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system is working in kernel space. The monolithic model differs from other operating system architectures (such as the microkernel architecture) in that it alone defines a high-level virtual interface over computer hardware. A set of primitives or system calls implement all operating system services such as process management, concurrency, and memory management. Device drivers can be added to the kernel as modules. Loadable modules Modular operating systems such as OS-9 and most modern monolithic operating systems such as OpenVMS, Linux, BSD, SunOS, AIX, and MULTICS can dynamically load (and unload) executable modules at runtime. This modularity of the operating system is | A set of primitives or system calls implement all operating system services such as process management, concurrency, and memory management. Device drivers can be added to the kernel as modules. Loadable modules Modular operating systems such as OS-9 and most modern monolithic operating systems such as OpenVMS, Linux, BSD, SunOS, AIX, and MULTICS can dynamically load (and unload) executable modules at runtime. This modularity of the operating system is at the binary (image) level and not at the architecture level. Modular monolithic operating systems are not to be confused with the architectural level of modularity inherent in server-client operating systems (and its derivatives sometimes marketed as hybrid kernel) which use microkernels and servers (not to be mistaken for modules or daemons). Practically speaking, dynamically |
or ruby ring, chasuble or cape, elaborate jewel-encrusted robes, with metallic threads | Saturn |} Elsewhere, as at Dura-Europos, Mithraic graffiti survive giving membership lists, in which initiates of a mithraeum are named with their Mithraic grades. At Virunum, the membership list or album sacratorum was maintained as an inscribed plaque, updated year by year as new members were initiated. By cross-referencing these lists it is possible to track some initiates from one mithraeum to another; and also speculatively to identify Mithraic initiates with persons on other contemporary lists such as military service rolls and lists of devotees of non-Mithraic religious sanctuaries. Names of initiates are also found in the dedication inscriptions of altars and other cult objects. Clauss noted in 1990 that overall, only about 14% of Mithraic names inscribed before 250 CE identify the initiate's grade – and hence questioned the traditional view that all initiates belonged to one of the seven grades. Clauss argues that the grades represented a distinct class of priests, sacerdotes. Gordon maintains the former theory of Merkelbach and others, especially noting such examples as Dura where all names are associated with a Mithraic grade. Some scholars maintain that practice may have differed over time, or from one Mithraeum to another. The highest grade, pater, is by far the most common one found on dedications and inscriptions – and it would appear not to have been unusual for a mithraeum to have several men with this grade. The form pater patrum (father of fathers) is often found, which appears to indicate the pater with primary status. There are several examples of persons, commonly those of higher social status, joining a mithraeum with the status pater – especially in Rome during the 'pagan revival' of the 4th century. It has been suggested that some mithraea may have awarded honorary pater status to sympathetic dignitaries. The initiate into each grade appears to have been required to undertake a specific ordeal or test, involving exposure to heat, cold or threatened peril. An 'ordeal pit', dating to the early 3rd century, has been identified in the mithraeum at Carrawburgh. Accounts of the cruelty of the emperor Commodus describes his amusing himself by enacting Mithraic initiation ordeals in homicidal form. By the later 3rd century, the enacted trials appear to have been abated in rigor, as 'ordeal pits' were floored over. Admission into the community was completed with a handshake with the pater, just as Mithras and Sol shook hands. The initiates were thus referred to as syndexioi (those united by the handshake). The term is used in an inscription by Proficentius and derided by Firmicus Maternus in De errore profanarum religionum, a 4th century Christian work attacking paganism. In ancient Iran, taking the right hand was the traditional way of concluding a treaty or signifying some solemn understanding between two parties. Ritual re-enactments Activities of the most prominent deities in Mithraic scenes, Sol and Mithras, were imitated in rituals by the two most senior officers in the cult's hierarchy, the Pater and the Heliodromus. The initiates held a sacramental banquet, replicating the feast of Mithras and Sol. Reliefs on a cup found in Mainz appear to depict a Mithraic initiation. On the cup, the initiate is depicted as being led into a location where a Pater would be seated in the guise of Mithras with a drawn bow. Accompanying the initiate is a mystagogue, who explains the symbolism and theology to the initiate. The Rite is thought to re-enact what has come to be called the 'Water Miracle', in which Mithras fires a bolt into a rock, and from the rock now spouts water. Roger Beck has hypothesized a third processional Mithraic ritual, based on the Mainz cup and Porphyrys. This scene, called 'Procession of the Sun-Runner', shows the Heliodromus escorted by two figures representing Cautes and Cautopates (see below) and preceded by an initiate of the grade Miles leading a ritual enactment of the solar journey around the mithraeum, which was intended to represent the cosmos. Consequently, it has been argued that most Mithraic rituals involved a re-enactment by the initiates of episodes in the Mithras narrative, a narrative whose main elements were: birth from the rock, striking water from stone with an arrow shot, the killing of the bull, Sol's submission to Mithras, Mithras and Sol feasting on the bull, the ascent of Mithras to heaven in a chariot. A noticeable feature of this narrative (and of its regular depiction in surviving sets of relief carvings) is the absence of female personages (the sole exception being Luna watching the tauroctony in the upper corner opposite Helios). Membership Only male names appear in surviving inscribed membership lists. Historians including Cumont and Richard Gordon have concluded that the cult was for men only. The ancient scholar Porphyry refers to female initiates in Mithraic rites. However, the early 20th-century historian A.S. Geden writes that this may be due to a misunderstanding. According to Geden, while the participation of women in the ritual was not unknown in the Eastern cults, the predominant military influence in Mithraism makes it unlikely in this instance. It has recently been suggested by David Jonathan that "Women were involved with Mithraic groups in at least some locations of the empire." Soldiers were strongly represented amongst Mithraists, and also merchants, customs officials and minor bureaucrats. Few, if any, initiates came from leading aristocratic or senatorial families until the 'pagan revival' of the mid-4th century; but there were always considerable numbers of freedmen and slaves. Ethics Clauss suggests that a statement by Porphyry, that people initiated into the Lion grade must keep their hands pure from everything that brings pain and harm and is impure, means that moral demands were made upon members of congregations. A passage in the Caesares of Julian the Apostate refers to "commandments of Mithras". Tertullian, in his treatise "On the Military Crown" records that Mithraists in the army were officially excused from wearing celebratory coronets on the basis of the Mithraic initiation ritual that included refusing a proffered crown, because "their only crown was Mithras". History and development Mithras before the Roman Mysteries According to the archaeologist Maarten Vermaseren, 1st century BCE evidence from Commagene demonstrates the "reverence paid to Mithras" but does not refer to "the mysteries". In the colossal statuary erected by King Antiochus I (69–34 BCE) at Mount Nemrut, Mithras is shown beardless, wearing a Phrygian cap (or the similar headdress, Persian tiara), in Iranian (Parthian) clothing, and was originally seated on a throne alongside other deities and the king himself. On the back of the thrones there is an inscription in Greek, which includes the name Apollo Mithras Helios in the genitive case (Ἀπόλλωνος Μίθρου Ἡλίου). Vermaseren also reports about a Mithras cult in 3rd century BCE. Fayum. R.D. Barnett has argued that the royal seal of King Saussatar of Mitanni from . depicts a tauroctonous Mithras. Beginnings of Roman Mithraism The origins and spread of the Mysteries have been intensely debated among scholars and there are radically differing views on these issues. According to Clauss, mysteries of Mithras were not practiced until the 1st century CE. According to Ulansey, the earliest evidence for the Mithraic mysteries places their appearance in the middle of the 1st century BCE: The historian Plutarch says that in 67 BCE the pirates of Cilicia (a province on the southeastern coast of Asia Minor) were practicing "secret rites" of Mithras. However, according to Daniels, whether any of this relates to the origins of the mysteries is unclear. The unique underground temples or mithraea appear suddenly in the archaeology in the last quarter of the 1st century CE. Earliest archaeology Inscriptions and monuments related to the Mithraic Mysteries are catalogued in a two volume work by Maarten J. Vermaseren, the Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae (or CIMRM). The earliest monument showing Mithras slaying the bull is thought to be CIMRM 593, found in Rome. There is no date, but the inscription tells us that it was dedicated by a certain Alcimus, steward of T. Claudius Livianus. Vermaseren and Gordon believe that this Livianus is a certain Livianus who was commander of the Praetorian guard in 101 CE, which would give an earliest date of 98–99 CE. Five small terracotta plaques of a figure holding a knife over a bull