," ¶ #2) refers to it as a likely "creation of memory" or a "literary invention", given that Gibbon, in his autobiography, claimed that his journal dated the reminiscence to 15 October, when in fact the journal gives no date.
Late Career: 1765–1776
Work
In June 1765, Gibbon returned to his father's house, and remained there until the latter's death in 1770. These five years were considered by Gibbon as the worst of his life, but he tried to remain busy by making early attempts towards writing full histories. His first historical narrative known as the History of Switzerland, which represented Gibbon's love for Switzerland, was never published nor finished. Even under the guidance of Deyverdun (a German translator for Gibbons), Gibbon became too critical of himself, and completely abandoned the project, only writing 60 pages of text. However, after Gibbon's death, his writings on Switzerland's history were discovered and published by Lord Sheffield in 1815. Soon after abandoning his History of Switzerland, Gibbon made another attempt towards completing a full history.
His second work, Memoires Litteraires de la Grande Bretagne, was a two-volume set which described the literary and social conditions of England at the time, such as Lord Lyttelton's history of Henry II and Nathaniel Lardner's The Credibility of the Gospel History. Gibbon's Memoires Litteraires failed to gain any notoriety, and was considered a flop by fellow historians and literary scholars.
After he tended to his father's estate—which was by no means in good condition— quite enough remained for Gibbon to settle fashionably in London at 7 Bentinck Street, free of financial concern. By February 1773, he was writing in earnest, but not without the occasional self-imposed distraction. He took to London society quite easily, joined the better social clubs, including Dr. Johnson's Literary Club, and looked in from time to time on his friend Holroyd in Sussex. He succeeded Oliver Goldsmith at the Royal Academy as 'professor in ancient history' (honorary but prestigious). In late 1774, he was initiated as a Freemason of the Premier Grand Lodge of England.
He was also, perhaps least productively in that same year, 1774, returned to the House of Commons for Liskeard, Cornwall through the intervention of his relative and patron, Edward Eliot. He became the archetypal back-bencher, benignly "mute" and "indifferent," his support of the Whig ministry invariably automatic. Gibbon's indolence in that position, perhaps fully intentional, subtracted little from the progress of his writing. Gibbon lost the Liskeard seat in 1780 when Eliot joined the opposition, taking with him "the Electors of Leskeard [who] are commonly of the same opinion as Mr. El[l]iot." (Murray, p. 322.) The following year, owing to the good grace of Prime Minister Lord North, he was again returned to Parliament, this time for Lymington on a by-election.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: 1776–1788
After several rewrites, with Gibbon "often tempted to throw away the labours of seven years," the first volume of what was to become his life's major achievement, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published on 17 February 1776. Through 1777, the reading public eagerly consumed three editions, for which Gibbon was rewarded handsomely: two-thirds of the profits, amounting to approximately £1,000. Biographer Leslie Stephen wrote that thereafter, "His fame was as rapid as it has been lasting." And as regards this first volume, "Some warm praise from David Hume overpaid the labour of ten years."
Volumes II and III appeared on 1 March 1781, eventually rising "to a level with the previous volume in general esteem." Volume IV was finished in June 1784; the final two were completed during a second Lausanne sojourn (September 1783 to August 1787) where Gibbon reunited with his friend Deyverdun in leisurely comfort. By early 1787, he was "straining for the goal" and with great relief the project was finished in June. Gibbon later wrote:
Volumes IV, V, and VI finally reached the press in May 1788, their publication having been delayed since March so it could coincide with a dinner party celebrating Gibbon's 51st birthday (the 8th). Mounting a bandwagon of praise for the later volumes were such contemporary luminaries as Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Lord Camden, and Horace Walpole. Adam Smith told Gibbon that "by the universal assent of every man of taste and learning, whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe."
In November 1788, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the main proposer being his good friend Lord Sheffield.
In 1783 Gibbon had been intrigued by the cleverness of Sheffield's 12 year-old eldest daughter, Maria, and he proposed to teach her himself. Over the following years he continued, creating a girl of sixteen who was both well educated, confident and determined to choose her own husband. Gibbon described her as a "mixture of just observation and lively imagery, the strong sense of a man expressed with the easy elegance of a female".
Later life: 1789–1794
The years following Gibbon's completion of The History were filled largely with sorrow and increasing physical discomfort. He had returned to London in late 1787 to oversee the publication process alongside Lord Sheffield. With that accomplished, in 1789 it was back to Lausanne only to learn of and be "deeply affected" by the death of Deyverdun, who had willed Gibbon his home, La Grotte. He resided there with little commotion, took in the local society, received a visit from Sheffield in 1791, and "shared the common abhorrence" of the French Revolution. In 1793, word came of Lady Sheffield's death; Gibbon immediately left Lausanne and set sail to comfort a grieving but composed Sheffield. His health began to fail critically in December, and at the turn of the new year, he was on his last legs.
Gibbon is believed to have suffered from an extreme case of scrotal swelling, probably a hydrocele testis, a condition which causes the scrotum to swell with fluid in a compartment overlying either testicle. In an age when close-fitting clothes were fashionable, his condition led to a chronic and disfiguring inflammation that left Gibbon a lonely figure. As his condition worsened, he underwent numerous procedures to alleviate the condition, but with no enduring success. In early January, the last of a series of three operations caused an unremitting peritonitis to set in and spread, from which he died.
The "English giant of the Enlightenment" finally succumbed at 12:45 pm, 16 January 1794 at age 56. He was buried in the Sheffield Mausoleum attached to the north transept of the Church of St Mary and St Andrew, Fletching, East Sussex, having died in Fletching while staying with his great friend, Lord Sheffield. Gibbon's estate was valued at approximately £26,000. He left most of his property to cousins. As stipulated in his will, Sheffield oversaw the sale of his library at auction to William Beckford for £950. What happened next suggests that Beckford may have known of Gibbon's moralistic, 'impertinent animadversion' at his expense in the presence of the Duchess of Devonshire at Lausanne. Gibbon's wish that his 6,000-book library would not be locked up 'under the key of a jealous master' was effectively denied by Beckford who retained it in Lausanne until 1801 before inspecting it, then locking it up again until at least as late as 1818 before giving most of the books back to Gibbon's physician Dr Scholl who had helped negotiate the sale in the first place. Beckford's annotated copy of the Decline and Fall turned up in Christie's in 1953, complete with his shattering critique of the author's 'ludicrous self-complacency ... your frequent distortion of historical Truth to provoke a gibe, or excite a sneer ... your ignorance of oriental languages [etc]'.
Legacy
Edward Gibbon's central thesis in his explanation of how the Roman Empire fell, that it was due to embracing Christianity, is not widely accepted by scholars today. Gibbon argued that with the empire's new Christian character, large sums of wealth that would have otherwise been used in the secular affairs in promoting the state were transferred to promoting the activities of the Church. However, the pre-Christian empire also spent large financial sums on religious affairs and it is unclear whether or not the change of religion increased the amount of resources the empire spent on religion. Gibbon further argued that new attitudes in Christianity caused many Christians of wealth to renounce their lifestyles and enter a monastic lifestyle, and so stop participating in the support of the empire. However, while many Christians of wealth did become monastics, this paled in comparison to the participants in the imperial bureaucracy. Although Gibbon further pointed out the importance Christianity placed on peace caused a decline in the number of people serving the military, the decline was so small as to be negligible for the army's effectiveness.
Gibbon's work has been criticised for its scathing view of Christianity as laid down in chapters XV and XVI, a situation which resulted in the banning of the book in several countries. Gibbon's alleged crime was disrespecting, and none too lightly, the character of sacred Christian doctrine, by "treat[ing] the Christian church as a phenomenon of general history, not a special case admitting supernatural explanations and disallowing criticism of its adherents". More specifically, the chapters excoriated the church for "supplanting in an unnecessarily destructive way the great culture that preceded it" and for "the outrage of [practising] religious intolerance and warfare".
Gibbon, in letters to Holroyd and others, expected some type of church-inspired backlash, but the harshness of the ensuing torrents exceeded anything he or his friends had anticipated. Contemporary detractors such as Joseph Priestley and Richard Watson stoked the nascent fire, but the most severe of these attacks was an "acrimonious" piece by the young cleric, Henry Edwards Davis.
Gibbon subsequently published his Vindication in 1779, in which he categorically denied Davis' "criminal accusations", branding him a purveyor of "servile plagiarism." Davis followed Gibbon's Vindication with yet another reply (1779).
Gibbon's apparent antagonism to Christian doctrine spilled over into the Jewish faith, leading to charges of anti-Semitism. For example, he wrote:
From the reign of Nero to that of Antoninus Pius, the Jews discovered a fierce impatience of the dominion of Rome, which repeatedly broke out in the most furious massacres and insurrections. Humanity is shocked at the recital of the horrid cruelties which they committed in the cities of Egypt, of Cyprus, and of Cyrene, where they dwelt in treacherous friendship with the unsuspecting natives; and we are tempted to applaud the severe retaliation which was exercised by the arms of legions against a race of fanatics, whose dire and credulous superstition seemed to render them the implacable enemies not only of the Roman government, but also of humankind.
Influence
Gibbon is considered to be a son of the Enlightenment and this is reflected in his famous verdict on the history of the Middle Ages: "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." However, politically, he aligned himself with the conservative Edmund Burke's rejection of the radical egalitarian movements of the time as well as with Burke's dismissal of overly rationalistic applications of the "rights of man".
Gibbon's work has been praised for its style, his piquant epigrams and its effective irony. Winston Churchill memorably noted in My Early Life, "I set out upon...Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [and] was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. ...I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all." Churchill modelled much of his own literary style on Gibbon's. Like Gibbon, he dedicated himself to producing a "vivid historical narrative, ranging widely over period and place and enriched by analysis and reflection."
Unusually for the 18th century, Gibbon was never content with secondhand accounts when the primary sources were accessible (though most of these were drawn from well-known printed editions). "I have always endeavoured," he says, "to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and that, if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence, on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend." In this insistence upon the importance of primary sources, Gibbon is considered by many to be one of the first modern historians:
In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the 'History' is unsurpassable. It is the one English history which may be regarded as definitive...Whatever its shortcomings the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period.
The subject of Gibbon's writing, as well as his ideas and style, have influenced other writers. Besides his influence on Churchill, Gibbon was also a model for Isaac Asimov in his writing of The Foundation Trilogy, which he said involved "a little bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon".
Evelyn Waugh admired Gibbon's style, but not his secular viewpoint. In Waugh's 1950 novel Helena, the early Christian author Lactantius worried about the possibility of "'a false historian, with the mind of Cicero or Tacitus and the soul of an animal,' and he nodded towards the gibbon who fretted his golden chain and chattered for fruit."
Monographs by Gibbon
Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature (London: Becket & De Hondt, 1761).
Critical Observations on the Sixth Book of [Vergil's] The Aeneid (London: Elmsley, 1770).
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (vol. I, 1776; vols. II, III, 1781; vols. IV, V, VI, 1788–1789). all London: Strahan & Cadell.
A Vindication of some passages in the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: J. Dodsley, 1779).
Mémoire Justificatif pour servir de Réponse à l’Exposé, etc. de la Cour de France (London: Harrison & Brooke, 1779).
Other writings by Gibbon
"Lettre sur le gouvernement de Berne" [Letter No. IX. Mr. Gibbon to *** on the Government of Berne], in Miscellaneous Works, First (1796) edition, vol. 1 (below). Scholars differ on the date of its composition (Norman, D.M. Low: 1758–59; Pocock: 1763–64).
Mémoires Littéraires de la Grande-Bretagne. co-author: Georges Deyverdun (2 vols.: vol. 1, London: Becket & De Hondt, 1767; vol. 2, London: Heydinger, 1768).
Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, Esq., ed. John Lord Sheffield (2 vols., London: Cadell & Davies, 1796; 5 vols., London: J. Murray, 1814; 3 vols., London: J. Murray, 1815). Includes Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Edward Gibbon, Esq..
Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. John Murray (London: J. Murray, 1896). EG's complete memoirs (six drafts) from the original manuscripts.
The Private Letters of Edward Gibbon, 2 vols., ed. Rowland E. Prothero (London: J. Murray, 1896).
The works of Edward Gibbon, Volume 3 1906.
Gibbon's Journal to 28 January 1763, ed. D.M. Low (London: Chatto and Windus, 1929).
Le Journal de Gibbon à Lausanne, ed. Georges A. Bonnard (Lausanne: Librairie de l'Université, 1945).
Miscellanea Gibboniana, eds. G.R. de Beer, L. Junod, G.A. Bonnard (Lausanne: Librairie de l'Université, 1952).
The Letters of Edward Gibbon, 3 vols., ed. J.E. Norton (London: Cassell & Co., 1956). vol. 1: 1750–1773; vol. 2: 1774–1784; vol. 3: 1784–1794. cited as 'Norton, Letters'.
Gibbon's Journey from Geneva to Rome, ed. G.A. Bonnard (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961). journal.
Edward Gibbon: Memoirs of My Life, ed. G.A. Bonnard (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969; 1966). portions of EG's memoirs arranged chronologically, omitting repetition.
The English Essays of Edward Gibbon, ed. Patricia Craddock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); hb: .
See also
The Work of J.G.A. Pocock: Edward Gibbon section
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Further reading The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon A Gibbon chronology Historiography of the United Kingdom
Notes
Most of this article, including quotations unless otherwise noted, has been adapted from Stephen's entry on Edward Gibbon in the Dictionary of National Biography.
References
Beer, G. R. de. "The Malady of Edward Gibbon, F.R.S." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 7:1 (December 1949), 71–80.
Craddock, Patricia B. Edward Gibbon, Luminous Historian 1772–1794. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. HB: . Biography.
Dickinson, H.T . "The Politics of Edward Gibbon". Literature and History 8:4 (1978), 175–196.
Low, D. M., Edward Gibbon. 1737–1794 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1937).
Murray, John (ed.), The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon. Second Edition (London: John Murray, 1897).
Norton, J. E. A Bibliography of the Works of Edward Gibbon. New York: Burt Franklin Co., 1940, repr. 1970.
Norton, J .E. The Letters of Edward Gibbon. 3 vols. London: Cassell & Co. Ltd., 1956.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. HB: .
Pocock, J. G. A. "Classical and Civil History: The Transformation of Humanism". Cromohs 1 (1996). Online at the Università degli Studi di Firenze. Retrieved 20 November 2009.
Pocock, J. G. A. "The Ironist". Review of David Womersley's The Watchmen of the Holy City. London Review of Books 24:22 (14 November 2002). Online at the London Review of Books (subscribers only). Retrieved 20 November 2009.
Gibbon, Edward. Memoirs of My Life and Writings. Online at Gutenberg. Retrieved 20 November 2009.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, "Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794)". In the Dictionary of National Biography, eds. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee. Oxford: 1921, repr. 1963. Vol. 7, 1129–1135.
Womersley, David, ed. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 3 vols. (London and New York: Penguin, 1994).
Womersley, David. "Introduction," in Womersley, Decline and Fall, vol. 1, xi–cvi.
Womersley, David. "Gibbon, Edward (1737–1794)". In the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eds. H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vol. 22, 8–18.
Further reading
Before 1985
Barlow, J.W. (1879). “Gibbon and Julian”. In: Hermathena, Volume 3, 142–159. Dublin: Edward Posonby.
Beer, Gavin de. Gibbon and His World. London: Thames and Hudson, 1968. HB: .