have been excavated near Kerch in the Crimea, dated by Beskow and Clauss to the second half of the 1st century BCE, and by Beck to 50 BCE–50 CE. These may be the earliest tauroctonies, if they are accepted to be a depiction of Mithras. The bull-slaying figure wears a Phrygian cap, but is described by Beck and Beskow as otherwise unlike standard depictions of the tauroctony. Another reason for not connecting these artifacts with the Mithraic Mysteries is that the first of these plaques was found in a woman's tomb. An altar or block from near SS. Pietro e Marcellino on the Esquiline in Rome was inscribed with a bilingual inscription by an Imperial freedman named T. Flavius Hyginus, probably between 80 and 100 CE. It is dedicated to Sol Invictus Mithras. CIMRM 2268 is a broken base or altar from Novae/Steklen in Moesia Inferior, dated 100 CE, showing Cautes and Cautopates. Other early archaeology includes the Greek inscription from Venosia by Sagaris actor probably from 100–150 CE; the Sidon cippus dedicated by Theodotus priest of Mithras to Asclepius, 140–141 CE; and the earliest military inscription, by C. Sacidius Barbarus, centurion of XV Apollinaris, from the bank of the Danube at Carnuntum, probably before 114 CE. According to C.M.Daniels, the Carnuntum inscription is the earliest Mithraic dedication from the Danube region, which along with Italy is one of the two regions where Mithraism first struck root. The earliest dateable mithraeum outside Rome dates from 148 CE. The Mithraeum at Caesarea Maritima is the only one in Palestine and the date is inferred. Earliest cult locations According to Roger Beck, the attested locations of the Roman cult in the earliest phase () are as follows: Mithraea datable from pottery Nida/Heddemheim III (Germania Sup.) Mogontiacum (Germania Sup.) Pons Aeni (Noricum) Caesarea Maritima (Judaea) Datable dedications Nida/Heddernheim I (Germania Sup.) (CIMRM 1091/2, 1098) Carnuntum III (Pannonia Sup.) (CIMRM 1718) Novae (Moesia Inf.) (CIMRM 2268/9) Oescus (Moesia Inf.)(CIMRM 2250) Rome(CIMRM 362, 593/4) Classical literature about Mithras and the Mysteries According to Boyce, the earliest literary references to the mysteries are by the Latin poet Statius, about 80 CE, and Plutarch (c. 100 CE). Statius The Thebaid () an epic poem by Statius, pictures Mithras in a cave, wrestling with something that has horns. The context is a prayer to the god Phoebus. The cave is described as persei, which in this context is usually translated Persian; however, according to the translator J.H. Mozley it literally means Persean, referring to Perses, the son of Perseus and Andromeda, this Perses being the ancestor of the Persians according to Greek legend. Justin Martyr Writing in approximately 145 CE, the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr charges the cult of Mithras with imitating the Christian communion, Plutarch The Greek biographer Plutarch (46–127 CE) says that "secret mysteries ... of Mithras" were practiced by the pirates of Cilicia, the coastal province in the southeast of Anatolia, who were active in the 1st century BCE: "They likewise offered strange sacrifices; those of Olympus I mean; and they celebrated certain secret mysteries, among which those of Mithras continue to this day, being originally instituted by them." He mentions that the pirates were especially active during the Mithridatic wars (between the Roman Republic and King Mithridates VI of Pontus) in which they supported the king. The association between Mithridates and the pirates is also mentioned by the ancient historian Appian. The 4th century commentary on Vergil by Servius says that Pompey settled some of these pirates in Calabria in southern Italy. Dio Cassius The historian Dio Cassius (2nd to 3rd century CE) tells how the name of Mithras was spoken during the state visit to Rome of Tiridates I of Armenia, during the reign of Nero. (Tiridates was the son of Vonones II of Parthia, and his coronation by Nero in 66 CE confirmed the end of a war between Parthia and Rome.) Dio Cassius writes that Tiridates, as he was about to receive his crown, told the Roman emperor that he revered him "as Mithras". Roger Beck thinks it possible that this episode contributed to the emergence of Mithraism as a popular religion in Rome. Porphyry The philosopher Porphyry (3rd–4th century CE) gives an account of the origins of the Mysteries in his work De antro nympharum (The Cave of the Nymphs). Citing Eubulus as his source, Porphyry writes that the original temple of Mithras was a natural cave, containing fountains, which Zoroaster found in the mountains of Persia. To Zoroaster, this cave was an image of the whole world, so he consecrated it to Mithras, the creator of the world. Later in the same work, Porphyry links Mithras and the bull with planets and star-signs: Mithras himself is associated with the sign of Aries and the planet Mars, while the bull is associated with Venus. Porphyry is writing close to the demise of the cult, and Robert Turcan has challenged the idea that Porphyry's statements about Mithraism are accurate. His case is that far from representing what Mithraists believed, they are merely representations by the Neoplatonists of what it suited them in the late 4th century to read into the mysteries. However, Merkelbach and Beck believe that Porphyry's work "is in fact thoroughly coloured with the doctrines of the Mysteries". Beck holds that classical scholars have neglected Porphyry's evidence and have taken an unnecessarily skeptical view of Porphyry. According to Beck, Porphyry's De antro is the only clear text from antiquity which tells us about the intent of the Mithraic Mysteries and how that intent was realized. David Ulansey finds it important that Porphyry "confirms ... that astral conceptions played an important role in Mithraism." Mithras Liturgy In later antiquity, the Greek name of Mithras (Μίθρας ) occurs in the text known as the "Mithras Liturgy", a part of the Paris Greek Magical Papyrus (Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Suppl. gr. 574); here Mithras is given the epithet "the great god", and is identified with the sun god Helios. There have been different views among scholars as to whether this text is an expression of Mithraism as such. Franz Cumont argued that it isn't; Marvin Meyer thinks it is; while Hans Dieter Betz sees it as a synthesis of Greek, Egyptian, and Mithraic traditions. Modern debate about origins Cumont's hypothesis: from Persian state religion Scholarship on Mithras begins with Franz Cumont, who published a two volume collection of source texts and images of monuments in French in 1894-1900, Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra [French: Texts and Illustrated Monuments Relating to the Mysteries of Mithra]. An English translation of part of this work was published in 1903, with the title The Mysteries of Mithra. Cumont's hypothesis, as the author summarizes it in the first 32 pages of his book, was that the Roman religion was "the Roman form of Mazdaism", the Persian state religion, disseminated from the East. He identified the ancient Aryan deity who appears in Persian literature as Mithras with the Hindu god Mitra of the Vedic hymns. According to Cumont, the god Mithra came to Rome "accompanied by a large representation of the Mazdean Pantheon". Cumont considers that while the tradition "underwent some modification in the Occident ... the alterations that it suffered were largely superficial". Criticisms and reassessments of Cumont Cumont's theories came in for severe criticism from John R. Hinnells and R.L. Gordon at the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies held in 1971. John Hinnells was unwilling to reject entirely the idea of Iranian origin, but wrote: "we must now conclude that his reconstruction simply will not stand. It receives no support from the Iranian material and is in fact in conflict with the ideas of that tradition as they are represented in the extant texts. Above all, it is a theoretical reconstruction which does not accord with the actual Roman iconography." He discussed Cumont's reconstruction of the bull-slaying scene and stated "that the portrayal of Mithras given by Cumont is not merely unsupported by Iranian texts but is actually in serious conflict with known Iranian theology." Another paper by R.L. Gordon argued that Cumont severely distorted the available evidence by forcing the material to conform to his predetermined model of Zoroastrian origins. Gordon suggested that the theory of Persian origins was completely invalid and that the Mithraic mysteries in the West were an entirely new creation. A similar view has been expressed by Luther H. Martin: "Apart from the name of the god himself, in other words, Mithraism seems to have developed largely in and is, therefore, best understood from the context of Roman culture." However, according to Hopfe, "All theories of the origin of Mithraism acknowledge a connection, however vague, to the Mithra/Mitra figure of ancient Aryan religion." Reporting on the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies, 1975, Ugo Bianchi says that although he welcomes "the tendency to question in historical terms the relations between Eastern and Western Mithraism", it "should not mean obliterating what was clear to the Romans themselves, that Mithras was a 'Persian' (in wider perspective: an Indo-Iranian) god." Boyce states that "no satisfactory evidence has yet been adduced to show that, before Zoroaster, the concept of a supreme god existed among the Iranians, or that among them Mithra – or any other divinity – ever enjoyed a separate cult of his or her own outside either their ancient or their Zoroastrian pantheons." However, she also says that although recent studies have minimized the Iranizing aspects of the self-consciously Persian religion "at least in the form which it attained under the Roman Empire", the name Mithras is enough to show "that this aspect is of some importance". She also says that "the Persian affiliation of the Mysteries is acknowledged in the earliest literary references to them." Beck tells us that since the 1970s scholars have generally rejected Cumont, but adds that recent theories about how Zoroastrianism was during the period BCE now make some new form of Cumont's east-west transfer possible. He says that ... an indubitable residuum of things Persian in the Mysteries and a better knowledge of what constituted actual Mazdaism have allowed modern scholars to postulate for Roman Mithraism a continuing Iranian theology. This indeed is the main line of Mithraic scholarship, the Cumontian model which subsequent scholars accept, modify, or reject. For the transmission of Iranian doctrine from East to West, Cumont postulated a plausible, if hypothetical, intermediary: the Magusaeans of the Iranian diaspora in Anatolia. More problematic – and never properly addressed by Cumont or his successors – is how real-life Roman Mithraists subsequently maintained a quite complex and sophisticated Iranian theology behind an occidental facade. Other than the images at Dura of the two 'magi' with scrolls, there is no direct and explicit evidence for the carriers of such doctrines. ... Up to a point, Cumont's Iranian paradigm, especially in Turcan's modified form, is certainly plausible. He also says that "the old Cumontian model of formation in, and diffusion from, Anatolia ... is by no means dead – nor should it be." Modern theories Beck theorizes that the cult was created in Rome, by a single founder who had some knowledge of both Greek and Oriental religion, but suggests that some of the ideas used may have passed through the Hellenistic kingdoms. He observes that "Mithras – moreover, a Mithras who was identified with the Greek Sun god Helios" was among the gods of the syncretic Greco-Armenian-Iranian royal cult at Nemrut, founded by Antiochus I of Commagene in the mid 1st century BCE. While proposing the theory, Beck says that his scenario may be regarded as Cumontian in two ways. Firstly, because it looks again at Anatolia and Anatolians, and more importantly, because it hews back to the methodology first used by Cumont. Merkelbach suggests that its mysteries were essentially created by a particular person or persons and created in a specific place, the city of Rome, by someone from an eastern province or border state who knew the Iranian myths in detail, which he wove into his new grades of initiation; but that he must have been Greek and Greek-speaking because he incorporated elements of Greek Platonism into it. The myths, he suggests, were probably created in the milieu of the imperial bureaucracy, and for its members. Clauss tends to agree. Beck calls this "the most likely scenario" and states "Until now, Mithraism has generally been treated as if it somehow evolved Topsy-like from its Iranian precursor – a most implausible scenario once it is stated explicitly." Archaeologist Lewis M. Hopfe notes that there are only three mithraea in Roman Syria, in contrast to further west. He writes: "Archaeology indicates that Roman Mithraism had its epicenter in Rome ... the fully developed religion known as Mithraism seems to have begun in Rome and been carried to Syria by soldiers and merchants." Taking a different view from other modern scholars, Ulansey argues that the Mithraic mysteries began in the Greco-Roman world as a religious response to the discovery by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus of the astronomical phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes – a discovery that amounted to discovering that the entire cosmos was moving in a hitherto unknown way. This new cosmic motion, he suggests, was seen by the founders of Mithraism as indicating the existence of a powerful new god capable of shifting the cosmic spheres and thereby controlling the universe. However, A. D. H. Bivar, L. A. Campbell, and G. Widengren have variously argued that Roman Mithraism represents a continuation of some form of Iranian Mithra worship. More recently, Parvaneh Pourshariati has made similar claims. According to Antonia Tripolitis, Roman Mithraism originated in Vedic India and picked up many features of the cultures which it encountered in its westward journey. Later history The first important expansion of the mysteries in the Empire seems to have happened quite quickly, late in the reign of Antoninus Pius (b. 121 CE, d. 161 CE) and under Marcus Aurelius. By this time all the key elements of the mysteries were in place. Mithraism reached the apogee of its popularity during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, spreading at an "astonishing" rate at the same period when the worship of Sol Invictus was incorporated into the state-sponsored cults. At this period a certain Pallas devoted a monograph to Mithras, and a little later Euboulus wrote a History of Mithras, although both works are now lost. According to the 4th century Historia Augusta, the emperor Commodus participated in its mysteries but it never became one of the state cults. The historian Jacob Burckhardt writes: Persecution and Christianization The religion and its followers faced persecution in the 4th century from Christianization, and Mithraism came to an end at some point between its last decade and the 5th century. Ulansey states that "Mithraism declined with the rise to power of Christianity, until the beginning of the fifth century, when Christianity became strong enough to exterminate by force rival religions such as Mithraism." According to Speidel, Christians fought fiercely with this feared enemy and suppressed it during the late 4thcentury. Mithraic sanctuaries were destroyed and religion was no longer a matter of personal choice. According to Luther H. Martin, Roman Mithraism came to an end with the anti-pagan decrees of the Christian emperor Theodosius during the last decade of the 4thcentury. Clauss states that inscriptions show Mithras as one of the cults listed on inscriptions by Roman senators who had not converted to Christianity, as part of the "pagan revival" among the elite in the second half of the 4th century. Beck states that "Quite early in the [fourth] century the religion was as good as dead throughout the empire." However, archaeological evidence indicates the continuance of the cult of Mithras up until the end of the 4thcentury. In particular, large numbers of votive coins deposited by worshippers have been recovered at the Mithraeum at Pons Sarravi (Sarrebourg) in Gallia Belgica, in a series that runs from Gallienus (r. 253–268) to Theodosius I (r. 379–395). These were scattered over the floor when the mithraeum was destroyed, as Christians apparently regarded the coins as polluted; therefore, providing reliable dates for the functioning of the mithraeum up until near the end of the century. Franz Cumont states that Mithraism may have survived in certain remote cantons of the Alps and Vosges into the 5thcentury. According to Mark Humphries, the deliberate concealment of Mithraic cult objects in some areas suggests that precautions were being taken against Christian attacks. However, in areas like the Rhine frontier, barbarian invasions may have also played a role in the end of Mithraism. At some of the mithraeums that have been found below churches, such as the Santa Prisca Mithraeum and the San Clemente Mithraeum, the ground plan of the church above was made in a way to symbolize Christianity's domination of Mithraism. The cult disappeared earlier than that of Isis. Isis was still remembered in the Middle Ages as a pagan deity, but Mithras was already forgotten in late antiquity. "John, the Lord Chamberlain", a 1999–2014 series of historical mystery novels, depicts a secret Mithraist community still active in Justinian's court (r. 527–567), but there is no historical evidence for such a late survival of the religion. Interpretations of the bull-slaying scene According to Cumont, the imagery of the tauroctony was a Graeco-Roman representation of an event in Zoroastrian cosmogony described in a 9th-century Zoroastrian text, the Bundahishn. In this text the evil spirit Ahriman (not Mithra) slays the primordial creature Gavaevodata, which is represented as a bovine. Cumont held that a version of the myth must have existed in which Mithras, not Ahriman, killed the bovine. But according to Hinnells, no such variant of the myth is known, and that this is merely speculation: "In no known Iranian text [either Zoroastrian or otherwise] does Mithra slay a bull." David Ulansey finds astronomical evidence from the mithraeum itself. He reminds us that the Platonic writer Porphyry wrote in the 3rd century CE that the cave-like temple Mithraea depicted "an image of the world" and that Zoroaster consecrated a cave resembling the world fabricated by Mithras. The ceiling of the Caesarea Maritima Mithraeum retains traces of blue paint, which may mean the ceiling was painted to depict the sky and the stars. Beck has given the following celestial composition of the Tauroctony: {| class="wikitable" |- ! Component of Tauroctony ! Celestial counterpart |- | Bull | Taurus |- | Sol | Sun |- | Luna | Moon |- | Dog | Canis Minor, Canis Major |- | Snake | Hydra, Serpens, Draco |- | Raven | Corvus |- | Scorpion | Scorpius |- | Wheat's ear (on bull's tail) | Spica |- | Twins Cautes and Cautopates | Gemini |- | Lion | Leo |- | Crater | Crater |- | Cave | Universe |} Several celestial identities for the Tauroctonous Mithras (TM) himself have been proposed. Beck summarizes them in the table below. {| class="wikitable"t |- ! Scholar ! Identifies tauroctonous Mithras (TM) as |- | Bausani, A. (1979) | TM associated with Leo, in that the tauroctony is a type of the ancient lion–bull (Leo–Taurus) combat motif. |- | Beck, R.L. (1994) | TM = Sun in Leo |- | Insler, S. (1978) | [tauroctony = heliacal setting of Taurus] |- | Jacobs, B. (1999) | [tauroctony = heliacal setting of Taurus] |- | North, J.D. (1990) | TM = Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis) setting,TM knife = Triangulum setting,TM cloak = Capella (Alpha Aurigae) setting. |- | Rutgers, A.J. (1970) | TM = Sun,Bull = Moon |- | Sandelin, K.