Bowersock, G.W., et al. eds. Edward Gibbon and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977.
Craddock, Patricia B. Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. HB: . Biography.
Jordan, David. Gibbon and his Roman Empire. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1971.
Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. The Library of Edward Gibbon. 2nd ed. Godalming, England: St. Paul's Bibliographies, 1940, repr. 1980.
Lewis, Bernard. "Gibbon on Muhammad". Daedalus 105:3 (Summer 1976), 89–101.
Low, D.M. Edward Gibbon 1737–1794. London: Chatto and Windus, 1937. Biography.
Momigliano, Arnaldo. "Gibbon's Contributions to Historical Method". Historia 2 (1954), 450–463. Reprinted in Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1966; Garland Pubs., 1985), 40–55. PB: .
Porter, Roger J. "Gibbon's Autobiography: Filling Up the Silent Vacancy". Eighteenth-Century Studies 8:1 (Autumn 1974), 1–26.
Stephen, Leslie, "Gibbon's Autobiography" in Studies of a Biographer, Vol. 1 (1898)
Swain, J. W. Edward Gibbon the Historian. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1966.
White, Jr. Lynn, ed. The Transformation of the Roman World: Gibbon's Problem after Two Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. HB: .
Since 1985
Berghahn, C.-F., and T. Kinzel, eds., Edward Gibbon im deutschen Sprachraum. Bausteine einer Rezeptionsgeschichte. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015.
Bowersock, G. W. Gibbon's Historical Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Burrow, J. W. Gibbon (Past Masters). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. HB: . PB: .
Carnochan, W. Bliss. Gibbon's Solitude: The Inward World of the Historian. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. HB: .
Chaney, Edward, "Reiseerlebnis und 'Traumdeutung' bei Edward Gibbon und William Beckford", Europareisen politisch-sozialer Eliten im 18.Jahrhundert, eds. J. Rees, W. Siebers and H. Tilgner (Berlin 2002), pp.243-60.
Chaney, Edward, "Gibbon, Beckford and the Interpretation of Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents", The Beckford Society Annual Lectures 2000-2003, ed. Jon Millinton (Beckford Society, 2004).
Craddock, Patricia B. Edward Gibbon: a Reference Guide. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. PB: . A comprehensive listing of secondary literature through 1985. See also her supplement covering the period through 1997.
Ghosh, Peter R. "Gibbon Observed". Journal of Roman Studies 81 (1991), 132–156.
Ghosh, Peter R. "Gibbon's First Thoughts: Rome, Christianity and the Essai sur l'Étude de la Litterature 1758–61". Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995), 148–164.
Ghosh, Peter R. "The Conception of Gibbon's History", in McKitterick and Quinault, eds. Edward Gibbon and Empire, 271–316.
Ghosh, Peter R. "Gibbon's Timeless Verity: Nature and Neo-Classicism in the Late Enlightenment," in Womersley, Burrow, Pocock, eds. Edward Gibbon: bicentenary essays.
Ghosh, Peter R. "Gibbon, Edward 1737–1794 British historian of Rome and universal historian," in Kelly Boyd, ed. Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), 461–463.
Levine, Joseph M., "Edward Gibbon and the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns," in Levine, Humanism and History: origins of modern English historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).
Levine, Joseph M. "Truth and Method in Gibbon's Historiography," in Levine, The Autonomy of History: truth and method from Erasmus to Gibbon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999).
McKitterick, R., and R. Quinault, eds. Edward Gibbon and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Norman, Brian. "The Influence of Switzerland on the Life and Writings of Edward Gibbon," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century [SVEC] v.2002:03. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2002.
O'Brien, Karen. "English Enlightenment Histories, 1750–c.1815" in .
Pocock, J. G. A. Barbarism and Religion, 4 vols.: vol. 1, The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737–1764, 1999 [hb: ]; vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government, 1999 [hb: ]; vol. 3, The First Decline and Fall, 2003 [pb: ]; vol. 4, Barbarians, Savages and Empires, 2005 [pb: ]. all Cambridge Univ. Press.
Porter, Roy. Gibbon: Making History. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989, HB: .
Turnbull, Paul. "'Une marionnette infidele': the Fashioning of Edward Gibbon's Reputation as the English Voltaire," in Womersley, Burrow, Pocock, eds. Edward Gibbon: bicentenary essays.
Womersley, David P. The Transformation of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. HB: .
Womersley, David P., John Burrow, and J.G.A. Pocock, eds. Edward Gibbon: bicentenary essays. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1997. HB: .
Womersley, David P. Gibbon and the ‘Watchmen of the Holy City’: The Historian and His Reputation, 1776–1815''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. PB: .
External links
Complete History of the Decline and Fall including Gibbon's Vindication, courtesy: Christian Classics Ethereal Library of Calvin College, Grands Rapids, Michigan.
Edward Gibbon, Historian of the Roman Empire. Part 1: The Man and his Book
Edward Gibbon, Historian of the Roman Empire. Part 2: A closer look at The Decline and Fall Archive link
The Decline and Fall of Edward Gibbon @ Ward's Book of Days
DeclineandFallResources.com – Original Maps and Footnote Translations
Biographer Patricia Craddock's comprehensive bibliography through May 1999.
Craddock's supplement to her Reference Guide.
1737 births
1794 deaths
18th-century diarists
18th-century English historians
18th-century English male writers
18th-century English non-fiction writers
Edward
Alumni of Magdalen College, Oxford
British book and manuscript collectors
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British MPs 1774–1780
British MPs 1780–1784
British Protestants
British rhetoricians
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Critics of religions
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Deaths from peritonitis
English book and manuscript collectors
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English rhetoricians
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Freemasons of the Premier Grand Lodge of England
Historians of ancient Rome
Historians of Christianity
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Irony theorists
Members of the Parliament of Great Britain for constituencies in Cornwall
Members of the Parliament of Great Britain for English constituencies
Scholars of Roman history
Social critics
People educated at Kingston Grammar School
People educated at Westminster School, London
People from Buriton
People from Putney
Rhetoric theorists
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The Epistle to the Laodiceans is a letter of Paul the Apostle, the original existence of which is inferred from an instruction to the congregation in Colossae to send their letter to the believing community in Laodicea, and likewise obtain a copy of the letter "from Laodicea" (, ek Laodikeas).
This letter is generally regarded as being lost. However, some ancient sources, such as Hippolytus, and some modern scholars consider that the epistle "from Laodicea" was never a lost epistle, but simply Paul re-using one of his other letters (the most common candidate is the canonical Epistle to the Ephesians), just as he asks for the copying and forwarding of the Letter to Colossians to Laodicea.
Several ancient texts purporting to be the missing "Epistle to the Laodiceans" have been known to have existed, most of which are now lost. These were generally considered, both in antiquity and by modern scholarship, to be attempts to supply a forged copy of a lost document. The sole version that survived is a Latin Epistola ad Laodicenses ("Epistle to the Laodiceans"), first witnessed in Codex Fuldensis. The Latin epistle is actually a short compilation of verses from other Pauline epistles, principally Philippians. It too is generally considered a "clumsy forgery" and an attempt to seek to fill the "gap" suggested by Colossians 4:16.
Mention in Colossians 4:16
Paul, the earliest known Christian author, wrote several letters (or epistles) in Greek to various churches. Paul apparently dictated all his epistles through a secretary (or amanuensis), but wrote the final few paragraphs of each letter by his own hand. Many survived and are included in the New Testament, but others are known to have been lost. The Epistle to the Colossians states "After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea." The last words can be interpreted as "letter written to the Laodiceans", but also "letter written from Laodicea". The New American Standard Bible (NASB) translates this verse in the latter manner, and translations in other languages such as the Dutch Statenvertaling translate it likewise: "When this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and you, for your part read my letter (that is coming) from Laodicea." Those who read here "letter written to the Laodiceans" presume that, at the time that the Epistle to the Colossians was written, Paul also had written an epistle to the community of believers in Laodicea.
Another possibility exists: that no such epistle to the Laodiceans was ever created, despite the verse in Colossians. Colossians is considered a deutero-Pauline work by many scholars: a number of differences in writing style and assumed situation distinguish it from Paul's earlier letters. While this is generally explained by Christians by increasing use of a secretary (amanuensis) later in Paul's life, a more skeptical approach is to suggest that Colossians was not written by Paul at all. If Colossians was forged in Paul's name, then the reference to the other letter to the Laodiceans could merely be a verisimilitude - a small detail to make the letter seem real. The letter would never have been sent to Colossae in this scenario, but rather used as an example of Paul's doctrine to win a theological dispute far from Colossae, and there would be nobody to recognize that the claimed letter to the Laodiceans was non-existent.
Identification with canonical epistles
Epistle to the Ephesians
Some scholars have suggested that it refers to the canonical Epistle to the Ephesians, contending that it was a circular letter (an encyclical) to be read to many churches in the Laodicean area. Others dispute this view.
Epistle to Philemon
Others have suggested that it refers to the canonical Epistle to Philemon.
Works purporting to be the lost text
Marcionite Epistle to the Laodiceans
According to the Muratorian fragment, Marcion's canon contained an epistle called the Epistle to the Laodiceans which is commonly thought to be a forgery written to conform to his own point of view. This is not at all clear, however, since none of the text survives. It is not known what this letter might have contained. Most scholars believe it was explicitly Marcionist in its outlook, hence its condemnation.
Others believe it to be the Epistle to the Ephesians; the proto-Orthodox author Tertullian accuses Marcion's group of using an edited version of Ephesians which was referred to as the Epistle to the Laodiceans.
Latin Vulgate Epistle to the Laodiceans
A claimed Epistle to the Laodiceans from Paul exists in Latin. It is quite short at only 20 verses. It is mentioned by various writers from the fourth century onwards, notably by Pope Gregory the Great; the oldest known copy of this epistle is in the Fulda manuscript written for Victor of Capua in 546. Possibly due to Gregory's endorsement of it, many Western Latin Bibles contained this epistle for centuries afterward. It also featured in early English Bibles: John Wycliffe included Paul's letter to the Laodiceans in his Bible translation from the Latin to English. However, the epistle is essentially unknown in Eastern Christianity, where it was never used or published; additionally, there is no evidence of a Greek text, the language Paul wrote in. The text was almost unanimously considered pseudepigraphal when the Christian Biblical canon was decided upon, and does not appear in any Greek copies of the Bible at all, nor is it known in Syriac or other versions. Jerome, who wrote the Latin Vulgate translation, wrote in the 4th century, "it is rejected by everyone".
Scholars are unanimous in concurring with Jerome and believing this epistle forged long after Paul's death. Additionally, the epistle is derided for having no theological content. It includes Pauline greetings and farewells, but does not appear to have any substantive content: it does not address any problem or advocate for any position. Professors Rudolf Knopf (1874-1920) and Gustav Kruger (1862-1940) wrote that the epistle is "nothing other than a worthless patching together of [canonical] Pauline passages and phrases, mainly from the Epistle to the Philippians." M. R. James wrote that "It is not easy to imagine a more feebly constructed cento of Pauline phrases." Wilhelm Schneemelcher was "amazed that it ever found a place in Bible manuscripts." However, it evidently gained a certain degree of respect, having appeared in over 100 surviving early Latin copies of the Bible. According to Biblia Sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, there are Latin Vulgate manuscripts containing this epistle dating between the 6th and 12th century, including Latin manuscripts F (Codex Fuldensis), M, Q, B, D (Ardmachanus), C, and Lambda.
The apocryphal epistle is generally considered a transparent attempt to supply this supposed lost sacred document. Some scholars, such as Wolfgang Speyer, suggest that it was created to offset the popularity of the Marcionite epistle; it would be easier to reject the Marcionite version if the "real" Epistle to the Laodiceans could be provided to counter it.
An obvious question is if the Latin epistle and the Marcionite epistle are actually the same document: is it possible that the Muratorian fragment was referring to an early version of the Latin epistle? While the occasional scholar advocates for this (Adolf von Harnack for one), most scholars consider this unlikely, because the Latin epistle does not include any Marcionite theology or character.
References
External links
1st-century Christian texts
Laodiceans
Pauline epistles
Christian terminology
Marcionism | [
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Eschrichtiidae or the gray whales is a family of baleen whale (Parvorder Mysticeti) with a single extant species, the gray whale (Eschrichtius robustus), as well as three described fossil genera: Archaeschrichtius and Eschrichtioides from the Miocene and Pliocene of Italy respectively, and Gricetoides from the Pliocene of North Carolina. More recent phylogenetic studies have found this family to be invalid, with its members nesting inside the Balaenopteridae. The names of the extant genus and the family honours Danish zoologist Daniel Eschricht.
Taxonomy
In his morphological analysis, found that eschrichtiids and Cetotheriidae (Cetotherium, Mixocetus and Metopocetus) form a monophyletic sister group of Balaenopteridae.
A specimen from the Late Pliocene of northern Italy, named "Cetotherium" gastaldii by and renamed "Balaenoptera" gastaldii by , was identified as a basal eschrichtiid by who recombined it to Eschrichtioides gastaldii.
found that the gray whale is phylogenetically distinct from rorquals and that previous morphological studies were correct in the conclusion that the evolution of gulp feeding was a single event in the rorqual lineage. In contrast, multiple later studies found the gray whale to fall within the family Balaenopteridae, being more derived than the minke whales but basal to all other members in the family, and reclassified it in Balaenopteridae; the American Society of Mammalogists has followed this classification.
Evolution
Fossils of Eschrichtiidae have been found in all major oceanic basins in the Northern Hemisphere, and the family is believed date back to the Late Miocene. Today, gray whales are only present in the northern Pacific, but a population was also present in the northern Atlantic before being driven to extinction by European whalers three centuries ago.
Fossil eschrichtiids from before the Holocene are rare compared to other fossil mysticetes. The only Pleistocene fossil from the Pacific referred to E. eschrichtius is a partial skeleton and an associated skull from California, estimated to be about 200 thousand years old. However, a late Pliocene fossil from Hokkaido, Japan, referred to Eschrichtius sp. is estimated to be and a similar unnamed fossil has been reported from California.
In their description of Archaeschrichtius ruggieroi from the late Miocene of Italy, argued that eschrichtiids most likely originated in the Mediterranean Basin about and remained there, either permanently or intermittently, at least until the Early Pliocene (5–3 Mya), (but see Messinian salinity crisis.)
References
Notes
Sources
External links
Baleen whales
Miocene cetaceans
Pliocene cetaceans
Pleistocene cetaceans
Extant Miocene first appearances
Mammal families | [
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] |
Echolocation is the use of "sound" as a form of navigation
Navigation using sound
Acoustic location, the general use of sound to locate objects.
Animal echolocation, non-human animals emitting sound waves and listening to the echo in order to locate objects or navigate.
Human echolocation, the use of sound by people to navigate.
Sonar (sound navigation and ranging), the use of sound on water or underwater, to navigate or to locate other watercraft, usually by submarines.
Echo sounding, listening to the echo of sound pulses to measure the distance to the bottom of the sea, a special case of Sonar.
Medical ultrasonography, the use of ultrasound echoes to look inside the body.