-G. (1988) | TM = Auriga |- | Speidel, M.P. (1980) | TM = Orion |- | Ulansey, D. (1989) | TM = Perseus |- | Weiss, M. (1994, 1998) | TM = the Night Sky |} Ulansey has proposed that Mithras seems to have been derived from the constellation of Perseus, which is positioned just above Taurus in the night sky. He sees iconographic and mythological parallels between the two figures: both are young heroes, carry a dagger, and wear a Phrygian cap. He also mentions the similarity of the image of Perseus killing the Gorgon and the tauroctony, both figures being associated with caverns and both having connections to Persia as further evidence. Michael Speidel associates | named with their Mithraic grades. At Virunum, the membership list or album sacratorum was maintained as an inscribed plaque, updated year by year as new members were initiated. By cross-referencing these lists it is possible to track some initiates from one mithraeum to another; and also speculatively to identify Mithraic initiates with persons on other contemporary lists such as military service rolls and lists of devotees of non-Mithraic religious sanctuaries. Names of initiates are also found in the dedication inscriptions of altars and other cult objects. Clauss noted in 1990 that overall, only about 14% of Mithraic names inscribed before 250 CE identify the initiate's grade – and hence questioned the traditional view that all initiates belonged to one of the seven grades. Clauss argues that the grades represented a distinct class of priests, sacerdotes. Gordon maintains the former theory of Merkelbach and others, especially noting such examples as Dura where all names are associated with a Mithraic grade. Some scholars maintain that practice may have differed over time, or from one Mithraeum to another. The highest grade, pater, is by far the most common one found on dedications and inscriptions – and it would appear not to have been unusual for a mithraeum to have several men with this grade. The form pater patrum (father of fathers) is often found, which appears to indicate the pater with primary status. There are several examples of persons, commonly those of higher social status, joining a mithraeum with the status pater – especially in Rome during the 'pagan revival' of the 4th century. It has been suggested that some mithraea may have awarded honorary pater status to sympathetic dignitaries. The initiate into each grade appears to have been required to undertake a specific ordeal or test, involving exposure to heat, cold or threatened peril. An 'ordeal pit', dating to the early 3rd century, has been identified in the mithraeum at Carrawburgh. Accounts of the cruelty of the emperor Commodus describes his amusing himself by enacting Mithraic initiation ordeals in homicidal form. By the later 3rd century, the enacted trials appear to have been abated in rigor, as 'ordeal pits' were floored over. Admission into the community was completed with a handshake with the pater, just as Mithras and Sol shook hands. The initiates were thus referred to as syndexioi (those united by the handshake). The term is used in an inscription by Proficentius and derided by Firmicus Maternus in De errore profanarum religionum, a 4th century Christian work attacking paganism. In ancient Iran, taking the right hand was the traditional way of concluding a treaty or signifying some solemn understanding between two parties. Ritual re-enactments Activities of the most prominent deities in Mithraic scenes, Sol and Mithras, were imitated in rituals by the two most senior officers in the cult's hierarchy, the Pater and the Heliodromus. The initiates held a sacramental banquet, replicating the feast of Mithras and Sol. Reliefs on a cup found in Mainz appear to depict a Mithraic initiation. On the cup, the initiate is depicted as being led into a location where a Pater would be seated in the guise of Mithras with a drawn bow. Accompanying the initiate is a mystagogue, who explains the symbolism and theology to the initiate. The Rite is thought to re-enact what has come to be called the 'Water Miracle', in which Mithras fires a bolt into a rock, and from the rock now spouts water. Roger Beck has hypothesized a third processional Mithraic ritual, based on the Mainz cup and Porphyrys. This scene, called 'Procession of the Sun-Runner', shows the Heliodromus escorted by two figures representing Cautes and Cautopates (see below) and preceded by an initiate of the grade Miles leading a ritual enactment of the solar journey around the mithraeum, which was intended to represent the cosmos. Consequently, it has been argued that most Mithraic rituals involved a re-enactment by the initiates of episodes in the Mithras narrative, a narrative whose main elements were: birth from the rock, striking water from stone with an arrow shot, the killing of the bull, Sol's submission to Mithras, Mithras and Sol feasting on the bull, the ascent of Mithras to heaven in a chariot. A noticeable feature of this narrative (and of its regular depiction in surviving sets of relief carvings) is the absence of female personages (the sole exception being Luna watching the tauroctony in the upper corner opposite Helios). Membership Only male names appear in surviving inscribed membership lists. Historians including Cumont and Richard Gordon have concluded that the cult was for men only. The ancient scholar Porphyry refers to female initiates in Mithraic rites. However, the early 20th-century historian A.S. Geden writes that this may be due to a misunderstanding. According to Geden, while the participation of women in the ritual was not unknown in the Eastern cults, the predominant military influence in Mithraism makes it unlikely in this instance. It has recently been suggested by David Jonathan that "Women were involved with Mithraic groups in at least some locations of the empire." Soldiers were strongly represented amongst Mithraists, and also merchants, customs officials and minor bureaucrats. Few, if any, initiates came from leading aristocratic or senatorial families until the 'pagan revival' of the mid-4th century; but there were always considerable numbers of freedmen and slaves. Ethics Clauss suggests that a statement by Porphyry, that people initiated into the Lion grade must keep their hands pure from everything that brings pain and harm and is impure, means that moral demands were made upon members of congregations. A passage in the Caesares of Julian the Apostate refers to "commandments of Mithras". Tertullian, in his treatise "On the Military Crown" records that Mithraists in the army were officially excused from wearing celebratory coronets on the basis of the Mithraic initiation ritual that included refusing a proffered crown, because "their only crown was Mithras". History and development Mithras before the Roman Mysteries According to the archaeologist Maarten Vermaseren, 1st century BCE evidence from Commagene demonstrates the "reverence paid to Mithras" but does not refer to "the mysteries". In the colossal statuary erected by King Antiochus I (69–34 BCE) at Mount Nemrut, Mithras is shown beardless, wearing a Phrygian cap (or the similar headdress, Persian tiara), in Iranian (Parthian) clothing, and was originally seated on a throne alongside other deities and the king himself. On the back of the thrones there is an inscription in Greek, which includes the name Apollo Mithras Helios in the genitive case (Ἀπόλλωνος Μίθρου Ἡλίου). Vermaseren also reports about a Mithras cult in 3rd century BCE. Fayum. R.D. Barnett has argued that the royal seal of King Saussatar of Mitanni from . depicts a tauroctonous Mithras. Beginnings of Roman Mithraism The origins and spread of the Mysteries have been intensely debated among scholars and there are radically differing views on these issues. According to Clauss, mysteries of Mithras were not practiced until the 1st century CE. According to Ulansey, the earliest evidence for the Mithraic mysteries places their appearance in the middle of the 1st century BCE: The historian Plutarch says that in 67 BCE the pirates of Cilicia (a province on the southeastern coast of Asia Minor) were practicing "secret rites" of Mithras. However, according to Daniels, whether any of this relates to the origins of the mysteries is unclear. The unique underground temples or mithraea appear suddenly in the archaeology in the last quarter of the 1st century CE. Earliest archaeology Inscriptions and monuments related to the Mithraic Mysteries are catalogued in a two volume work by Maarten J. Vermaseren, the Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae (or CIMRM). The earliest monument showing Mithras slaying the bull is thought to be CIMRM 593, found in Rome. There is no date, but the inscription tells us that it was dedicated by a certain Alcimus, steward of T. Claudius Livianus. Vermaseren and Gordon believe that this Livianus is a certain Livianus who was commander of the Praetorian guard in 101 CE, which would give an earliest date of 98–99 CE. Five small terracotta plaques of a figure holding a knife over a bull have been excavated near Kerch in the Crimea, dated by Beskow and Clauss to the second half of the 1st century BCE, and by Beck to 50 BCE–50 CE. These may be the earliest tauroctonies, if they are accepted to be a depiction of Mithras. The bull-slaying figure wears a Phrygian cap, but is described by Beck and Beskow as otherwise unlike standard depictions of the tauroctony. Another reason for not connecting these artifacts with the Mithraic Mysteries is that the first of these plaques was found in a woman's tomb. An altar or block from near SS. Pietro e Marcellino on the Esquiline in Rome was inscribed with a bilingual inscription by an Imperial freedman named T. Flavius Hyginus, probably between 80 and 100 CE. It is dedicated to Sol Invictus Mithras. CIMRM 2268 is a broken base or altar from Novae/Steklen in Moesia Inferior, dated 100 CE, showing Cautes and Cautopates. Other early archaeology includes the Greek inscription from Venosia by Sagaris actor probably from 100–150 CE; the Sidon cippus dedicated by Theodotus priest of Mithras to Asclepius, 140–141 CE; and the earliest military inscription, by C. Sacidius Barbarus, centurion of XV Apollinaris, from the bank of the Danube at Carnuntum, probably before 114 CE. According to C.M.Daniels, the Carnuntum inscription is the earliest Mithraic dedication from the Danube region, which along with Italy is one of the two regions where Mithraism first struck root. The earliest dateable mithraeum outside Rome dates from 148 CE. The Mithraeum at Caesarea Maritima is the only one in Palestine and the date is inferred. Earliest cult locations According to Roger Beck, the attested locations of the Roman cult in the earliest phase () are as follows: Mithraea datable from pottery Nida/Heddemheim III (Germania Sup.) Mogontiacum (Germania Sup.) Pons Aeni (Noricum) Caesarea Maritima (Judaea) Datable dedications Nida/Heddernheim I (Germania Sup.) (CIMRM 1091/2, 1098) Carnuntum III (Pannonia Sup.) (CIMRM 1718) Novae (Moesia Inf.) (CIMRM 2268/9) Oescus (Moesia Inf.)