Other
Echolocation (album), a 2001 album by Fruit Bats
Echolocation, a 2017 album by Gone Is Gone
See also
Radar, locating objects by detecting the echo of emitted radio waves
Lidar, locating objects by detecting the echo of emitted laser beams
Time to Echolocate, a 2005 album by The Ebb and Flow | [
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Electrothermal-chemical (ETC) technology is an attempt to increase accuracy and muzzle energy of future tank, artillery, and close-in weapon system guns by improving the predictability and rate of expansion of propellants inside the barrel.
An electrothermal-chemical gun uses a plasma cartridge to ignite and control the ammunition's propellant, using electrical energy to trigger the process. ETC increases the performance of conventional solid propellants, reduces the effect of temperature on propellant expansion and allows for more advanced, higher density propellants to be used.
The technology has been under development since the mid-1980s and at present is actively being researched in the United States by the Army Research Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and defense industry contractors, including FMC Corporation, General Dynamics Land Systems, Olin Ordnance, and Soreq Nuclear Research Center. It is possible that electrothermal-chemical gun propulsion will be an integral part of US Army's future combat system and those of other countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom.
Electrothermal-chemical technology is part of a broad research and development program that encompasses all electric gun technology, such as railguns and coil guns.
Background
The constant battle between armour and armor-piercing round has led to continuous development of the main battle tank design. The evolution of American anti-tank weapons can be traced back to requirements to combat Soviet tanks. In the late 1980s, it was thought that the protection level of the Future Soviet Tank (FST) could exceed 700 mm of rolled homogeneous armour equivalence at its maximum thickness, which was effectively immune against the contemporary M829 armour piercing fin stabilized discarding sabot. In the 1980s the most immediate method available to NATO to counter Soviet advances in armour technology was the adoption of a 140 mm main gun, but this required a redesigned turret that could incorporate the larger breech and ammunition, and it also required some sort of automatic loader. Although the 140 mm gun was considered a real interim solution it was decided after the fall of the Soviet Union that the increase in muzzle energy it provided was not worth the increase in weight. Resources were therefore spent on research into other programs that could provide the needed muzzle energy. One of the most successful alternative technologies remains electrothermal-chemical ignition.
Most proposed advances in gun technology are based on the assumption that the solid propellant as a stand-alone propulsion system is no longer capable of delivering the required muzzle energy. This requirement has been underscored by the appearance of the Russian T-90 main battle tank. Even the elongation of current gun tubes, such as the new German 120 mm L/55, which was introduced by Rheinmetall is considered only an interim solution as it does not offer the required increase in muzzle velocity. Even advanced kinetic energy ammunition such as the United States' M829A3 is considered only an interim solution against future threats. To that extent the solid propellant is considered to have reached the end of its usefulness, although it will remain the principal propulsion method for at least the next decade until newer technologies mature. To improve on the capabilities of a solid propellant weapon the electrothermal-chemical gun may see production as early as 2016.
ETC technology offers a medium-risk upgrade and is developed to the point that further improvements are so minor that it can be considered mature. The lightweight American 120 mm XM291 came close to achieving 17 MJ of muzzle energy, which is the lower-end muzzle energy spectrum for a 140 mm gun. However, the success of the XM291 does not imply the success of ETC technology as there are key parts of the propulsion system that are not yet understood or fully developed, such as the plasma ignition process. Nevertheless, there is substantial existing evidence that ETC technology is viable and worth the money to continue development. Furthermore, it can be integrated into current gun systems.
How it works
An electrothermal-chemical gun uses a plasma cartridge to ignite and control the ammunition's propellant, using electrical energy as a catalyst to begin the process. Originally researched by Dr. Jon Parmentola for the U.S. Army, it has grown into a very plausible successor to a standard solid propellant tank gun. Since the beginning of research the United States has funded the XM291 gun project with USD 4,000,000, basic research with USD 300,000, and applied research with USD 600,000. Since then it has been proven to work, although efficiency to the level required has not yet been accomplished. ETC increases the performance of conventional solid propellants, reduces the effect of temperature on propellant expansion and allows for more advanced, higher density propellants to be used. It will also reduce pressure placed on the barrel in comparison to alternative technologies that offer the same muzzle energy given the fact that it helps spread the propellant's gas much more smoothly during ignition. Currently, there are two principal methods of plasma initiation: the flashboard large area emitter (FLARE) and the triple coaxial plasma igniter (TCPI).
Flashboard large area emitter
Flashboards run in several parallel strings to provide a large area of plasma or ultraviolet radiation and uses the breakdown and vaporization of gaps of diamonds to produce the required plasma. These parallel strings are mounted in tubes and oriented to have their gaps azimuthal to the tube's axis. It discharges by using high pressure air to move air out of the way. FLARE initiators can ignite propellants through the release of plasma, or even through the use of ultraviolet heat radiation. The absorption length of a solid propellant is sufficient to be ignited by radiation from a plasma source. However, FLARE has most likely not reached optimal design requirements and further understanding of FLARE and how it works is completely necessary to ensure the evolution of the technology. If FLARE provided the XM291 gun project with the sufficient radiative heat to ignite the propellant to achieve a muzzle energy of 17 MJ one could only imagine the possibilities with a fully developed FLARE plasma igniter. Current areas of study include how plasma will affect the propellant through radiation, the deliverance of mechanical energy and heat directly and by driving gas flow. Despite these daunting tasks FLARE has been seen as the most plausible igniter for future application on ETC guns.
Triple coaxial plasma igniter
A coaxial igniter consists of a fully insulated conductor, covered by four strips of aluminum foil. All of this is further insulated in a tube about 1.6 cm in diameter that is perforated with small holes. The idea is to use an electrical flow through the conductor and then exploding the flow into vapor and then breaking it down into plasma. Consequently, the plasma escapes through the constant perforations throughout the insulating tube and initiates the surrounding propellant. A TCPI igniter is fitted in individual propellant cases for each piece of ammunition. However, TCPI is no longer considered a viable method of propellant ignition because it may damage the fins and does not deliver energy as efficiently as a FLARE igniter.
Feasibility
The XM291 is the best existing example of a working electrothermal-chemical gun. It was an alternative technology to the heavier caliber 140 mm gun by using the dual-caliber approach. It uses a breech that is large enough to accept 140 mm ammunition and be mounted with both a 120 mm barrel and a 135 mm or 140 mm barrel. The XM291 also mounts a larger gun tube and a larger ignition chamber than the existing M256 L/44 main gun. Through the application of electrothermal-chemical technology the XM291 has been able to achieve muzzle energy outputs that equate that to a low-level 140 mm gun, while achieving muzzle velocities greater than those of the larger 140 mm gun. Although the XM291 does not mean that ETC technology is viable it does offer an example that it is possible.
ETC is also a more viable option than other alternatives by definition. ETC requires much less energy input from outside sources, like a battery, than a railgun or a coilgun would. Tests have shown that energy output by the propellant is higher than energy input from outside sources on ETC guns. In comparison, a railgun currently cannot achieve a higher muzzle velocity than the amount of energy input. Even at 50% efficiency a rail gun launching a projectile with a kinetic energy of 20 MJ would require an energy input into the rails of 40 MJ, and 50% efficiency has not yet been achieved. To put this into perspective, a rail gun launching at 9 MJ of energy would need roughly 32 MJ worth of energy from capacitors. Current advances in energy storage allow for energy densities as high as 2.5 MJ/dm³, which means that a battery delivering 32 MJ of energy would require a volume of 12.8 dm³ per shot; this is not a viable volume for use in a modern main battle tank, especially one designed to be lighter than existing models. There has even been discussion about eliminating the necessity for an outside electrical source in ETC ignition by initiating the plasma cartridge through a small explosive force.
Furthermore, ETC technology is not only applicable to solid propellants. To increase muzzle velocity even further electrothermal-chemical ignition can work with liquid propellants, although this would require further research into plasma ignition. ETC technology is also compatible with existing projects to reduce the amount of recoil delivered to the vehicle while firing. Understandably, recoil of a gun firing a projectile at 17 MJ or more will increase directly with the increase in muzzle energy in accordance to Newton's third law of motion and successful implementation of recoil reduction mechanisms will be vital to the installation of an ETC powered gun in an existing vehicle design. For example, OTO Melara's new lightweight 120 mm L/45 gun has achieved a recoil force of 25 t by using a longer recoil mechanism (550 mm) and a pepperpot muzzle brake. Reduction in recoil can also be achieved through mass attenuation of the thermal sleeve. The ability of ETC technology to be applied to existing gun designs means that for future gun upgrades there's no longer the necessity to redesign the turret to include a larger breech or caliber gun barrel.
Several countries have already determined that ETC technology is viable for the future and have funded indigenous projects considerably. These include the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, amongst others. The United States' XM360, which was planned to equip the Future Combat Systems Mounted Combat System light tank and may be the M1 Abrams' next gun upgrade, is reportedly based on the XM291 and may include ETC technology, or portions of ETC technology. Tests of this gun have been performed using "precision ignition" technology, which may refer to ETC ignition.
Notes
Bibliography
External links
Electromagnetic Launch Symposium
http://www.powerlabs.org/electrothermal.htm
Artillery by type
Emerging technologies
Propellants
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] |
Esperanto culture refers to the shared cultural experience of the Esperantujo, or Esperanto-speaking community. Despite being a constructed language, Esperanto has a history dating back to the late 19th century, and shared cultural social mores have developed among its speakers. Some of these can be traced back to the initial ideas of the language's creator, Ludwig Zamenhof, including the theory that a global second language would foster international communication. Others have developed over time, as the language has allowed different national and linguistic cultures to blend together. Some researched also the ideologies of Esperanto.
Esperanto culture also includes art, literature, and music, as well as international celebrations and cultural exchanges such as the Pasporta Servo.
Native speakers
Native Esperanto speakers are people who have acquired Esperanto as one of their native languages. As of 1996, there were 350 or so attested cases of families with native Esperanto speakers. Estimates from associations indicate that there are currently around 1,000 Esperanto-speaking families, involving perhaps 2,000 children. In all known cases, speakers are natively multilingual, being raised in both Esperanto and either the local national language or the native language of their parents. In all but a handful of cases, it was the father who used Esperanto with the child. In the majority of such families, the parents had the same native language, though in many the parents had different native languages, and only Esperanto in common.
Gufujo
Esperanto speakers create a makeshift café (whether in a rented space or someone's home), using Esperanto coins or voucher-like items as well as real money to pay for food and drink. Live music, poetry reading, or literature reading are usual activities. This custom arose in 1995 in order to contrast with the more usual custom of after-convention partying at a bar.
Religion
Esperanto has had an influence on certain religious traditions (Oomoto, Baháʼí Faith, etc., see Esperanto and religion). While some Esperantists subscribe to these beliefs, they are not necessarily common, and are not required nor encouraged by any Esperanto groups.
Literature
Books that are translated to Esperanto are not always internationally famous books, because everyone can already read those in another language that they know. For example, several Japanese crime novels and several Icelandic novels that have never been translated to English (or any other language) have been translated to Esperanto. One reason for this is that people are actually translating their favourite stories instead of famous ones, and another is that it's simply cheaper and easier to get the rights to translate a small-time book compared to a famous one.
The first Harry Potter book, for example, was translated and the translator enquired about how to purchase translating rights so the book could be published, but J.K. Rowling refused to allow it to be published in Esperanto (despite Harry Potter being one of the most-translated books in the whole world). In lieu of physical books, the translation now exists as a free download on the internet.
Similarly, famous books translated into Esperanto are often books fallen into public domain such as the Bible, the Quran, or works by Shakespeare, Molière, Balzac, etc., because there are no rights on them.
As Esperanto speakers were persecuted throughout WWII (Esperanto was banned in Germany and the Soviet Union), and even today might be mocked by journalists and the average person, oppression and acceptance have become strong themes in Esperanto writing and conversation.
There are over 25,000 Esperanto books (originals and translations) as well as over a hundred regularly distributed Esperanto magazines. This is despite that Esperanto has only existed for around 100 years. In comparison, the entire literature of Iceland (a country created in the 900s, and with a population of around 320,000 people) totals fewer than 50,000 books.
Pasporta Servo
Many speakers travel the world using the Pasporta Servo which is a free couchsurfing and homestay service combined, meaning that their trips are possible because they don't have to pay for lodging while at the same time they stay with people who speak a language they know fluently. Many people have commented that this is also a useful tool for actual immigrants, as Esperanto speakers are normally much friendlier and more willing to see the immigrant as a "human" compared to the normal natives of the country. For example, it's suggested that an English speaker in Japan should make friends with Esperanto speakers instead, because the Esperanto speakers won't "simply use the friendship as a way to get free English lessons".
Writing
Esperanto was originally a language that one had to learn entirely through books, and even today most people live apart from each other and converse through the internet, so writing and reading are a big part of Esperanto culture. Most people have created or translated some sort of written work whether fiction or nonfiction, published or available to read online for free.
Penpals have been popular since Esperanto's earliest days, as Esperanto was originally advertised as a language where you could "send a letter with a message, short list of grammar rules and a dictionary to a complete stranger, and they'll be able to look up the words and write a coherent reply back". Many people did indeed do this in order to recruit more Esperanto speakers.
At the time, in the early 1900s, there was no major world language that could be used "anywhere" and it was difficult to get accurate information about foreign countries. On top of that, things like stamp collecting were popular hobbies for children. In the modern day, most Esperanto speakers talk to each other through the internet.
Monato ("month") is a general news magazine "like a genuinely international Time or Newsweek", written by local correspondents.
A magazine for the blind, Aŭroro, has been published since 1920 and in general, Esperanto hosts the largest Braille publications in the world — starting in the early 1900s Esperanto was taught in schools of the blind in Europe, and that is where the trend started.
Esperanto is the magazine used by the World Esperanto Association to inform its members about everything happening in the Esperanto community.
There are many more magazines created by individual Esperanto clubs from towns in places such as from Japan and China.
Conventions
Many people wear their country's traditional clothing to Esperanto conventions, whether or not they would ever wear it in their own country. Swedish people, for example, who usually never wear their traditional clothing in their own country, may still wear traditional clothing for any meeting involving Esperanto speakers.
Every year, the World Congress of Esperanto (), which is held in different countries around the world according to year (though it mostly takes place in Europe). Each convention draws in an average of 1500–3000 attendees, and the best-attended conferences are those held in Central or Eastern Europe (generally meaning Poland, Hungary etc.), as Esperanto is an option for fulfilling mandatory foreign-language requirements in Hungarian schools, and the creator of Esperanto came from Poland (see statistics at World Congress of Esperanto).
Popular culture
Esperanto music is usually done in the traditional style of a person's country, but "international" music (American pop music, rap music etc.) also exists. Many famous songs are translated to Esperanto as well, for example "La vie en rose" and "En el frente de Gandesa" (the links are to the Esperanto versions of the songs on YouTube).
There are currently radio broadcasts from China Radio International, Melbourne Ethnic Community Radio, Radio Habana Cuba, Radio Audizioni Italiane (Rai), Radio Polonia, Radio F.R.E.I. and Radio Vatican. Many more people have personal podcasts and vlogs.
In 1964, Jacques-Louis Mahé produced the first full-length feature film in Esperanto, entitled Angoroj. This was followed in 1965 by the first American Esperanto-production: Incubus, starring William Shatner. Incubus however is commonly seen as a funny way of introducing a person to Esperanto, as none of the actors even knew how to pronounce Esperanto in the first place, the dialogue being strange and bad due to the scriptwriter not getting a second opinion before the filming was done, and the plot being confusing in general.
Internacia Televido, an internet television channel, began broadcasting in November 2005. Australia is the hotspot of much of the organization behind Esperanto television.
Several short films have been produced, and at times plays have been recorded "for television". , the Esperanto-language Wikipedia lists 14 films and 3 short films.
In 2011, Academy Award-nominated director Sam Green (The Weather Underground), released a new documentary about Esperanto titled The Universal Language (La Universala Lingvo.) This 30-minute film traces the history of Esperanto. It's known for having extremely good camera quality and filming sense, as well as being a good "absolute introduction" to what Esperanto is, but is criticized for being too short.
Many more films, cartoons and documentaries that aren't Esperanto originals are simply subtitled in Esperanto and put up on YouTube. Some fan-dubs exist, especially of Disney songs and short scenes.
Food
As Esperanto speakers are from all over the world, and families whose children speak Esperanto natively usually have parents from two vastly different countries, recipes incorporating elements from different countries are naturally born. Traditional foods are also enjoyed in settings where a native wouldn't normally mix or eat them.
One cookbook is Internacie kuiri “Cooking Internationally” by Maria Becker-Meisberger, published by FEL (Flemish Esperanto League), Antwerp 1989, . Another is Manĝoj el sanigaj plantoj “Meals from Healthy Vegetable Dishes” by Zlata Nanić, published by BIO-ZRNO, Zagreb 2002, .
Some Esperanto periodicals, such as MONATO include recipes from time to time.
Zamenhof Day
On December 15 (L. L. Zamenhof's birthday), Esperanto speakers around the world celebrate Zamenhof Day, sometimes called Book Day. It's a common goal to have a book written in Esperanto published on or by that day, as Zamenhof was a strong advocate of the idea that in order to spread Esperanto around the world, its speakers need to create a large body of literature.
The poem La Espero is the Esperanto anthem, and most Esperanto speakers know it by heart. It's often sung at conventions. Whether or not one enjoys the lyrics, the song is in general something that ties all Esperanto speakers together — as it's been around since Esperanto's early days, is known at least in tune to every Esperanto speaker, and is a general tradition. The very short poem Ho, mia kor' (Zamenhof, 1887) and the longer (Zamenhof, 1896) are also very famous and often quoted in whole or in part; some distychs of La vojo, in particular, have become proverbial (e.g. Eĉ guto malgranda, konstante frapante, traboros la monton granitan “Even a small drop, by constantly hitting, will pierce the mountain of granite” as a metaphor for unyielding perseverance).
See also
Gufujo
Esperanto literature
Esperanto music
Esperanto flag
Interhelpo
Zamenhof-Esperanto object
Notes
References
External links
Esperanto Kaj Turismo
Esperanto-USA's Esperanto Day page
Jacques-Louis Mahé
Generator for Esperanto typographical filler text
esperanto-panorama.net: Radio in Esperanto
Melbourne Ethnic Community Radio program with Esperanto entry
Radio F.R.E.I. from Erfurt/Germany once a month
Propono por la tago de Esperanto-libro kaj Zamenhof-festo
Esperanto website from Spain
Esperanto version of Le Monde diplomatique | [
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was the 32nd Emperor of Japan, according to the traditional order of succession.
Sushun's reign spanned the years from 587 through 592.
Traditional narrative
Before his ascension to the Chrysanthemum Throne, his personal name (his imina) was Hatsusebe-shinnō, also known as Hatsusebe no Waka-sazaki.
His name at birth was . He was the twelfth son of Emperor Kinmei. His mother was , a daughter of Soga no Iname, who was the chief, or Ōomi, of the Soga clan.
He succeeded his half-brother, Emperor Yōmei in 587, and lived in the Kurahashi Palace (Kurahashi no Miya) in Yamato.
587: In the , the Emperor died, and despite a dispute over who should follow him as sovereign, the succession was received by another son of Emperor Kinmei, one of Yōmei's younger brothers. Shortly thereafter, Emperor Sushun is said to have acceded to the throne.
Sushun's contemporary title would not have been tennō, as most historians believe this title was not introduced until the reigns of Emperor Tenmu and Empress Jitō. Rather, it was presumably , meaning "the great king who rules all under heaven". Alternatively, Sushun might have been referred to as or the "Great King of Yamato".
He came to the throne with the support of the Soga clan and Empress Suiko, his half sister and the widow of Emperor Bidatsu. Initially, the Mononobe clan, a rival clan of the Sogas, allied with Prince Anahobe, another son of Kimmei, and attempted to have him installed as Emperor. At the Battle of Shigisan, Soga no Umako, who succeeded his father as Ōomi of the Soga clan, eventually killed Mononobe no Moriya, the head of the Mononobe clan, which led to its decline. Umako then installed Emperor Sushun on the throne.
As time went on, Sushun eventually became resentful of Umako's power, and wanted him deposed. It is said that one day, he saw a wild boar and proclaimed, "I want to kill Soga Umako like this wild boar". This angered Soga no Umako and, perhaps out of fear of being struck first, Umako had Sushun assassinated by in 592.
Emperor Sushun's reign lasted for five years before his death at the age of 72.
The actual site of Sushun's grave is known. The Emperor is traditionally venerated at a memorial Shinto shrine (misasagi) at Nara.
The Imperial Household Agency designates this location as Yōmei's mausoleum. It is formally named Kurahashi no oka no e no misasagi.
Genealogy
Sushun had one Empress and two Imperial children.
Consort: , Otomo-no-Nukateko's daughter
Third Son:
Concubine: , Soga no Umako's daughter
Mother Unknown
, older brother of Prince Hachiko, Nakahara clan's ancestor
Concubine: , Mononobe no Moriya's younger sister
Ancestry
See also
Emperor of Japan
List of Emperors of Japan
Imperial cult
Notes
References
Aston, William George. (1896). Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Brown, Delmer M. and Ichirō Ishida, eds. (1979). Gukanshō: The Future and the Past. Berkeley: University of California Press. ;
Jochi Daigaku. (1989). Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 44. Tokyo: Sophia University Press.
Ponsonby-Fane, Richard Arthur Brabazon. (1959). The Imperial House of Japan. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society.
Titsingh, Isaac. (1834). Nihon Ōdai Ichiran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Royal Asiatic Society, Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.
Varley, H. Paul. (1980). Jinnō Shōtōki: A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns. New York: Columbia University Press. ;
Japanese emperors
6th-century murdered monarchs
592 deaths
People of Asuka-period Japan
6th-century monarchs in Asia
6th-century Japanese monarchs
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] |
, also known as , was the 46th (with the name Empress Kōken) and the 48th monarch of Japan (with the name Empress Shōtoku), according to the traditional order of succession.
Empress Kōken first reigned from 749 to 758, then, following the Fujiwara no Nakamaro Rebellion, she reascended the throne as Empress Shōtoku from 765 until her death in 770. Empress Kōken was involved in an affair with priest Dōkyō and appointed him Grand Minister in 764. In 766, he was promoted to Hōō (priestly emperor) and in 770 had tried to ascend the throne by himself. The death of the Empress and resistance from the aristocracy destroyed his plans. This incident was a reason for the later move of the Japanese capital from Nara (Heijō).
In the history of Japan, Kōken/Shōtoku was the sixth of eight women to take on the role of empress regnant. The five female monarchs before Kōken/Shōtoku were Suiko, Kōgyoku/Saimei, Jitō, Genmei and Genshō, and the two women sovereigns reigning after Kōken/Shōtoku were Meishō and Go-Sakuramachi.
Traditional narrative
Empress Kōken's personal name (imina) was . Her father was Emperor Shōmu, and her mother was Empress Kōmyō.
Kōken is traditionally venerated at her tomb; the Imperial Household Agency designates , in Nara, Nara, as the location of Kōken's mausoleum. The site is publicly accessible.
Events of Kōken's life
August 19, 749 (): In the 25th year of Shōmu-tennō 's reign (聖武天皇二十五年), the emperor renounced his throne and the succession (senso) was received by his daughter. Shortly thereafter, Kōken is said to have acceded to the throne.
757: Conspiracy to overthrow Empress Kōken was not successful.
758: Kōken abdicated in favor of a cousin who would become known as Emperor Junnin. The Empress had reigned for about ten years.
764: In the sixth year of Junnin-tennō 's reign, the emperor was deposed by his adoptive mother, and the succession was received by former-Empress Kōken.
January 26, 765 (): Kōken formally reascended the throne (sokui) as Empress Shōtoku.
August 28, 770 (: Empress Shōtoku died at age 57, leaving the throne vacant. She was succeeded by her first cousin twice removed, Emperor Kōnin. Empress Shōtoku had reigned for five years.
Eras of her reigns
The years of Kōken's reign are more specifically identified by more than one era name.
Tenpyō-kanpō (749)
Tenpyō-shōhō (749–757)
Tenpyō-hōji (757–765)
The years of Shōtoku's reign are more specifically identified by more than one era name.
Tenpyō-hōji (757–765)
Tenpyō-jingo (765–767)
Jingo-keiun (767–770)
Legacy
Koken's reign was turbulent, and she survived coup attempts by both Tachibana no Naramaro and Fujiwara no Nakamaro. Today, she is remembered chiefly for her alleged affair with a Buddhist monk named Dōkyō (道鏡), a man she honored with titles and power. An oracle from Usa Shrine, the shrine of the kami in Usa, is said to have proclaimed that the monk should be made emperor; but when the empress sent to verify the pronouncement, Hachiman decreed that only one of imperial blood should ascend to the throne.
As with the seven other reigning empresses whose successors were most often selected from amongst the males of the paternal imperial bloodline, she was followed on the throne by a male cousin, which is why some conservative scholars argue that the women's reigns were temporary and that male-only succession tradition must be maintained in the 21st century. Empress Genmei, who was followed on the throne by her daughter, Empress Genshō, remains the sole exception to this conventional argument.
She is also known for sponsoring the Hyakumantō Darani, one of the largest productions of printed works in early Japan.
Otagi Nenbutsu-ji, a Buddhist temple in the Arashiyama neighborhood of Kyoto, was founded by Shōtoku in the middle of the eighth century.
Kugyō
is a collective term for the very few most powerful men attached to the court of the Emperor of Japan in pre-Meiji eras.
In general, this elite group included only three to four men at a time. These were hereditary courtiers whose experience and background would have brought them to the pinnacle of a life's career. During Kōken's reign, this apex of the Daijō-kan included:
Taihō, Emi no Oshikatsu (formerly Fujiwara no Nakamaro).
Daijō-daijin
Sadaijin, Tachibana no Moroe (formerly Katsuragi-ō, Prince Katsuragi) (half brother of Empress Kōmyō).
Udaijin, Fujiwara no Toyonari (first son of Fujiwara no Muchimaro).
Udaijin, Fujiwara no Nakamaro (second son of Fujiwara no Muchimaro).
Naidaijin
Dainagon
The kugyō during Shōtoku's reign included:
Daijō-daiji, Dōkyō.
Sadaijin
Udaijin, Kibi Makibi.
Nadaijin
Dainagon, Fujiwara Matate.
Ancestry
Notes
References
Ponsonby-Fane, Richard Arthur Brabazon. (1959). The Imperial House of Japan. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society.
Titsingh, Isaac. (1834). Nihon Ōdai Ichiran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Royal Asiatic Society, Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.
Varley, H. Paul. (1980). Jinnō Shōtōki: A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns. New York: Columbia University Press. ;
See also
Emperor of Japan
Japanese empresses
Hyakumantō Darani
Women rulers in Japan
Deaths from smallpox
718 births
770 deaths
Infectious disease deaths in Japan
Japanese empresses regnant
People of Nara-period Japan
8th-century women rulers
8th-century Japanese monarchs
Japanese retired emperors
Daughters of Japanese emperors | [
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, also known as was the third legendary emperor of Japan, according to the traditional order of succession. Very little is known about this Emperor due to a lack of material available for further verification and study. Annei is known as a "legendary emperor" among historians as his actual existence is disputed. Nothing exists in the Kojiki other than his name and genealogy. Annei's reign allegedly began in 549 BC, he had one wife and three sons. After his death in 511 BC, his second or third son supposedly became the next emperor.
Legendary narrative
Emperor Annei's name appears in both the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki where only his genealogy are recorded. While the Japanese have traditionally accepted this sovereign's historical existence, no extant contemporary records have been discovered that confirm a view that this historical figure actually reigned. Before his accession to the throne, he was allegedly known as Prince Shikitsu-hiko Tamatemi. Shikitsu-hiko Tamatemi was either the eldest son or the only son of Emperor Suizei with Isuzuyori-hime. The Kojiki records that he ruled from the palace of at Katashiro in Kawachi in what would come to be known as Yamato Province. During Emperor Annei's alleged lifetime, he had one wife named "Nunasoko-Nakatsu-hime" and fathered three children with her. Annei's reign lasted from 549 BC until his death in 511 BC, his second or third son then took the throne and would later be referred to as Emperor Itoku.
Known information
The existence of at least the first nine Emperors is disputed due to insufficient material available for further verification and study. Annei is thus regarded by historians as a "legendary Emperor", and is considered to have been the second of eight Emperors without specific legends associated with them. The name Annei-tennō was assigned to him posthumously by later generations, and literally means "steady tranquillity". His name might have been regularized centuries after the lifetime ascribed to Annei, possibly during the time in which legends about the origins of the Yamato dynasty were compiled as the chronicles known today as the Kojiki. The name "Annei" is first credited to Japanese scholar and writer Ōmi no Mifune, who allegedly came up with the name sometime in the latter half of the 8th century.
While the actual site of Annei's grave is not known, the Emperor is traditionally venerated at a memorial Shinto shrine (misasagi) in Kashihara. The Imperial Household Agency designates this location as Annei's mausoleum, and is formally named Unebi-yama no hitsujisaru Mihodo no i no e no misasagi(The royal tomb over the mihodo at the south west of mount unebi) . The first emperor that historians state might have actually existed is Emperor Sujin, the 10th emperor of Japan. Outside of the Kojiki, the reign of Emperor Kinmei ( – 571 AD) is the first for which contemporary historiography is able to assign verifiable dates. The conventionally accepted names and dates of the early Emperors were not confirmed as "traditional" though, until the reign of Emperor Kanmu between 737 and 806 AD.
Consorts and Children
Empress: , Prince Kamo's daughter (Kotoshironushi's son)
First Son:
Second Son: , later Emperor Itoku
See also
Emperor of Japan
List of Emperors of Japan
Imperial cult
Notes
References
Further reading
Aston, William George. (1896). Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Brown, Delmer M. and Ichirō Ishida, eds. (1979). Gukanshō: The Future and the Past. Berkeley: University of California Press. ;
Chamberlain, Basil Hall. (1920). The Kojiki. Read before the Asiatic Society of Japan on April 12, May 10, and June 21, 1882; reprinted, May, 1919.
Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric and Käthe Roth. (2005). Japan encyclopedia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ;
Ponsonby-Fane, Richard Arthur Brabazon. (1959). The Imperial House of Japan. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society.
Titsingh, Isaac. (1834). Nihon Ōdai Ichiran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Royal Asiatic Society, Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.
Varley, H. Paul. (1980). Jinnō Shōtōki: A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns. New York: Columbia University Press. ;
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] |
, also known as was the 14th legendary Emperor of Japan, according to the traditional order of succession. Both the Kojiki, and the Nihon Shoki (collectively known as the Kiki) record events that took place during Chūai's alleged lifetime. Chūai is the first monarch to ascend the throne who was not a son of the previous Emperor as the latter's only child died young. He is also noted for having his capital in Kyushu, rather than Yamato like his predecessors. The records state that Chūai had a wife named Okinagatarashihime-no-Mikoto (later Jingū), and 2 consorts that all bore him 4 children.