(CIMRM 2250) Rome(CIMRM 362, 593/4) Classical literature about Mithras and the Mysteries According to Boyce, the earliest literary references to the mysteries are by the Latin poet Statius, about 80 CE, and Plutarch (c. 100 CE). Statius The Thebaid () an epic poem by Statius, pictures Mithras in a cave, wrestling with something that has horns. The context is a prayer to the god Phoebus. The cave is described as persei, which in this context is usually translated Persian; however, according to the translator J.H. Mozley it literally means Persean, referring to Perses, the son of Perseus and Andromeda, this Perses being the ancestor of the Persians according to Greek legend. Justin Martyr Writing in approximately 145 CE, the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr charges the cult of Mithras with imitating the Christian communion, Plutarch The Greek biographer Plutarch (46–127 CE) says that "secret mysteries ... of Mithras" were practiced by the pirates of Cilicia, the coastal province in the southeast of Anatolia, who were active in the 1st century BCE: "They likewise offered strange sacrifices; those of Olympus I mean; and they celebrated certain secret mysteries, among which those of Mithras continue to this day, being originally instituted by them." He mentions that the pirates were especially active during the Mithridatic wars (between the Roman Republic and King Mithridates VI of Pontus) in which they supported the king. The association between Mithridates and the pirates is also mentioned by the ancient historian Appian. The 4th century commentary on Vergil by Servius says that Pompey settled some of these pirates in Calabria in southern Italy. Dio Cassius The historian Dio Cassius (2nd to 3rd century CE) tells how the name of Mithras was spoken during the state visit to Rome of Tiridates I of Armenia, during the reign of Nero. (Tiridates was the son of Vonones II of Parthia, and his coronation by Nero in 66 CE confirmed the end of a war between Parthia and Rome.) Dio Cassius writes that Tiridates, as he was about to receive his crown, told the Roman emperor that he revered him "as Mithras". Roger Beck thinks it possible that this episode contributed to the emergence of Mithraism as a popular religion in Rome. Porphyry The philosopher Porphyry (3rd–4th century CE) gives an account of the origins of the Mysteries in his work De antro nympharum (The Cave of the Nymphs). Citing Eubulus as his source, Porphyry writes that the original temple of Mithras was a natural cave, containing fountains, which Zoroaster found in the mountains of Persia. To Zoroaster, this cave was an image of the whole world, so he consecrated it to Mithras, the creator of the world. Later in the same work, Porphyry links Mithras and the bull with planets and star-signs: Mithras himself is associated with the sign of Aries and the planet Mars, while the bull is associated with Venus. Porphyry is writing close to the demise of the cult, and Robert Turcan has challenged the idea that Porphyry's statements about Mithraism are accurate. His case is that far from representing what Mithraists believed, they are merely representations by the Neoplatonists of what it suited them in the late 4th century to read into the mysteries. However, Merkelbach and Beck believe that Porphyry's work "is in fact thoroughly coloured with the doctrines of the Mysteries". Beck holds that classical scholars have neglected Porphyry's evidence and have taken an unnecessarily skeptical view of Porphyry. According to Beck, Porphyry's De antro is the only clear text from antiquity which tells us about the intent of the Mithraic Mysteries and how that intent was realized. David Ulansey finds it important that Porphyry "confirms ... that astral conceptions played an important role in Mithraism." Mithras Liturgy In later antiquity, the Greek name of Mithras (Μίθρας ) occurs in the text known as the "Mithras Liturgy", a part of the Paris Greek Magical Papyrus (Paris Bibliothèque Nationale Suppl. gr. 574); here Mithras is given the epithet "the great god", and is identified with the sun god Helios. There have been different views among scholars as to whether this text is an expression of Mithraism as such. Franz Cumont argued that it isn't; Marvin Meyer thinks it is; while Hans Dieter Betz sees it as a synthesis of Greek, Egyptian, and Mithraic traditions. Modern debate about origins Cumont's hypothesis: from Persian state religion Scholarship on Mithras begins with Franz Cumont, who published a two volume collection of source texts and images of monuments in French in 1894-1900, Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra [French: Texts and Illustrated Monuments Relating to the Mysteries of Mithra]. An English translation of part of this work was published in 1903, with the title The Mysteries of Mithra. Cumont's hypothesis, as the author summarizes it in the first 32 pages of his book, was that the Roman religion was "the Roman form of Mazdaism", the Persian state religion, disseminated from the East. He identified the ancient Aryan deity who appears in Persian literature as Mithras with the Hindu god Mitra of the Vedic hymns. According to Cumont, the god Mithra came to Rome "accompanied by a large representation of the Mazdean Pantheon". Cumont considers that while the tradition "underwent some modification in the Occident ... the alterations that it suffered were largely superficial". Criticisms and reassessments of Cumont Cumont's theories came in for severe criticism from John R. Hinnells and R.L. Gordon at the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies held in 1971. John Hinnells was unwilling to reject entirely the idea of Iranian origin, but wrote: "we must now conclude that his reconstruction simply will not stand. It receives no support from the Iranian material and is in fact in conflict with the ideas of that tradition as they are represented in the extant texts. Above all, it is a theoretical reconstruction which does not accord with the actual Roman iconography." He discussed Cumont's reconstruction of the bull-slaying scene and stated "that the portrayal of Mithras given by Cumont is not merely unsupported by Iranian texts but is actually in serious conflict with known Iranian theology." Another paper by R.L. Gordon argued that Cumont severely distorted the available evidence by forcing the material to conform to his predetermined model of Zoroastrian origins. Gordon suggested that the theory of Persian origins was completely invalid and that the Mithraic mysteries in the West were an entirely new creation. A similar view has been expressed by Luther H. Martin: "Apart from the name of the god himself, in other words, Mithraism seems to have developed largely in and is, therefore, best understood from the context of Roman culture." However, according to Hopfe, "All theories of the origin of Mithraism acknowledge a connection, however vague, to the Mithra/Mitra figure of ancient Aryan religion." Reporting on the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies, 1975, Ugo Bianchi says that although he welcomes "the tendency to question in historical terms the relations between Eastern and Western Mithraism", it "should not mean obliterating what was clear to the Romans themselves, that Mithras was a 'Persian' (in wider |
a rear engine and cab forward layout. The early 1960s saw Ford and Chevrolet introduce "compact" vans for the North American market, the Econoline Club Wagon and Greenbrier respectively. The Ford version was marketed in the Falcon series, the Chevrolet in the Corvair 95 series. The Econoline grew larger in the 1970s, while the Greenbrier was joined by (and later replaced by) the Chevy Van. North America 1970s to 1990s In the late 1970s, Chrysler began a development program to design "a small affordable van that looked and handled more like a car." The result of this program was the first American minivan, the 1984 Plymouth Voyager. The Voyager debuted the minivan design features of front-wheel drive, a flat floor and a sliding door for rear passengers. The badge-engineered Dodge Caravan was also released in time for the 1984 model year, and was sold alongside the Voyager. The term minivan came into use largely in comparison to size to full-size vans; at six feet tall or lower, 1980s minivans were intended to fit inside a typical garage door opening. In 1984, The New York Times described minivans "the hot cars coming out of Detroit," noting that "analysts say the mini-van has created an entirely new market, one that may well overshadow the... station wagon." In response to the popularity of the Voyager/Caravan, General Motors released the 1985 Chevrolet Astro and GMC Safari badge-engineered twins, and Ford released the 1986 Ford Aerostar. These vehicles used a traditional rear-wheel drive layout, unlike the Voyager/Caravan. By the end of the 1980s, demand for minivans as family vehicles had largely superseded full-size station wagons in the United States. During the 1990s, the minivan segment underwent several major changes. Many models switched to the front-wheel drive layout used by the Voyager/Caravan minivans. For example, Ford replaced the Aerostar with the front-wheel drive Mercury Villager (a rebadged Nissan Quest) for 1993 and the Ford Windstar for 1995. The models also increased in size, as a result of the extended-wheelbase ("Grand") versions of the Voyager and Caravan which were launched in 1987. An increase in luxury features and interior equipment was seen in the Eddie Bauer