Chūai's reign is conventionally considered to have been from 192 to 200 AD. The events leading up to the Emperor's death have been subject to interpretation as they involve a vengeful Kami (spirit) indirectly killing Chūai. This event allegedly occurred after the Emperor disrespectfully scoffed at the Kami's request. His wife Jingū carried out the Kami's request which was to invade Korea, but this has since been considered legendary rather than factual. While the location of Chūai's grave (if any) is unknown, he is traditionally venerated at a memorial Shinto tomb, and at a Hachiman shrine.
Modern historians have come to the conclusion that the title of "Emperor" and the name "Chūai" were used by later generations to describe this legendary Emperor. It has also been proposed that Chūai actually reigned much later than he is attested. Emperor Chūai is traditionally listed as the last Emperor of the Yayoi period.
Legendary narrative
The Japanese have traditionally accepted this sovereign's historical existence, and a mausoleum (misasagi) for Chūai is currently maintained. The following information available is taken from the pseudo-historical Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, which are collectively known as or Japanese chronicles. These chronicles include legends and myths, as well as potential historical facts that have since been exaggerated and/or distorted over time. The records state that Chūai was born to Futaji no Iri Hime sometime in 149 AD, and was given the name . Chūai's father was allegedly the legendary prince, Yamato Takeru. He was the first Emperor who was not the child of the previous Emperor, being instead the nephew of his predecessor Emperor Seimu. The title of Crown Prince was given to him by his uncle before his death in 170 AD, two years later Chūai became the next Emperor. Unlike his predecessors who had maintained their capitals in Yamato Province, the records state his palace was first located on the northern shores of Shimonoseki Strait, then south of that in Kyushu.
Emperor Chūai is described in the Kiki as having been ten feet tall, with "a countenance of perfect beauty". He had one wife who was named Okinagatarashi (aka Jingū), and two consorts who all bore him four children. During the start of his reign he made progress to modern day Tsuruga, and led an expedition to Kii where he heard news of a revolt. Jingū accompanied him to the west to fight against a tribe in Tsukushi (located in modern-day Fukuoka Prefecture) called Kumaso. On the eve of battle though, his wife was suddenly possessed by some unknown kami who advised Chūai to invade and conquer Korea. The Kami gave the reasoning that the Kumaso were not worthy of "his steel". Chūai refused with scorn for a number of reasons which included giving up a military campaign, and doubting that such a land even existed. It is said that the Kami was so enraged by this disrespect, that Emperor Chūai was later killed in a battle that beat down his troops.
The death of the Emperor was kept quiet by Jingū, who vanquished the Kumaso soon afterwards in a fit of revenge. Jingū then respected the wishes of the Kami by invading Korea, and subjugated the eastern Korean kingdom of Shiragi. The other two Korean kingdoms at the time voluntarily submitted, and Jingū ascended to the throne as Empress. Jingū's occupation of the Korean Peninsula, and reign as Empress are now considered to be legendary rather than factual. The modern traditional view is that Chūai's son (Homutawake) became the next Emperor after Jingū acted as a regent. She would have been de facto ruler in the interim.
Known information
Emperor Chūai is regarded by historians as a "legendary Emperor" as there is insufficient material available for further verification and study. The lack of this information has made his very existence open to debate. There is no evidence to suggest that the title tennō was used during the time to which Chūai's reign has been assigned. It is certainly possible that he was a chieftain or local clan leader, and that the polity he ruled would have only encompassed a small portion of modern-day Japan. The name Chūai-tennō was more than likely assigned to him posthumously by later generations. His name might have been regularized centuries after the lifetime ascribed to Chūai, possibly during the time in which legends about the origins of the Yamato dynasty were compiled as the chronicles known today as the Kojiki.
The manner in which Chūai died has since been broken down to at least two theories. In his book Confucianism O - Z, professor Xinzhong Yao notes that it is possible the late Emperor could have succumbed to illness rather than death on the battlefield. Sources which include Yao, Francis Brinkley, and Kikuchi Dairoku also cite the enemy arrow scenario. While the actual site of Chūai's grave is not known, the Emperor is traditionally venerated at a memorial Shinto shrine (misasagi) at Nara. The Imperial Household Agency designates this location as Chūai's mausoleum, and is formally named Ega no Naganu no nishi no misasagi. The Kami (spirit) of Chūai is also enshrined at the Tamukeyama Hachiman Shrine in Nara. Chūai is traditionally listed as the last Emperor of the Yayoi period, who could have in reality ruled in the 4th century. The next era is known as the Kofun period, where more is known about the Emperors based on modern day archaeological evidence.
Outside of the Kiki, the reign of Emperor Kinmei ( – 571 AD) is the first for which contemporary historiography has been able to assign verifiable dates. The conventionally accepted names and dates of the early Emperors were not confirmed as "traditional" though, until the reign of Emperor Kanmu between 737 and 806 AD.
Consorts and children
Emperor Chuai and Empress Jingu are both great-great-great-grandchildren of Emperor Kaika, the ninth Emperor of Japan.
Empress: , later Empress Jingu, Prince Okinaga no sukune's daughter
, later Emperor Ōjin
Consort: , Prince Hikohitoōe's daughter (Emperor Keiko's son)
Consort: , Ōsakanushi's daughter
See also
Emperor of Japan
List of Emperors of Japan
Imperial cult
Notes
References
Further reading
Aston, William George. (1896). Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Brown, Delmer M. and Ichirō Ishida, eds. (1979). Gukanshō: The Future and the Past. Berkeley: University of California Press. ;
Chamberlain, Basil Hall. (1920). The Kojiki. Read before the Asiatic Society of Japan on April 12, May 10, and June 21, 1882; reprinted, May, 1919.
Ponsonby-Fane, Richard Arthur Brabazon. (1959). The Imperial House of Japan. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society.
Titsingh, Isaac. (1834). Nihon Ōdai Ichiran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Royal Asiatic Society, Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.
Varley, H. Paul. (1980). Jinnō Shōtōki: A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns. New York: Columbia University Press. ;
Legendary Emperors of Japan
People of Yayoi-period Japan
2nd-century monarchs in Asia
2nd-century Japanese monarchs
Hachiman faith
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(449 — 9 September 498) was the 24th legendary Emperor of Japan, according to the traditional order of succession. No firm dates can be assigned to this Emperor's life or reign, but he is conventionally considered to have reigned from 4 February 488 to 9 September 498.
Legendary narrative
Ninken is considered to have ruled the country during the late-5th century, but there is a paucity of information about him. There is insufficient material available for further verification and study.
In his youth, he was known as . Along with his younger brother, Prince Woke, Oke was raised to greater prominence when Emperor Seinei died without an heir. The two young princes were said to be grandsons of Emperor Richū. Each of these brothers would ascend the throne as adopted heirs of Seinei, although it is unclear whether they had been "found" in Seinei's lifetime or only after that.
Oke's younger brother, who would become posthumously known as Emperor Kenzō, ascended before his elder brother. This unconventional sequence was in accordance with an agreement made by the two brothers.
Ninken's reign
When Emperor Kenzo died without heirs, Prince Oke succeeded him as Emperor Ninken.
Ninken's contemporary title would not have been tennō, as most historians believe this title was not introduced until the reigns of Emperor Tenmu and Empress Jitō. Rather, it was presumably , meaning "the great king who rules all under heaven". Alternatively, Ninken might have been referred to as or the "Great King of Yamato".
Ninken married to Emperor Yūryaku's daughter Kasuga no Ōiratsume no Himemiko, a second cousin of him. Their daughter Tashiraka was later married to Emperor Keitai, successor or possibly usurper after her brother, and became mother of Emperor Kinmei, a future monarch and lineal ancestor of all future monarchs of Japan. There apparently was also another daughter, Princess Tachibana, who in turn is recorded to have become a wife of Senka and mother of Princess Iwahime, who herself became a consort of Kimmei and bore Emperor Bidatsu, a future monarch and lineal ancestor of current monarchs of Japan.
Ninken was succeeded by his son, who would accede as Emperor Buretsu.
The actual site of Ninken's grave is not known. The Emperor is traditionally venerated at a memorial Shinto shrine (misasagi) at Osaka.
The Imperial Household Agency designates this location as Ninken's mausoleum. It is formally named Hanyū no Sakamoto no misasagi.
Consorts and Children
Empress: , Emperor Yūryaku's daughter
, married to Emperor Keitai
, married to Emperor Senka
, later Emperor Buretsu
Consort: , Wani Nitsume's daughter
, married to Emperor Ankan
Ancestry
See also
Emperor of Japan
List of Emperors of Japan
Imperial cult
Notes
References
Aston, William George. (1896). Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Brown, Delmer M. and Ichirō Ishida, eds. (1979). Gukanshō: The Future and the Past. Berkeley: University of California Press. ;
Ponsonby-Fane, Richard Arthur Brabazon. (1959). The Imperial House of Japan. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society.
Titsingh, Isaac. (1834). Nihon Ōdai Ichiran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Royal Asiatic Society, Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.
Varley, H. Paul. (1980). Jinnō Shōtōki: A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns. New York: Columbia University Press. ;
Japanese emperors
5th-century births
People of Kofun-period Japan
5th-century monarchs in Asia
5th-century Japanese monarchs
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In Greek mythology, Eos (; Ionic and Homeric Greek Ēṓs, Attic Héōs, "dawn", or ; Aeolic Aúōs, Doric Āṓs) is a Titaness and the goddess of the dawn, who rose each morning from her home at the edge of the Oceanus. Like Roman Aurora and Rigvedic Ushas, Eos continues the name of an earlier Indo-European dawn goddess, Hausos. Eos, or her earlier Proto-Indo-European (PIE) ancestor, also shares several elements with the love goddess Aphrodite, perhaps signifying Eos's influence on her or otherwise a common origin for the two. In surviving tradition, Aphrodite is the cause behind Eos' numerous love affairs, having cursed the goddess with insatiable lust for mortal men.
Eos is presented as a daughter of Hyperion and Theia, the sister of the sun god Helios and the moon goddess Selene. In rarer traditions, she is the daughter of the Titan Pallas. Each day she drives her two-horse chariot, heralding the breaking of the new day and her brother's arrival. Thus, her most common epithet of the goddess in the Homeric epics is Rhododactylos, or "rosy-fingered", a reference to the sky's colours at dawn, and Erigeneia, "early-born".
Eos fell in love with mortal men several times, and would abduct them in similar manner to how male gods did mortal women. Her most notable mortal lover is the Trojan prince Tithonus, for whom she ensured the gift of immortality, but not eternal youth, leading to him aging without dying for an eternity.
Despite her Proto-Indo-European origins, there's little evidence of Eos having received any cult or worship during classical times.
Etymology and origins
The Proto-Greek form of Ἠώς / Ēṓs has been reconstructed as *ἀυhώς / auhṓs, and in Mycenaean Greek as *hāwōs. According to Robert S. P. Beekes, the loss of the initial aspiration could be due to metathesis. It is cognate to the Vedic goddess Ushas, Lithuanian goddess Aušrinė, and Roman goddess Aurora (Old Latin Ausosa), all three of whom are also goddesses of the dawn.
In Mycenaean Greek her name is also attested as a-wo-i-jo (Āw(ʰ)oʰios; Ἀϝohιος), found in a tablet from Pylos; it has been interpreted as a shepherd's personal name related to "dawn", or dative form Āwōiōi.
All four are considered derivatives of the Proto-Indo-European stem *h₂ewsṓs (later *Ausṓs), "dawn". The root also gave rise to Proto-Germanic *Austrō, Old High German *Ōstara and Old English Ēostre / Ēastre. These cognates led to the reconstruction of a Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess, Hausos (*H₂éwsōs). In the Greek pantheon, Eos, Helios and Zeus are the three gods that are of impeccable Indo-European lineage in both etymology and status, although the former two were sidelined in the pantheon by non-PIE newcomers.
Eos also shares some characteristics with the love goddess Aphrodite connoting perhaps a semi-shared origin or influence of Eos/*Haéusōs on Aphrodite, who otherwise has a Near Eastern origin; both goddesses were known for their erotic beauty and aggressive sexuality, both had relationships with mortal lovers and both were associated with the colors red, white, and gold. Michael Janda etymologizes Aphrodite's name as an epithet of Eos meaning "she who rises from the foam [of the ocean]" and points to Hesiod's Theogony account of Aphrodite's birth as an archaic reflex of Indo-European myth. Evidence is also provided by an Italic red-figure krater in which Aphrodite is shown holding a mirror beneath a solar disc while the Theban hero Cadmus slays the dragon, with a female figure nearly identical to Aphrodite being depicted on another krater labelled "", or Aṓs, the dawn; this shows that although Aphrodite is assimilated to Astarte/Inanna, in Greek artistic tradition she is sometimes presented in a similar matter to Eos.
This probably of Proto-Indo-European origin goddess of the dawn was often conflated and equated with Hemera, the goddess of the day and daylight.
Eos might have also played a role in Proto-Indo-European poetry.
Family
Eos was the daughter of the Titans Hyperion and Theia: Hyperion, a bringer of light, the One Above, Who Travels High Above the Earth and Theia, The Divine, also called Euryphaessa, "wide-shining" and Aethra, "bright sky". Eos was the sister of Helios, god of the sun, and Selene, goddess of the moon, "who shine upon all that are on earth and upon the deathless gods who live in the wide heaven". Of the four authors that give her and her siblings a birth order, two make her the oldest child, the other two the youngest. The generation of Titans preceded all the familiar deities of Olympus who largely supplanted them. In some accounts, Eos's father was called Pallas. Mesomedes made her the daughter of Helios, who is usually her brother, by an unnamed mother.
Eos married the Titan Astraeus ("of the Stars") and became the mother of the Anemoi ("winds") namely Zephyrus, Boreas, Notus and Eurus; of the Morning Star, Eosphoros (Venus); the Astra ("stars") and of the virgin goddess of justice, Astraea ("starry one"). Her other notable offspring were Memnon and Emathion by the Trojan prince, Tithonus. Sometimes, Hesperus, Phaethon and Tithonus (different from her lover) were called the children of Eos by the Athenian prince, Cephalus.
Mythology
Goddess of the dawn
The dawn goddess Eos was almost always described with rosy fingers or rosy forearms as she opened the gates of heaven for the Sun to rise. In Homer, her saffron-colored robe is embroidered or woven with flowers; rosy-fingered and with golden arms, she is pictured on Attic vases as a beautiful woman, crowned with a tiara or diadem and with the large white-feathered wings of a bird.
Homer and Hesiod
From The Iliad:
Now when Dawn in robe of saffron was hastening from the streams of Oceanus, to bring light to mortals and immortals, Thetis reached the ships with the armor that the god had given her.
But soon as early Dawn appeared, the rosy-fingered, then gathered the folk about the pyre of glorious Hector.
She is most often associated with her Homeric epithet "rosy-fingered" Eos Rhododactylos (), but Homer also calls her Eos Erigeneia:
That brightest of stars appeared, Eosphoros, that most often heralds the light of early-rising Dawn (Eos Erigeneia).