version of the 1988 Ford Aerostar, the 1990 Chrysler Town & Country, and the 1990 Oldsmobile Silhouette. The third-generation Plymouth Voyager, Dodge Caravan, and Chrysler Town & Country – released for the 1996 model year – were available with an additional sliding door on the driver's side. 2000 to present The highest selling year for minivans was in 2000, when 1.4 million units were sold. However, in the following years, the increasing popularity of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) began to erode sales of minivans. North American sales of the Volkswagen Transporter (sold as the 'Volkswagen Eurovan') ceased in 2003. Ford exited the segment in 2006, when the Ford Freestar was canceled, Chrysler discontinued its short-wheelbase minivans in 2007 (although long-wheelbase minivans remained in production in the form of the Chrysler RT-platform minivans) and General Motors exited the segment in 2009 with the cancellation of the Chevrolet Uplander. It has been suggested that the lesser popularity of minivans is due to the minivan's image as a vehicle for older, domestically-oriented drivers. In 2013, sales of the segment reached approximately 500,000 (one-third of its 2000 peak). Despite the declining sales for the segment in the late 2000s, several European brands launched minivans in the North American market. The Volkswagen Routan (a rebadged Dodge Grand Caravan) was sold from 2009 to 2013. In 2010, Ford began North American sales of the European-built Ford Transit Connect Wagon. North American sales of the Mercedes-Benz Vito (sold as the 'Mercedes-Benz Metris') began in 2016. However, the Nissan Quest and Mazda MPV were both discontinued in 2016. The five highest selling models in the United States in 2018 were the Dodge Grand Caravan, Chrysler Pacifica, Honda Odyssey, Toyota Sienna, and Kia Sedona. Europe Introduced several months after the Chrysler minivans, the 1984 Renault Espace was the first European-developed minivan developed primarily for passenger use (as the Volkswagen Caravelle/Vanagon was a derivative of a commercial van). Beginning development in the 1970s under the European subsidiaries of Chrysler, the Espace was intended as a successor for the Matra Rancho (a crossover vehicle before the fact), leading to its use of front-hinged doors. While slow-selling at the time of its release, the Espace would go on to become the most successful European-brand minivans. Initially intending to sell the Espace in the United States, the 1987 sale of AMC to Chrysler canceled plans of Renault doing so. At the end of the 1980s, Chrysler and Ford commenced sales of American-brand minivans in Europe, selling the Chrysler Voyager and Ford Aerostar (with varying degrees of success). Deriving its minivans from American designs, General Motors imported the Oldsmobile Silhouette (branded as the Pontiac Trans Sport), later marketing the American-produced Opel/Vauxhall Sintra. In the 1990s, several joint ventures produced long-running minivan designs. In 1994, the Sevel Nord-produced Eurovans were introduced, marketed by Citroën, Fiat, Lancia, and Peugeot; two generations were produced through 2014. In contrast to the Espace, the Eurovans were produced with two sliding doors; to increase interior space, the gearshift was relocated to the dashboard and the handbrake was moved. In 1995, Ford of Europe and Volkswagen entered a joint venture, producing the Ford Galaxy, SEAT Alhambra, and Volkswagen Sharan. Adopting a similar configuration as the Espace, the three model lines were launched with front-hinged doors; for 2010, SEAT and Volkswagen introduced a second-generation, adopting sliding doors. Despite high expectations during the 1990s, the full-size MPV market fell short, and some consumers thought of MPVs as being large like vans. Other MPVs on the market at the time include Mitsubishi Space Wagon and Honda Shuttle. Renault set a new "compact MPV" standard with the Renault Scénic in 1996 which became popular. The five highest selling minivans in Europe in 2018 were the Ford S-Max, SEAT Alhambra, Volkswagen Sharan, Renault Espace, and Ford Galaxy. Asia Japan In 1982, the Nissan Prairie became one of the first compact minivans. Derived closely from a compact sedan, the Prairie was configured with sliding doors, folding rear seats, and a lifting rear hatch. The Mitsubishi Chariot (exported to North America as the Dodge/Plymouth Colt Vista) adopted nearly the same form factor, instead using wagon-style front-hinged doors. To match the launch of minivans by American manufacturers, the Toyota TownAce, Nissan Vanette, and Mitsubishi Delica were introduced to North America in 1984, 1986, and 1987, respectively. While all three vehicles were assembled by different manufacturers, in the United States, each model line was named "Van" and "Wagon" (for cargo and passenger vans, respectively). Using a one-box design similar to the Volkswagen Vanagon, the mid-engine vans were slotted in size between kei cars and commercial vehicles, sharing components with compact trucks. For 1989, the Mazda MPV was the first Japanese-brand minivan developed from the ground up specifically for North American sale; as it exceeded compact size regulations, the MPV was heavily taxed in Japan and marketed as a luxury vehicle. Derived from the Mazda 929 sedan, the larger chassis of the MPV allowed for the fitment of an optional V6 engine and four-wheel drive. In contrast to the sliding doors of American minivans, a hinged passenger-side door was used (a driver-side door was added for 1996, as Mazda gradually remarketed the model line as an early crossover SUV). For 1990, Toyota introduced the Toyota Previa to replace the Van/Wagon in North America. While the Previa largely continued the mid-engine configuration of its TownAce predecessor (which continued in Japan), the model line was designed solely as a passenger vehicle sized to compete with American-market minivans; in Japan, the Previa was named the Toyota Estima. Along with its highly rounded exterior, the Previa was distinguished with nearly panoramic window glass (excluding the B- and D-pillars). For 1998, the Toyota Sienna became the first Japanese-brand minivan assembled in North America, replacing the Previa in that market. Outside of North America, the Previa was redesigned in 2000, adopting a front-wheel drive layout; it remains in production for sale (primarily in Japan and Australia). Slotted between the Previa and Sienna in size, Toyota introduced the Toyota Alphard in 2002. Developed as a luxury-oriented model, the Alphard is marketed primarily in Asia; the Alphard forms the basis of the Lexus LM, the first Lexus-brand minivan. Following the 1990 discontinuation of the Nissan Vanette into the United States, Nissan also ended the sale of the second-generation Prairie (badged as the Axxess). To reenter the segment with a vehicle developed | the end of the 1980s, demand for minivans as family vehicles had largely superseded full-size station wagons in the United States. During the 1990s, the minivan segment underwent several major changes. Many models switched to the front-wheel drive layout used by the Voyager/Caravan minivans. For example, Ford replaced the Aerostar with the front-wheel drive Mercury Villager (a rebadged Nissan Quest) for 1993 and the Ford Windstar for 1995. The models also increased in size, as a result of the extended-wheelbase ("Grand") versions of the Voyager and Caravan which were launched in 1987. An increase in luxury features and interior equipment was seen in the Eddie Bauer version of the 1988 Ford Aerostar, the 1990 Chrysler Town & Country, and the 1990 Oldsmobile Silhouette. The third-generation Plymouth Voyager, Dodge Caravan, and Chrysler Town & Country – released for the 1996 model year – were available with an additional sliding door on the driver's side. 2000 to present The highest selling year for minivans was in 2000, when 1.4 million units were sold. However, in the following years, the increasing popularity of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) began to erode sales of minivans. North American sales of the Volkswagen Transporter (sold as the 'Volkswagen Eurovan') ceased in 2003. Ford exited the segment in 2006, when the Ford Freestar was canceled, Chrysler discontinued its short-wheelbase minivans in 2007 (although long-wheelbase minivans remained in production in the form of the Chrysler RT-platform minivans) and General Motors exited the segment in 2009 with the cancellation of the Chevrolet Uplander. It has been suggested that the lesser popularity of minivans is due to the minivan's image as a vehicle for older, domestically-oriented drivers. In 2013, sales of the segment reached approximately 500,000 (one-third of its 2000 peak). Despite the declining sales for the segment in the late 2000s, several European brands launched minivans in the North American market. The Volkswagen Routan (a rebadged Dodge Grand Caravan) was sold from 2009 to 2013. In 2010, Ford began North American sales of the European-built Ford Transit Connect Wagon. North American sales of the Mercedes-Benz Vito (sold as the 'Mercedes-Benz Metris') began in 2016. However, the Nissan Quest and Mazda MPV were both discontinued in 2016. The five highest selling models in the United States in 2018 were the Dodge Grand Caravan, Chrysler Pacifica, Honda Odyssey, Toyota Sienna, and Kia Sedona. Europe Introduced several months after the Chrysler minivans, the 1984 Renault Espace was the first European-developed minivan developed primarily for passenger use (as the Volkswagen Caravelle/Vanagon was a derivative of a commercial van). Beginning development in the 1970s under the European subsidiaries of Chrysler, the Espace was intended as a successor for the Matra Rancho (a crossover vehicle before the fact), leading to its use of front-hinged doors. While slow-selling at the time of its release, the Espace would go on to become the most successful European-brand minivans. Initially intending to sell the Espace in the United States, the 1987 sale of AMC to Chrysler canceled plans of Renault doing so. At the end of the 1980s, Chrysler and Ford commenced sales of American-brand minivans in Europe, selling