Near the end of the Odyssey, Athena, wanting to buy Odysseus some time with his wife Penelope after they have reunited with each other, orders Eos not to yoke her two horses, thus delaying the coming of the new day:
And rose-fingered Dawn would have shone for the weepers had not bright-eyed goddess Athena thought of other things. She checked the long night in its passage, and further, held golden-throned Dawn over Ocean and didn't let her yoke her swift-footed horses, that bring daylight to men, Lampus and Phaethon, the colts that carry Dawn.
Hesiod wrote:
And after these Erigeneia ["Early-born"] bore the star Eosphoros ("Dawn-bringer"), and the gleaming stars with which heaven is crowned.
Thus Eos, preceded by the Morning Star, is seen as the genetrix of all the stars and planets; her tears are considered to have created the morning dew, personified as Ersa or Herse.
Orphic literature
Eos is addressed by the singer in one of the Orphic Hymns, as the bringer of the new day:
{{Quote|
Hear, O goddess, you bring the light of day to mortals
resplendent Dawn, you blush throughout the world
messenger of the great, the illustrious Titan.
|title=Orphic Hymn 78 to the Dawn.}}
Divine horses
Eos's team of horses pull her chariot across the sky and are named in the Odyssey as "Firebright" and "Daybright". Quintus described her exulting in her heart over the radiant horses (Lampus and Phaëton) that drew her chariot, amidst the bright-haired Horae, the feminine Hours, the daughters of Zeus and Themis who are responsible for the changing of the seasons, climbing the arc of heaven and scattering sparks of fire.
Role in wars
Eos played a small role in the battle of the giants against the gods, known as the Gigantomachy; when the earth goddess Gaia learned of a prophecy that the giants would perish at the hand of a mortal, Gaia sought to find a herb that would protect them; thus Zeus ordered Eos, as well as her siblings Selene (Moon) and Helios (Sun) not to shine, and harvested all of the plant for himself, denying Gaia the chance to make the giants indestructible.
According to Hesiod, by her lover Tithonus, Eos had two sons, Memnon and Emathion. Memnon fought among the Trojans in the Trojan War and fought against Achilles. Pausanias mentions images of Thetis, the mother of Achilles, and Eos begging Zeus on behalf of their sons. In the end, it was Achilles who triumphed and slew Memnon in battle. Mourning greatly over the death of her son, Eos made the light of her brother, Helios the god of the sun, to fade, and begged Nyx, the goddess of the night, to come out earlier, so she could be able to freely steal her son's body undetected by the armies. After his death, Eos asked Zeus to make her son immortal, and he granted her wish.
Lovers
Eos is presented as a goddess who fell in love several times. According to Pseudo-Apollodorus, it was the jealous Aphrodite who cursed her to be perpetually in love and have an insatiable sexual desire because Eos had once lain with Aphrodite's lover Ares, the god of war. This caused her to abduct a number of handsome young men.
In the Odyssey, Calypso complains to Hermes about the male gods taking many mortal women as lovers, but not allowing goddesses to do the same. She brings up as example Eos’s love for the hunter Orion, who was killed by Artemis in Ortygia. Apollodorus also mentions Eos’s love for Orion, and adds that she brought him to Delos, where he met Artemis. The good-looking Cleitus was snatched and made immortal by her.
Eos fell in love with and abducted Tithonus, a handsome prince from Troy. She went with a request to Zeus, asking him to make Tithonus immortal for her sake. Zeus agreed and granted her wish, but Eos forgot to ask for eternal youth as well for her beloved. For a while, they two lived happily, until Tithonus’ hair started turning grey, and Eos ceased to visit him in bed. But he kept aging, and was soon unable to even move. In the end, Eos locked him up in a chamber, where he withered away, forever a helpless old man. Out of pity, she turned him into a cicada. In the account of Hieronymus of Rhodes from the third century BC, the blame is shifted from Eos onto Tithonus, who asked for immortality but not agelessness from his lover, who was then unable to help him otherwise and turned him into a cicada. Propertius wrote that Eos did not forsake Tithonus, old and aged as he was, and would still embrace him and hold him in her arms rather than leaving him deserted in his cold chamber, while cursing the gods for his cruel fate. This myth might have been used to explain why cicadas were particularly noisy during the early hours of the morning.
The abduction of Cephalus had special appeal for an Athenian audience because Cephalus was a local boy, and so this myth element appeared frequently in Attic vase-paintings and was exported with them. In the literary myths, Eos snatched Cephalus against his will when he was hunting and took him to Syria. Although Cephalus was already married to Procris, Eos bore him three sons, including Phaethon and Hesperus, but he then began pining for Procris, causing a disgruntled Eos to return him to Procris, but not before sowing the seeds of doubt in his mind, telling him that it was highly unlikely that Procris had stayed faithful to him this entire time. Cephalus, troubled by her words, asked Eos to change his form into that of a stranger, in order to secretly test Procris’s love for him. Cephalus, disguised, propositioned Procris, who at first declined but eventually gave in. He was hurt by her betrayal, and she left him in shame, but eventually they got back together. This time however it was Procris’s turn to doubt her husband’s fidelity; while hunting, he would often call upon the breeze ('Aura' in Latin, sounding similar to Eos’s Roman equivalent Aurora) to refresh his body. Upon hearing that, Procris followed and spied on him. Cephalus, mistaking her for some wild animal, threw his spear at her, killing his wife.
The second-century CE traveller Pausanias knew of the story of Cephalus’s abduction too, though he calls Eos by the name of Hemera, goddess of day.
Iconography
Eos was imagined as a woman wearing a saffron mantle as she spread dew from an upturned urn, or with a torch in hand, riding a chariot. Greek and Italian vases show Eos/Aurora on a chariot preceding Helios, as Eosphorus flies with her; she is winged, wearing a fine pleated tunic and mantle. Eos is not an uncommon figure, especially on red-figure vases; as a single figure she appears rising from the sea in, or driving, a four-horse chariot like her brother Helios.
Although the romantic adventures of Eos is a common subject in pottery, so far as it is known, no vase depicts her with Orion or Cleitus, known lovers of hers, instead those vases fall into groups; those that depict Eos with a young hunter identified as Cephalus, and those that depict Eos with a youth holding a lyre, identified as Tithonus. Sometimes those vases bear inscriptions, and on a few the hunter is identified as Tithonus, while the lyre-player is Cephalus. The image of Eos pursuing Tithonus was eerily repetitive in ancient art, as was that of erotic pursuit in general; Tithonus was drawn running off to the right in terror, or trying to clobber with a lyre or a spear the pursuing Eos, indicating the terrifying aspect of a mortal man being taken by a goddess. The image of Zeus, the active erastes, pursuing Ganymede, the passive eromenos, was also common, but in the case of Eos, the female figure was put in the dominant position.
Cult and temples
Eos, along with her brother and sister, is a Proto-Indo-European deity, that was side-lined by the non-PIE newcomers to the pantheon; seemingly, persisting on the sidelines was a primary function for them, to be the minor gods that the major gods were juxtaposed to, thus helping to keep the Greek religion Greek. Thus there are no known temples, shrines, or altars to Eos. However, Ovid seems to allude to the existence of at least two shrines of Eos, as he describes them in plural, albeit few, in the lines:
Ovid may therefore have known of at least two such shrines.
Traces of the goddess's worship can be found at Athens, where wineless offerings (or nephalia) were made to Eos, along with other celestial gods and goddesses, including Eos's siblings Helios and Selene, as well as Aphrodite Urania.
Interpretations
Etruscan
Among the Etruscans, the generative dawn-goddess was Thesan. Depictions of the dawn-goddess with a young lover became popular in Etruria in the fifth century, probably inspired by imported Greek vase-painting. Though Etruscans preferred to show the goddess as a nurturer (Kourotrophos) rather than an abductor of young men, the late Archaic sculptural acroterion from Etruscan Cære, now in Berlin, showing the goddess in archaic running pose adapted from the Greeks, and bearing a boy in her arms, has commonly been identified as Eos and Cephalus. On an Etruscan mirror Thesan is shown carrying off a young man, whose name is inscribed as Tinthu.
Roman
The Roman equivalent of Eos is Aurora, also a cognate showing the characteristic Latin rhotacism. Dawn became associated in Roman cult with Matuta, later known as Mater Matuta. She was also associated with the sea harbors and ports, and had a temple on the Forum Boarium. On June 11, the Matralia was celebrated at that temple in honor of Mater Matuta; this festival was only for women during their first marriage.
Genealogy
See also
Family tree of the Greek gods
Dawn goddess
H2éwsōs
Zorya
List of solar deities
Footnotes
Notes
References
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Further reading
Jackson, Peter. "Πότνια Αὔως: The Greek Dawn-Goddess and Her Antecedent." Glotta 81 (2005): 116-23. Accessed May 10, 2020. .
External links
EOS from The Theoi Project
EOS from Greek Mythology Link
EOS from greekmythology.com
Dawn
Solar goddesses
Greek goddesses
Light deities
Personifications in Greek mythology
Women in Greek mythology
Metamorphoses characters
Hausōs
Titans (mythology)
Characters in the Odyssey
Sky and weather goddesses
Characters in Greek mythology | [
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] |
was the 54th emperor of Japan, according to the traditional order of succession. Ninmyō's reign lasted from 833 to 850, during the Heian period.
Traditional narrative
Ninmyō was the second son of Emperor Saga and the Empress Tachibana no Kachiko. His personal name (imina) was . After his death, he was given the title .
Ninmyō had nine Empresses, Imperial consorts, and concubines (kōi); and the emperor had 24 Imperial sons and daughters.
Emperor Ninmyō is traditionally venerated at his tomb; the Imperial Household Agency designates , in Fushimi-ku, Kyoto, as the location of Ninmyō's mausoleum.
Events of Ninmyō's life
Ninmyō ascended to the throne following the abdication of his uncle, Emperor Junna.
6 January 823 (): Received the title of Crown Prince at the age of 14.
22 March 833 (): In the 10th year of Emperor Junna's reign, the emperor abdicated; and the succession (senso) was received by his adopted son. Masara-shinnō was the natural son of Emperor Saga, and therefore would have been Junna's nephew. Shortly thereafter, Emperor Ninmyo is said to have acceded to the throne (sokui).
Shortly after Ninmyo was enthroned, he designated an heir. He named Prince Tsunesada, a son of former Emperor Junna, as the crown prince.
835 (): Kūkai (known posthumously as Kōbō-Daishi) died. This monk, scholar, poet, and artist had been the founder of the Shingon or "True Word" school of Buddhism.
838-839 (Jōwa 5-6): Diplomatic mission to Tang China headed by Fujiwara no Tsunetsugu.
842: Following a coup d'état called the Jōwa Incident, Tsunesada the crown prince was replaced with Ninmyō's first son, Prince Michiyasu (later Emperor Montoku) whose mother was the Empress Fujiwara no Junshi, a daughter of sadaijin Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu. It is supposed that this was the result of political intrigue planned by Ninmyō and Fujiwara no Yoshifusa. The first of what would become a powerful line of Fujiwara regents, Yoshifusa had numerous family ties to the imperial court; he was Ninmyō's brother in law (by virtue of his sister who became Ninmyō's consort), the second son of sadaijin Fuyutsugu, and uncle to the new crown prince.
In his lifetime, Ninmyō could not have anticipated that his third son, Prince Tokiyasu, would eventually ascend the throne in 884 as Emperor Kōkō.
6 May 850 ({{nihongo foot|Kashō 3, 21st day of the 3rd month|嘉祥三年三月二十一日}}): Emperor Ninmyō died at the age of 41. He was sometimes posthumously referred to as "the Emperor of Fukakusa", because that was the name given to his tomb.
Eras of Ninmyō's reign
The years of Ninmyō's reign are more specifically identified by more than one era name (nengō).
Tenchō (824–834)
Jōwa (834–848)
Kashō (848–851)
Kugyō
is a collective term for the very few most powerful men attached to the court of the Emperor of Japan in pre-Meiji eras.
In general, this elite group included only three to four men at a time. These were hereditary courtiers whose experience and background would have brought them to the pinnacle of a life's career. During Ninmyō's reign, this apex of the Daijō-kan included:
Sadaijin, Fujiwara no Otsugu (藤原緒嗣), 773–843.
Sadaijin, Minamoto no Tokiwa (源常), 812–854.
Udaijin, Kiyohara no Natsuno (清原夏野), 782–837.
Udaijin, Fujiwara no Mimori (藤原三守), d. 840.
Udaijin, Minamoto no Tokiwa (源常)
Udaijin, Tachibana no Ujikimi (橘氏公), 783–847.
Udaijin, Fujiwara no Yoshifusa (藤原良房), 804–872.
Udaijin, Fujiwara no Otsugu, 825–832
Naidaijin (not appointed)
Dainagon, Fujiwara no Otsugu, ?–825.
Consorts and children
Consort (Nyōgo) later Empress Dowager (Tai-Kōtaigō): Fujiwara no Junshi (藤原順子; 809–871), Fujiwara no Fuyutsugu’s daughter
First Son: Imperial Prince Michiyasu (道康親王) later Emperor Montoku
Consort (Nyōgo): Fujiwara no Takushi/Sawako (藤原沢子; d.839), Fujiwara no Fusatsugu’s daughter
Second Son: Imperial Prince Muneyasu (宗康親王; 828–868)
Third Son: Imperial Prince Tokiyasu (時康親王) later Emperor Kōkō
Fourth Son: Imperial Prince Saneyasu (人康親王; 831–872)
Imperial Princess Shinshi (新子内親王; d.897)
Consort (Nyōgo): Fujiwara no Teishi/Sadako (藤原貞子; d.864), Fujiwara no Tadamori’s daughter
Eighth Son: Imperial Prince Nariyasu (成康親王; 836–853)
Imperial Princess Shinshi (親子内親王; d. 851)
Imperial Princess Heishi (平子内親王; d. 877)
Court lady: Shigeno no Tsunako (滋野縄子), Shigeno no Sadanushi’s daughter
fifth Son: Imperial Prince Motoyasu (本康親王; d. 902)
Ninth Daughter: Imperial Princess Tokiko (時子内親王; d. 847), 2nd Saiin in Kamo Shrine 831–833
Imperial Princess Jūshi (柔子内親王; d. 869)
Consort (Nyōgo): Tachibana no Kageko (橘影子; d. 864), Tachibana no Ujikimi’s daughter
Consort (Nyōgo): Fujiwara Musuko (藤原息子)
Court Attendant (Koui): Ki no Taneko (紀種子; d. 869), Ki no Natora’s daughter
Seventh Prince: Imperial Prince Tsuneyasu (常康親王; d. 869)
Imperial Princess Shinshi/Saneko (真子内親王; d. 870)
Court Attendant (Koui) (deposed in 845): Mikuni-machi (三国町), daughter of Mikuni clan
Sada no Noboru (貞登), given the family name "Sada" from Emperor (Shisei Kōka, 賜姓降下) in 866
Court lady: Fujiwara no Katoko (藤原賀登子), Fujiwara no Fukutomaro’s daughter
Sixth Son: Imperial Prince Kuniyasu (国康親王; d. 898)
Court lady: Fujiwara no Warawako (藤原小童子), Fujiwara no Michitō’s daughter
Imperial Princess Shigeko (重子内親王; d. 865)
Court lady: Princess Takamune (高宗女王), Prince Okaya’s daughter
Seventh/eighth Daughter: Imperial Princess Hisako (久子内親王; d. 876), 18th Saiō in Ise Shrine 833–850.