the Chrysler Voyager and Ford Aerostar (with varying degrees of success). Deriving its minivans from American designs, General Motors imported the Oldsmobile Silhouette (branded as the Pontiac Trans Sport), later marketing the American-produced Opel/Vauxhall Sintra. In the 1990s, several joint ventures produced long-running minivan designs. In 1994, the Sevel Nord-produced Eurovans were introduced, marketed by Citroën, Fiat, Lancia, and Peugeot; two generations were produced through 2014. In contrast to the Espace, the Eurovans were produced with two sliding doors; to increase interior space, the gearshift was relocated to the dashboard and the handbrake was moved. In 1995, Ford of Europe and Volkswagen entered a joint venture, producing the Ford Galaxy, SEAT Alhambra, and Volkswagen Sharan. Adopting a similar configuration as the Espace, the three model lines were launched with front-hinged doors; for 2010, SEAT and Volkswagen introduced a second-generation, adopting sliding doors. Despite high expectations during the 1990s, the full-size MPV market fell short, and some consumers thought of MPVs as being large like vans. Other MPVs on the market at the time include Mitsubishi Space Wagon and Honda Shuttle. Renault set a new "compact MPV" standard with the Renault Scénic in 1996 which became popular. The five highest selling minivans in Europe in 2018 were the Ford S-Max, SEAT Alhambra, Volkswagen Sharan, Renault Espace, and Ford Galaxy. Asia Japan In 1982, the Nissan Prairie became one of the first compact minivans. Derived closely from a compact sedan, the Prairie was configured with sliding doors, folding rear seats, and a lifting rear hatch. The Mitsubishi Chariot (exported to North America as the Dodge/Plymouth Colt Vista) adopted nearly the same form factor, instead using wagon-style front-hinged doors. To match the launch of minivans by American manufacturers, the Toyota TownAce, Nissan Vanette, and Mitsubishi Delica were introduced to North America in 1984, 1986, and 1987, respectively. While all three vehicles were assembled by different manufacturers, in the United States, each model line was named "Van" and "Wagon" (for cargo and passenger vans, respectively). Using a one-box design similar to the Volkswagen Vanagon, the mid-engine vans were slotted in size between kei cars and commercial vehicles, sharing components with compact trucks. For 1989, the Mazda MPV was the first Japanese-brand minivan developed from the ground up specifically for North American sale; as it exceeded compact size regulations, the MPV was heavily taxed in Japan and marketed as a luxury vehicle. Derived from the Mazda 929 sedan, the larger chassis of the MPV allowed for the fitment of an optional V6 engine and four-wheel drive. In contrast to the sliding doors of American minivans, a hinged passenger-side door was used (a driver-side door was added for 1996, as Mazda gradually remarketed the model line as an early crossover SUV). For 1990, Toyota introduced the Toyota Previa to replace the Van/Wagon in North America. While the Previa largely continued the mid-engine configuration of its TownAce predecessor (which continued in Japan), the model line was designed solely as a passenger vehicle sized to compete with American-market minivans; in Japan, the Previa was named the Toyota Estima. Along with its highly rounded exterior, the Previa was distinguished with nearly panoramic window glass (excluding the B- and D-pillars). For 1998, the Toyota Sienna became the first Japanese-brand minivan assembled in North America, replacing the Previa in that market. Outside of North America, the Previa was redesigned in 2000, adopting a front-wheel drive layout; it remains in production for sale (primarily in Japan and Australia). Slotted between the Previa and Sienna in size, Toyota introduced the Toyota Alphard in 2002. Developed as a luxury-oriented model, the Alphard is marketed primarily in Asia; the Alphard forms the basis of the Lexus LM, the first Lexus-brand minivan. Following the 1990 discontinuation of the Nissan Vanette into the United States, Nissan also ended the sale of the second-generation Prairie (badged as the Axxess). To reenter the segment with a vehicle developed specifically for North America, Nissan had entered into a joint venture with Ford to develop and assemble a minivan. For 1993, the agreement led to the launch of the front-wheel drive Nissan Quest (and its Mercury Villager counterpart). Similar in size to the GM APV minivans (though far more conventional in exterior design), the Quest was assembled by Ford, but the chassis and powertrain were derived from the Nissan Maxima. Following the end of the Ford joint venture, Nissan developed its own version of the Quest for 2004, which was produced through 2017. In markets outside of North America, Nissan introduced the Nissan Serena in 1990 and the Nissan Elgrand in 1997; the luxury-oriented Elgrand is a narrower-body version of the 2010-2017 Quest. For 1995, Honda entered the minivan segment, introducing the Honda Odyssey for both Japan and North America. Derived from the Honda Accord, the Odyssey was designed with front-hinged doors. In a design feature that would become widely adopted by other manufacturers, the Odyssey introduced a rear seat that folded flat into the floor (replacing a removable rear seat). For 1999, Honda introduced separate versions of |
and was produced in Lowell, Massachusetts. The sweet soda is similar to root beer, with a bitter aftertaste. It is flavoured with gentian root extract, an extremely bitter substance commonly used in herbal medicine. Moxie was designated the official soft drink of Maine on May 10, 2005. It continues to be regionally popular today, particularly in New England states. It was previously produced by the Moxie Beverage Company of Bedford, New Hampshire until Moxie was purchased by The Coca-Cola Company in 2018. The name has become the word "moxie" in American English, a noun meaning energy, determination, and spunk. History Moxie originated around 1876 as a patent medicine called "Moxie Nerve Food," by Augustin Thompson in Lowell, Massachusetts. Thompson claimed that it contained an extract from a rare, unnamed South American plant, which is now known to be gentian root. Moxie, he claimed, was especially effective against "paralysis, softening of the brain, nervousness, and insomnia." Thompson claimed that he named the beverage after a Lieutenant Moxie, a purported friend of his, who he claimed had discovered the plant and used it as a panacea, and the company he created continued to promulgate legendary stories about the word's origin. It likely derives from an Abenaki word that means "dark water" and that is found in lake and river names in Maine, where Thompson was born and raised. After a few years, Thompson added soda water to the formula and changed the product's name to "Beverage Moxie Nerve Food." By 1884 he was selling Moxie both in bottles and in bulk as a soda fountain syrup. In 1885, he received a trademark for the term. He marketed it as "a delicious blend of bitter and sweet, a drink to satisfy everyone's taste." Thompson died in 1903. In 1907, the Moxie Nerve Food Company of New England filed a lawsuit in Boston against the Modox Company and others, alleging that they had copied the ingredients of Moxie and were using the name "Modox," which closely resembles "Moxie," and were infringing upon patents and trademarks. The suit was dismissed by the judge, who said the court could not protect the legitimate part of the plaintiff's business in this case. In a later case in New York, the Moxie Nerve Food Company won a lawsuit against Modox, which subsequently went out of business. President Calvin Coolidge was known to favor the drink, and Boston Red Sox slugger Ted Williams endorsed it on radio and in print. The company also marketed a beverage called "Ted's Root Beer" in the early sixties. Author E. B. White once claimed that "Moxie contains gentian root, which is the path to the good life." The brand suffered a significant decline in sales during the 1930s. | Moxie Boy, now a man (and some man at that), who posed for this picture many, many years ago, in fact before some of the readers of this article were born." For many years the urban legend was that Archer himself was Moxie's mascot, but he would have been about 50 at its introduction in 1911, disproving this theory. In recent years a historical group, The Moxie Congress, was able to ascertain that the man was likely a model for the lithographers printing these advertisements, and with some confidence it is posited that the "Moxie Boy" was one John T. Chamberlain of Revere, Massachusetts. In 2010 the Moxie Man logo was removed from labels for a brief period because it was thought to be too old-fashioned. In 2011 the company's head of marketing, Ryan Savage, made the executive decision to bring the logo back in response to complaints from long-standing customers. A unique advertising tool was the Moxie Horsemobile, a modified automobile whose driver sits on a large model of a horse. The first Horsemobiles were deployed around 1918. A 1935 Rolls-Royce Moxie Horsemobile was sold for $55,000 at the May 20, 2011, Mecum Auction in Indianapolis, Indiana. Moxie at one time maintained about two dozen of them, and they appeared in parades and other public functions. Derivative products There is a Moxie Energy Drink and a variety of Olde New England Seltzers. The energy drink is citrus-based; it lacks Moxie's gentian root tang, caramel color, and (as of 2008) its distinctive branding; similarly, the waters are simply carbonated waters with fruit flavors marketed under the Moxie brand. Moxie ice cream is seasonally available in Maine in limited quantities and is mild in flavor as compared to the soft drink. Moxie has been used as a cooking additive by chefs for its herbaceous, savory-sweet flavor profile. It is generally used in reductions as a glaze for meats such as lamb, as well as in baked beans. "Moxie" as a slang term Moxie was early advertised as "nerve food" which would "strengthen the nervous system" and was "very healthful" and a "drink for athletes" which "strengthens and invigorates". The term "moxie", which derives from the drink name, has the approximate meaning of ""energy, determination, spunk, daring courage, nerve, spirit, guts". This term was extant from about the 1930s and has continued in use, to some extent, into the early 21st century, as in "This kid's got moxie!" See also List of brand name soft drink products References Further reading Bowers, Q. David, The Moxie Encyclopedia, Vestal Press, 1985. Grace, Roger M., "Is Hires the Longest Marketed Soft Drink? Or Moxie? Or...?", Metropolitan News-Enterprise newspaper, Los Angeles, Thursday, November 17, 2005, p. 15 Potter, Frank N., The Book Of Moxie, Paducah, KY : Collector Books, 1987. . External links Official Website Moxie facts "Make Mine a Moxie!" – Maine Farmhouse Journal, July 6–10, 2000 https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/08/28/coca-cola-acquires-beloved-maine-soda-moxie/8EWByZiHnZwIp1qT4ik45M/story.html Maine culture Food and drink companies established in 1876 1876 introductions Kirin Group Mitsubishi companies Monarch brands Patent medicines Carbonated drinks Coca-Cola acquisitions 1876 establishments in Massachusetts Drink companies of the United States Food and drink companies based in Maine Food and drink companies based |