Court lady: daughter of Yamaguchi clan (山口氏の娘)
Minamoto no Satoru (源覚; 849–879)
Nyoju: Kudaraō Toyofuku’s daughter
Minamoto no Masaru (源多; 831–888), Udaijin 882–888
Minamoto no Hikaru (源光; 846–913), Udaijin 901–913
Court lady (Nyoju): Kudara no Yōkyō (百済永慶), Kudara no Kyōfuku’s daughter
Twelfth Daughter: Imperial Princess Takaiko (高子内親王; d. 866), 3rd Saiin in Kamo Shrine 833–850
(from unknown women)
Minamoto no Suzushi (源冷; 835–890), Sangi 882–890
Minamoto no Itaru (源効)
Ancestry
See also
Emperor Go-Fukakusa, a later emperor named in honor of Emperor Ninmyō
Imperial cult
List of Emperors of Japan
Shoku Nihon Kōki, a Japanese national history covering Emperor Ninmyō's reign.
Notes
References
Adolphson, Mikael S., Edward Kamens and Stacie Matsumoto. (2007). Heian Japan, centers and peripheries. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric and Käthe Roth. (2005). Japan encyclopedia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ;
Ponsonby-Fane, Richard Arthur Brabazon. (1959). The Imperial House of Japan. Kyoto: Ponsonby Memorial Society.
Titsingh, Isaac. (1834). Nihon Ōdai Ichiran; ou, Annales des empereurs du Japon. Paris: Royal Asiatic Society, Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland.
Varley, H. Paul. (1980). Jinnō Shōtōki: A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns. New York: Columbia University Press. ;
External links
Hokusai: Poem #12, image of ceremonial event in Ninmyō's court
Japanese emperors
808 births
850 deaths
9th-century rulers in Asia
9th-century Japanese monarchs | [
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Espionage, spying or intelligence gathering is the act of obtaining secret or confidential information (intelligence) from non-disclosed sources or divulging of the same without the permission of the holder of the information for a tangible benefit. A person who commits espionage is called an espionage agent or spy. Any individual or spy ring (a cooperating group of spies), in the service of a government, company, criminal organization, or independent operation, can commit espionage. The practice is clandestine, as it is by definition unwelcome. In some circumstances, it may be a legal tool of law enforcement and in others, it may be illegal and punishable by law.
Espionage is often part of an institutional effort by a government or commercial concern. However, the term tends to be associated with state spying on potential or actual enemies for military purposes. Spying involving corporations is known as industrial espionage.
One of the most effective ways to gather data and information about a targeted organization is by infiltrating its ranks. This is the job of the spy (espionage agent). Spies can then return information such as the size and strength of enemy forces. They can also find dissidents within the organization and influence them to provide further information or to defect. In times of crisis, spies steal technology and sabotage the enemy in various ways. Counterintelligence is the practice of thwarting enemy espionage and intelligence-gathering. Almost all nations have strict laws concerning espionage and the penalty for being caught is often severe. However, the benefits gained through espionage are often so great that most governments and many large corporations make use of it.
History
Espionage has been recognized as an importance in military affairs since ancient times.
The oldest known classified document was a report made by a spy disguised as a diplomatic envoy in the court of King Hammurabi, who died in around 1750 BC. The Ancient Egyptians had a developed secret service and espionage is mentioned in the Iliad, the Bible, and the Amarna letters as well as its recordings in the story of the Old Testament, The Twelve Spies. Espionage was also prevalent in the Greco-Roman world, when spies employed illiterate subjects in civil services.
The thesis that espionage and intelligence has a central role in war as well as peace was first advanced in The Art of War and in the Arthashastra. In the Middle Ages European states excelled at what has later been termed counter-subversion when Catholic inquisitions were staged to annihilate heresy. Inquisitions were marked by centrally organised mass interrogations and detailed record keeping. During the Renaissance European states funded codebreakers to obtain intelligence through frequency analysis. Western espionage changed fundamentally during the Renaissance when Italian city-states installed resident ambassadors in capital cities to collect intelligence. Renaissance Venice became so obsessed with espionage that the Council of Ten, which was nominally responsible for security, did not even allow the doge to consult government archives freely. In 1481 the Council of Ten barred all Venetian government officials from making contact with ambassadors or foreigners. Those revealing official secrets could face the death penalty. Venice became obsessed with espionage because successful international trade demanded that the city-state could protect its trade secrets. Under Elizabeth I, Francis Walsingham was appointed foreign secretary and intelligence chief.
During the American Revolution, Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold achieved their fame as spies, and there was considerable use of spies on both sides during the American Civil War. Though not a spy himself, George Washington was America's first spymaster, utilizing espionage tactics against the British.
In the 20th century, at the height of World War I, all great powers except the United States had elaborate civilian espionage systems and all national military establishments had intelligence units. In order to protect the country against foreign agents, the U.S. Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917. Mata Hari, who obtained information for Germany by seducing French officials, was the most noted espionage agent of World War I. Prior to World War II, Germany and Imperial Japan established elaborate espionage nets. In 1942 the Office of Strategic Services was founded by Gen. William J. Donovan. However, the British system was the keystone of Allied intelligence. Numerous resistance groups such as the Austrian Maier-Messner Group, the French Resistance, the Witte Brigade, Milorg and the Polish Home Army worked against Nazi Germany and provided the Allied secret services with information that was very important for the war effort.
Since the end of World War II, the activity of espionage has enlarged, much of it growing out of the Cold War between the United States and the former USSR. The Russian Empire and its successor, the Soviet Union have had a long tradition of espionage ranging from the Okhrana to the KGB (Committee for State Security), which also acted as a secret police force. In the United States, the 1947 National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to coordinate intelligence and the National Security Agency for research into codes and electronic communication. In addition to these, the United States has 13 other intelligence gathering agencies; most of the U.S. expenditures for intelligence gathering are budgeted to various Defense Dept. agencies and their programs. Under the intelligence reorganization of 2004, the director of national intelligence is responsible for overseeing and coordinating the activities and budgets of the U.S. intelligence agencies.
In the Cold War, espionage cases included Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers and the Rosenberg Case. In 1952 the Communist Chinese captured two CIA agents, and in 1960 Francis Gary Powers, flying a U-2 reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union for the CIA, was shot down and captured. During the Cold War, many Soviet intelligence officials defected to the West, including Gen. Walter Krivitsky, Victor Kravchenko, Vladimir Petrov, Peter Deriabin Pawel Monat, and Oleg Penkovsky, of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence). Among Western officials who defected to the Soviet Union are Guy Burgess and Donald D. Maclean of Great Britain in 1951, Otto John of West Germany in 1954, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, U.S. cryptographers, in 1960, and Harold (Kim) Philby of Great Britain in 1962. U.S. acknowledgment of its U-2 flights and the exchange of Francis Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel in 1962 implied the legitimacy of some espionage as an arm of foreign policy.
China has a very cost-effective intelligence program that is especially effective in monitoring neighboring countries such as Mongolia, Russia, and India. Smaller countries can also mount effective and focused espionage efforts. For instance, the Vietnamese Communists had consistently superior intelligence during the Vietnam War. Some Islamic countries, including Libya, Iran, and Syria, have highly developed operations as well. SAVAK, the secret police of the Pahlavi dynasty, was particularly feared by Iranian dissidents before the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Today
Today, spy agencies target the illegal drug trade and terrorists as well as state actors. Between 2008 and 2011, the United States charged at least 57 defendants for attempting to spy for China.
Intelligence services value certain intelligence collection techniques over others. The former Soviet Union, for example, preferred human sources over research in open sources, while the United States has tended to emphasize technological methods such as SIGINT and IMINT. In the Soviet Union, both political (KGB) and military intelligence (GRU) officers were judged by the number of agents they recruited.
The espionage efforts and knowledge of a nation are often used by other countries by hiring their intelligence employees. The United Arab Emirates is one of the major countries relying on the technique, where they have hired the former employees of the US' National Security Agency and the White House veterans. Some of the agents were hired to hack the Emirates' former rival nation Qatar, its royals and even FIFA officials. Others were asked to conduct surveillance on other governments, human rights activists, social media critics, and even militants. However, the spying efforts of the UAE by using the Americans were also used to target the US itself, including former first lady Michelle Obama.
In September 2021, three former intelligence officials from America admitted to working for the United Arab Emirates' DarkMatter for hacking computers, servers, and electronic devices, including the computers and servers in the United States. According to court documents, the three operatives—Daniel Gericke, Ryan Adams, and Marc Baier—helped Emirati intelligence operatives with advanced cyber technology to assist them in breaches directed at potential enemies or political rivals. The DarkMatter also hired several other ex-N.S.A. and C.I.A. officers at salaries worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Targets of espionage
Espionage agents are usually trained experts in a targeted field so they can differentiate mundane information from targets of value to their own organizational development. Correct identification of the target at its execution is the sole purpose of the espionage operation.
Broad areas of espionage targeting expertise include:
Natural resources: strategic production identification and assessment (food, energy, materials). Agents are usually found among bureaucrats who administer these resources in their own countries
Popular sentiment towards domestic and foreign policies (popular, middle class, elites). Agents often recruited from field journalistic crews, exchange postgraduate students and sociology researchers
Strategic economic strengths (production, research, manufacture, infrastructure). Agents recruited from science and technology academia, commercial enterprises, and more rarely from among military technologists
Military capability intelligence (offensive, defensive, manoeuvre, naval, air, space). Agents are trained by military espionage education facilities and posted to an area of operation with covert identities to minimize prosecution
Counterintelligence operations targeting opponents' intelligence services themselves, such as breaching the confidentiality of communications, and recruiting defectors or moles
Methods and terminology
Although the news media may speak of "spy satellites" and the like, espionage is not a synonym for all intelligence-gathering disciplines. It is a specific form of human source intelligence (HUMINT). Codebreaking (cryptanalysis or COMINT), aircraft or satellite photography, (IMINT) and analysis of publicly available data sources (OSINT) are all intelligence gathering disciplines, but none of them is considered espionage. Many HUMINT activities, such as prisoner interrogation, reports from military reconnaissance patrols and from diplomats, etc., are not considered espionage. Espionage is the disclosure of sensitive information (classified) to people who are not cleared for that information or access to that sensitive information.
Unlike other forms of intelligence collection disciplines, espionage usually involves accessing the place where the desired information is stored or accessing the people who know the information and will divulge it through some kind of subterfuge. There are exceptions to physical meetings, such as the Oslo Report, or the insistence of Robert Hanssen in never meeting the people who bought his information.
The US defines espionage towards itself as "the act of obtaining, delivering, transmitting, communicating, or receiving information about the national defence with an intent, or reason to believe, that the information may be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation". Black's Law Dictionary (1990) defines espionage as: "... gathering, transmitting, or losing ... information related to the national defense". Espionage is a violation of United States law, and Article 106a of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The United States, like most nations, conducts espionage against other nations, under the control of the National Clandestine Service. Britain's espionage activities are controlled by the Secret Intelligence Service.
Technology and techniques
Agent handling
Concealment device
Covert agent
Covert listening device
Cut-out
Cyber spying
Dead drop
False flag operations
Honeypot
Impersonation
Impostor
Interrogation
Non-official cover
Numbers messaging
Official cover
One-way voice link
Sabotage
Safe house
Side channel attack
Steganography
Surveillance
Surveillance aircraft
Source:
Organization
A spy is a person employed to seek out top secret information from a source. Within the United States Intelligence Community, "asset" is more common usage. A case officer or Special Agent, who may have diplomatic status (i.e., official cover or non-official cover), supports and directs the human collector. Cut-outs are couriers who do not know the agent or case officer but transfer messages. A safe house is a refuge for spies. Spies often seek to obtain secret information from another source.
In larger networks, the organization can be complex with many methods to avoid detection, including clandestine cell systems. Often the players have never met. Case officers are stationed in foreign countries to recruit and supervise intelligence agents, who in turn spy on targets in the countries where they are assigned. A spy need not be a citizen of the target country and hence does not automatically commit treason when operating within it. While the more common practice is to recruit a person already trusted with access to sensitive information, sometimes a person with a well-prepared synthetic identity (cover background), called a legend in tradecraft, may attempt to infiltrate a target organization.
These agents can be moles (who are recruited before they get access to secrets), defectors (who are recruited after they get access to secrets and leave their country) or defectors in place (who get access but do not leave).
A legend is also employed for an individual who is not an illegal agent, but is an ordinary citizen who is "relocated", for example, a "protected witness". Nevertheless, such a non-agent very likely will also have a case officer who will act as a controller. As in most, if not all synthetic identity schemes, for whatever purpose (illegal or legal), the assistance of a controller is required.
Spies may also be used to spread disinformation in the organization in which they are planted, such as giving false reports about their country's military movements, or about a competing company's ability to bring a product to market. Spies may be given other roles that also require infiltration, such as sabotage.
Many governments spy on their allies as well as their enemies, although they typically maintain a policy of not commenting on this. Governments also employ private companies to collect information on their behalf such as SCG International Risk, International Intelligence Limited and others.
Many organizations, both national and non-national, conduct espionage operations. It should not be assumed that espionage is always directed at the most secret operations of a target country. National and terrorist organizations and other groups are also targeted. This is because governments want to retrieve information that they can use to be proactive in protecting their nation from potential terrorist attacks.
Communications both are necessary to espionage and clandestine operations, and also a great vulnerability when the adversary has sophisticated SIGINT detection and interception capability. Spies rely on COVCOM or covert communication through technically advanced spy devices. Agents must also transfer money securely.
Industrial espionage
Reportedly Canada is losing $12 billion and German companies are estimated to be losing about €50 billion ($87 billion) and 30,000 jobs to industrial espionage every year.
Agents in espionage
In espionage jargon, an "agent" is the person who does the spying. They may be a citizen of a country recruited by that country to spy on another; a citizen of a country recruited by that country to carry out false flag assignments disrupting his own country; a citizen of one country who is recruited by a second country to spy on or work against his own country or a third country, and more.
In popular usage, this term is sometimes confused with an intelligence officer, intelligence operative or case officer who recruits and handles agents.
Among the most common forms of agent are:
Agent provocateur: instigates trouble or provides information to gather as many people as possible into one location for an arrest.
Intelligence agent: provides access to sensitive information through the use of special privileges. If used in corporate intelligence gathering, this may include gathering information of a corporate business venture or stock portfolio. In economic intelligence, "Economic Analysts may use their specialized skills to analyze and interpret economic trends and developments, assess and track foreign financial activities, and develop new econometric and modelling methodologies." This may also include information of trade or tariff.
Agent-of-influence: provides political influence in an area of interest, possibly including publications needed to further an intelligence service agenda. The use of the media to print a story to mislead a foreign service into action, exposing their operations while under surveillance.
Double agent: engages in clandestine activity for two intelligence or security services (or more in joint operations), who provides information about one or about each to the other, and who wittingly withholds significant information from one on the instructions of the other or is unwittingly manipulated by one so that significant facts are withheld from the adversary. Peddlers, fabricators and others who work for themselves rather than a service are not double agents because they are not agents. The fact that double agents have an agent relationship with both sides distinguishes them from penetrations, who normally are placed with the target service in a staff or officer capacity."
Redoubled agent: forced to mislead the foreign intelligence service after being caught as a double agent.
Unwitting double agent: offers or is forced to recruit as a double or redoubled agent and in the process is recruited by either a third-party intelligence service or his own government without the knowledge of the intended target intelligence service or the agent. This can be useful in capturing important information from an agent that is attempting to seek allegiance with another country. The double agent usually has knowledge of both intelligence services and can identify operational techniques of both, thus making third-party recruitment difficult or impossible. The knowledge of operational techniques can also affect the relationship between the operations officer (or case officer) and the agent if the case is transferred by an operational targeting officer to a new operations officer, leaving the new officer vulnerable to attack. This type of transfer may occur when an officer has completed his term of service or when his cover is blown.
Sleeper agent: recruited to wake up and perform a specific set of tasks or functions while living undercover in an area of interest. This type of agent is not the same as a deep cover operative, who continually contacts a case officer to file intelligence reports. A sleeper agent is not in contact with anyone until activated.
Triple agent: works for three intelligence services.
Less common or lesser known forms of agent include:
Access agent: provides access to other potential agents by providing offender profiling information that can help lead to recruitment into an intelligence service.
Confusion agent: provides misleading information to an enemy intelligence service or attempts to discredit the operations of the target in an operation.
Facilities agent: provides access to buildings, such as garages or offices used for staging operations, resupply, etc.
Illegal agent: lives in another country under false credentials and does not report to a local station. A nonofficial cover operative can be dubbed an "illegal" when working in another country without diplomatic protection.
Principal agent: functions as a handler for an established network of agents, usually considered "blue chip".
Law
Espionage against a nation is a crime under the legal code of many nations. In the United States, it is covered by the Espionage Act of 1917. The risks of espionage vary. A spy violating the host country's laws may be deported, imprisoned, or even executed. A spy violating its own country's laws can be imprisoned for espionage or/and treason (which in the United States and some other jurisdictions can only occur if they take up arms or aids the enemy against their own country during wartime), or even executed, as the Rosenbergs were. For example, when Aldrich Ames handed a stack of dossiers of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents in the Eastern Bloc to his KGB-officer "handler", the KGB "rolled up" several networks, and at least ten people were secretly shot. When Ames was arrested by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), he faced life in prison; his contact, who had diplomatic immunity, was declared persona non grata and taken to the airport. Ames' wife was threatened with life imprisonment if her husband did not cooperate; he did, and she was given a five-year sentence. Hugh Francis Redmond, a CIA officer in China, spent nineteen years in a Chinese prison for espionage—and died there—as he was operating without diplomatic cover and immunity.
In United States law, treason, espionage, and spying are separate crimes. Treason and espionage have graduated punishment levels.
The United States in World War I passed the Espionage Act of 1917. Over the years, many spies, such as the Soble spy ring, Robert Lee Johnson, the Rosenberg ring, Aldrich Hazen Ames, Robert Philip Hanssen, Jonathan Pollard, John Anthony Walker, James Hall III, and others have been prosecuted under this law.
History of espionage laws
From ancient times, the penalty for espionage in many countries was execution. This was true right up until the era of World War II; for example, Josef Jakobs was a Nazi spy who parachuted into Great Britain in 1941 and was executed for espionage.
In modern times, many people convicted of espionage have been given penal sentences rather than execution. For example, Aldrich Hazen Ames is an American CIA analyst, turned KGB mole, who was convicted of espionage in 1994; he is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole in the high-security Allenwood U.S. Penitentiary. Ames was formerly a 31-year CIA counterintelligence officer and analyst who committed espionage against his country by spying for the Soviet Union and Russia. So far as it is known, Ames compromised the second-largest number of CIA agents, second only to Robert Hanssen, who is also serving a prison sentence.
Use against non-spies
Espionage laws are also used to prosecute non-spies. In the United States, the Espionage Act of 1917 was used against socialist politician Eugene V. Debs (at that time the Act had much stricter guidelines and amongst other things banned speech against military recruiting). The law was later used to suppress publication of periodicals, for example of Father Coughlin in World War II. In the early 21st century, the act was used to prosecute whistleblowers such as Thomas Andrews Drake, John Kiriakou, and Edward Snowden, as well as officials who communicated with journalists for innocuous reasons, such as Stephen Jin-Woo Kim.
, India and Pakistan were holding several hundred prisoners of each other's country for minor violations like trespass or visa overstay, often with accusations of espionage attached. Some of these include cases where Pakistan and India both deny citizenship to these people, leaving them stateless. The BBC reported in 2012 on one such case, that of Mohammed Idrees, who was held under Indian police control for approximately 13 years for overstaying his 15-day visa by 2–3 days after seeing his ill parents in 1999. Much of the 13 years were spent in prison waiting for a hearing, and more time was spent homeless or living with generous families. The Indian People's Union for Civil Liberties and Human Rights Law Network both decried his treatment. The BBC attributed some of the problems to tensions caused by the Kashmir conflict.
Espionage laws in the UK
Espionage is illegal in the UK under the Official Secrets Acts of 1911 and 1920. The UK law under this legislation considers espionage as "concerning those who intend to help an enemy and deliberately harm the security of the nation". According to MI5, a person commits the offence of 'spying' if they, "for any purpose prejudicial to the safety or interests of the State": approaches, enters or inspects a prohibited area; makes documents such as plans that are intended, calculated, or could directly or indirectly be of use to an enemy; or "obtains, collects, records, or publishes, or communicates to any other person any secret official code word, or password, or any sketch, plan, model, article, or note, or other document which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy". The illegality of espionage also includes any action which may be considered 'preparatory to' spying, or encouraging or aiding another to spy.
Under the penal codes of the UK, those found guilty of espionage are liable to imprisonment for a term of up to 14 years, although multiple sentences can be issued.
Government intelligence laws and its distinction from espionage
Government intelligence is very much distinct from espionage, and is not illegal in the UK, providing that the organisations of individuals are registered, often with the ICO, and are acting within the restrictions of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). 'Intelligence' is considered legally as "information of all sorts gathered by a government or organisation to guide its decisions. It includes information that may be both public and private, obtained from much different public or secret sources. It could consist entirely of information from either publicly available or secret sources, or be a combination of the two."
However, espionage and intelligence can be linked. According to the MI5 website, "foreign intelligence officers acting in the UK under diplomatic cover may enjoy immunity from prosecution. Such persons can only be tried for spying (or, indeed, any criminal offence) if diplomatic immunity is waived beforehand. Those officers operating without diplomatic cover have no such immunity from prosecution".
There are also laws surrounding government and organisational intelligence and surveillance. Generally, the body involved should be issued with some form of warrant or permission from the government and should be enacting their procedures in the interest of protecting national security or the safety of public citizens. Those carrying out intelligence missions should act within not only RIPA but also the Data Protection Act and Human Rights Act. However, there are spy equipment laws and legal requirements around intelligence methods that vary for each form of intelligence enacted.
War
In war, espionage is considered permissible as many nations recognize the inevitability of opposing sides seeking intelligence each about the dispositions of the other. To make the mission easier and successful, combatants wear disguises to conceal their true identity from the enemy while penetrating enemy lines for intelligence gathering. However, if they are caught behind enemy lines in disguises, they are not entitled to prisoner-of-war status and subject to prosecution and punishment—including execution.
The Hague Convention of 1907 addresses the status of wartime spies, specifically within "Laws and Customs of War on Land" (Hague IV); October 18, 1907: CHAPTER II Spies". Article 29 states that a person is considered a spy who, acts clandestinely or on false pretences, infiltrates enemy lines with the intention of acquiring intelligence about the enemy and communicate it to the belligerent during times of war. Soldiers who penetrate enemy lines in proper uniforms for the purpose of acquiring intelligence are not considered spies but are lawful combatants entitled to be treated as prisoners of war upon capture by the enemy. Article 30 states that a spy captured behind enemy lines may only be punished following a trial. However, Article 31 provides that if a spy successfully rejoined his own military and is then captured by the enemy as a lawful combatant, he cannot be punished for his previous acts of espionage and must be treated as a prisoner of war. Note that this provision does not apply to citizens who committed treason against their own country or co-belligerents of that country and may be captured and prosecuted at any place or any time regardless whether he rejoined the military to which he belongs or not or during or after the war.
The ones that are excluded from being treated as spies while behind enemy lines are escaping prisoners of war and downed airmen as international law distinguishes between a disguised spy and a disguised escaper. It is permissible for these groups to wear enemy uniforms or civilian clothes in order to facilitate their escape back to friendly lines so long as they do not attack enemy forces, collect military intelligence, or engage in similar military operations while so disguised. Soldiers who are wearing enemy uniforms or civilian clothes simply for the sake of warmth along with other purposes rather than engaging in espionage or similar military operations while so attired are also excluded from being treated as unlawful combatants.
Saboteurs are treated as spies as they too wear disguises behind enemy lines for the purpose of waging destruction on an enemy's vital targets in addition to intelligence gathering. For example, during World War II, eight German agents entered the U.S. in June 1942 as part of Operation Pastorius, a sabotage mission against U.S. economic targets. Two weeks later, all were arrested in civilian clothes by the FBI thanks to two German agents betraying the mission to the U.S. Under the Hague Convention of 1907, these Germans were classified as spies and tried by a military tribunal in Washington D.C. On August 3, 1942, all eight were found guilty and sentenced to death. Five days later, six were executed by electric chair at the District of Columbia jail. Two who had given evidence against the others had their sentences reduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to prison terms. In 1948, they were released by President Harry S. Truman and deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany.
The U.S. codification of enemy spies is Article 106 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. This provides a mandatory death sentence if a person captured in the act is proven to be "lurking as a spy or acting as a spy in or about any place, vessel, or aircraft, within the control or jurisdiction of any of the armed forces, or in or about any shipyard, any manufacturing or industrial plant, or any other place or institution engaged in work in aid of the prosecution of the war by the United States, or elsewhere".
Spy fiction
Spies have long been favorite topics for novelists and filmmakers. An early example of espionage literature is Kim by the English novelist Rudyard Kipling, with a description of the training of an intelligence agent in the Great Game between the UK and Russia in 19th century Central Asia. An even earlier work was James Fenimore Cooper's classic novel, The Spy, written in 1821, about an American spy in New York during the Revolutionary War.
During the many 20th-century spy scandals, much information became publicly known about national spy agencies and dozens of real-life secret agents. These sensational stories piqued public interest in a profession largely off-limits to human interest news reporting, a natural consequence of the secrecy inherent in their work. To fill in the blanks, the popular conception of the secret agent has been formed largely by 20th and 21st-century fiction and film. Attractive and sociable real-life agents such as Valerie Plame find little employment in serious fiction, however. The fictional secret agent is more often a loner, sometimes amoral—an existential hero operating outside the everyday constraints of society. Loner spy personalities may have been a stereotype of convenience for authors who already knew how to write loner private investigator characters that sold well from the 1920s to the present.
Johnny Fedora achieved popularity as a fictional agent of early Cold War espionage, but James Bond is the most commercially successful of the many spy characters created by intelligence insiders during that struggle. His less fantastic rivals include Le Carré's George Smiley, and Harry Palmer as played by Michael Caine.
Jumping on the spy bandwagon, other writers also started writing about spy fiction featuring female spies as protagonists, such as The Baroness, which has more graphic action and sex, as compared to other novels featuring male protagonists.
Spy fiction has permeated the video game world as well, in games such as Perfect Dark, GoldenEye 007, No One Lives Forever, and the Metal Gear series.
Espionage has also made its way into comedy depictions. The 1960s TV series Get Smart, the 1983 Finnish film Agent 000 and the Deadly Curves, and Johnny English film trilogy portrays an inept spy, while the 1985 movie Spies Like Us depicts a pair of none-too-bright men sent to the Soviet Union to investigate a missile.
The historical novel The Emperor and the Spy highlights the adventurous life of U.S. Colonel Sidney Forrester Mashbir, who during the 1920s and 1930s attempted to prevent war with Japan, and when war did erupt, he became General MacArthur's top advisor in the Pacific Theater of World War Two.
Black Widow is also a fictional agent who was introduced as a Russian spy, an antagonist of the superhero Iron Man. She later became an agent of the fictional spy agency S.H.I.E.L.D. and a member of the superhero team the Avengers.
See also
American espionage in China
Animals used in espionage
Chinese intelligence operations in the United States
Clandestine operation
Classified information
Dumpster diving
Intelligence assessment
History of Soviet espionage
Human intelligence (intelligence gathering)
Labor spies
List of cryptographers
List of intelligence agencies
List of intelligence gathering disciplines
Military intelligence
Ninja
Operation Snow White
Security clearance
Spymaster
Spy Museum (disambiguation)
Jalal Haji Zawar
References
Citations
Works cited
Further reading
Aldrich, Richard J., and Christopher Andrew, eds. Secret Intelligence: A Reader (2nd ed. 2018); focus on the 21st century; reprints 30 essays by scholars. excerpt
Andrew, Christopher, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, 2018.
Burnham, Frederick Russell, Taking Chances, 1944.
Felix, Christopher [pseudonym for James McCarger] A Short Course in the Secret War, 4th Edition. Madison Books, November 19, 2001.
Friedman, George. America's Secret War: Inside the Hidden Worldwide Struggle Between the United States and Its Enemies 2005
Gopnik, Adam, "Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy: How valuable is espionage?", The New Yorker, 2 September 2019, pp. 53–59. "There seems to be a paranoid paradox of espionage: the better your intelligence, the dumber your conduct; the more you know, the less you anticipate.... Hard-won information is ignored or wildly misinterpreted.... [It] happens again and again [that] a seeming national advance in intelligence is squandered through cross-bred confusion, political rivalry, mutual bureaucratic suspicions, intergovernmental competition, and fear of the press (as well as leaks to the press), all seasoned with dashes of sexual jealousy and adulterous intrigue." (p. 54.)
Jeffreys-Jones, Rhodri. In Spies, We Trust: The Story of Western Intelligence (2013), covers U.S. and Britain
Jenkins, Peter. Surveillance Tradecraft: The Professional's Guide to Surveillance Training
Kahn, David, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet, 1996 revised edition. First published 1967.
Keegan, John, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda, 2003.
Knightley, Phillip, The Second Oldest Profession: Spies and Spying in the Twentieth Century, Norton, 1986.
Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth & K. Lee Lerner, eds. Terrorism: essential primary sources Thomas Gale 2006
Lerner, K. Lee and Brenda Wilmoth Lerner, eds. Encyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence and Security (2003), worldwide recent coverage 1100 pages.
May, Ernest R. (ed.). Knowing One's Enemies: Intelligence Assessment Before the Two World Wars (1984).
O'Toole, George. Honorable Treachery: A History of U.S. Intelligence, Espionage, Covert Action from the American Revolution to the CIA 1991
Murray, Williamson, and Allan Reed Millett, eds. Calculations: net assessment and the coming of World War II (1992).
Owen, David. Hidden Secrets: A Complete History of Espionage and the Technology Used to Support It
Richelson, Jeffery T. A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century (1977)
Richelson, Jeffery T. The U.S. Intelligence Community (1999, fourth edition)
Smith, W. Thomas Jr. Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency (2003)
Tuchman, Barbara W., The Zimmermann Telegram, New York, Macmillan, 1962.
Warner, Michael. The Rise and Fall of Intelligence: An International Security History (2014)
External links
History of an espionage in Russia
Law enforcement occupations
Organized crime activity
Positions of authority
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