from 1620, in Nathaniel Brent's translation of Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent: "To this citation he made answer by a Manifesto" (p. 102). Similarly, "They were so farre surprised with his Manifesto, that they would never suffer it to be published" (p. 103). See also Art manifesto Election promise Government platform Party line (politics) Party platform The Communist Manifesto References External links Manifestos.net British political party manifesto archives, 1900–present: Labour, Conservative, Liberal/SDP/Liberal Democrat Academic works about | from the Latin manifestum, meaning clear or conspicuous. Its first recorded use in English is from 1620, in Nathaniel Brent's translation of Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent: "To this citation he made answer by a Manifesto" (p. 102). Similarly, "They were so farre surprised with |
that it would run for no more than five years. The show was produced by Danny Thomas' company, and Thomas himself recommended her. He remembered Moore as "the girl with three names" whom he had turned down earlier. Moore's energetic comic performances as Van Dyke's character's wife, begun at age 24 (11 years Van Dyke's junior), made both the actress and her signature fitted capri pants extremely popular, and she became internationally known. When she won her first Emmy Award for her portrayal of Laura Petrie, she said, "I know this will never happen again." As Laura Petrie, Moore often wore styles that recalled the fashion of Jackie Kennedy, such as capri pants, echoing an ideal of the Kennedy administration's Camelot. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977) In 1970, after having appeared in a pivotal one-hour musical special called Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, Moore and husband Grant Tinker successfully pitched a sitcom centered on Moore to CBS. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was a half-hour newsroom sitcom featuring Ed Asner as her gruff boss Lou Grant. The Mary Tyler Moore Show bridged aspects of the Women's Movement with mainstream culture by portraying an amiable, independent woman whose life focused on her professional career rather than marriage and family. The show marked the first big hit for film and television producer James L. Brooks, who would also do more work for Moore and Tinker's production company. Moore's show proved so popular that three other regular characters, Valerie Harper as Rhoda Morgenstern, Cloris Leachman as Phyllis Lindstrom and Ed Asner as Lou Grant were spun off into their own series, again featurinh Brooks and his former production partner Allan Burns as producers. The premise of the single working woman's life, alternating during the program between work and home, became a television staple. After six years of ratings in the top 20, the show slipped to number 39 during season seven. Producers asked that the series be canceled because of falling ratings, afraid that the show's legacy might be damaged if it were renewed for another season. Despite the decline in ratings, the 1977 season would go on to garner its third straight Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy. During its seven seasons, the program won 29 Emmys in total (Moore herself winning three times for Best Lead Actress in a sitcom). That record remained unbroken until 2002, when the NBC sitcom Frasier won its 30th Emmy. Later projects During season six of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Moore appeared in a musical/variety special for CBS titled Mary's Incredible Dream, which featured Ben Vereen. In 1978, she starred in a second CBS special, How to Survive the '70s and Maybe Even Bump Into Happiness. This time, she received significant support from a strong lineup of guest stars: Bill Bixby, John Ritter, Harvey Korman and Dick Van Dyke. In the 1978–79 season, Moore starred in two unsuccessful CBS variety series. The first, Mary, featured David Letterman, Michael Keaton, Swoosie Kurtz and Dick Shawn in the supporting cast. After CBS canceled that series, it brought Moore back in March 1979 in a new, retooled show, The Mary Tyler Moore Hour. Described as a "sit-var" (part situation comedy/part variety series), it had Moore portraying a TV star putting on a variety show. The program lasted just 11 episodes. In the 1985–86 season, she returned to CBS in a sitcom titled Mary, which suffered from poor reviews, sagging ratings, and strife within the production crew. According to Moore, she asked the network to pull the show as she was unhappy with the direction of the program and the producers. She also starred in the short-lived Annie McGuire in 1988. In 1995, after another lengthy break from TV series work, Moore was cast as tough, unsympathetic newspaper owner Louise "the Dragon" Felcott on the CBS drama New York News, the third series in which her character was involved in the news media. As she had with 1985's Mary, Moore quickly became unhappy with the nature of her character and was negotiating with producers to get out of her contract for the series when it was canceled. In the mid-1990s, Moore appeared as herself on two episodes of Ellen. She also guest-starred on Ellen DeGeneres's next TV show, The Ellen Show, in 2001. In 2004, Moore reunited with her Dick Van Dyke Show castmates for a reunion special called The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited. In 2006, Moore guest-starred as Christine St. George, the high-strung host of a fictional TV show, in three episodes of the Fox sitcom That '70s Show. Moore's scenes were shot on the same soundstage where The Mary Tyler Moore Show was filmed in the 1970s. Moore made a guest appearance on the season two premiere of Hot in Cleveland, which starred her former co-star Betty White. This marked the first time that White and Moore had worked together since The Mary Tyler Moore Show ended in 1977. In the fall of 2013, Moore reprised her role on Hot in Cleveland in a season four episode which not only reunited Moore and White, but also former MTM cast members Cloris Leachman, Valerie Harper and Georgia Engel as well. This reunion coincided with Harper's public announcement that she had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and was given only a few months to live. Theater Moore appeared in several Broadway plays. She was the star of a new musical version of Breakfast at Tiffany's in December 1966, but the show, titled Holly Golightly, was a flop that closed in previews before opening on Broadway. In reviews of performances in Philadelphia and Boston, critics "murdered" the play in which Moore claimed to be singing with bronchial pneumonia. She starred in Whose Life Is It Anyway with James Naughton, which opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on February 24, 1980, and ran for 96 performances, and in Sweet Sue, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on January 8, 1987, later transferred to the Royale Theatre, and ran for 164 performances. During the 1980s, Moore and her production company produced five plays: Noises Off, The Octette Bridge Club, Joe Egg, Benefactors, and Safe Sex. Moore appeared in previews of the Neil Simon play Rose's Dilemma at the off-Broadway Manhattan Theatre Club in December 2003 but quit the production after receiving a critical letter from Simon instructing her to "learn your lines or get out of my play". Moore had been using an earpiece on stage to feed her lines to the repeatedly rewritten play. Films Moore made her film debut in a bit as a nurse in the Jack Lemmon comedy Operation Mad Ball (1957). Her first speaking part came in X-15 (1961). Following her success on The Dick Van Dyke Show, she appeared in a string of films in the late 1960s (after signing an exclusive contract with Universal Pictures), including Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), as a would-be actress in 1920s New York who is taken under the wing of Julie Andrews' title character, and two films released in 1968, What's So Bad About Feeling Good? with George Peppard, and Don't Just Stand There! with Robert Wagner. She starred opposite Elvis Presley as a nun in Change of Habit (1969). Moore's future television castmate Ed Asner appeared in the film as a police officer. After not appearing in another feature film for eleven years, Moore returned to the big screen in the coming-of-age drama Ordinary People (1980). For her role as a grieving mother unable to cope either with the drowning death of one of her sons or the subsequent suicide attempt of her surviving son (played by Timothy Hutton who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance), she received her first and only Oscar nomination. Despite that success, Moore shot only two more films in the next fifteen years: the poorly received Six Weeks (1982) and Just Between Friends (1986). She returned to films with the independent hit Flirting with Disaster (1996). Moore appeared in the television movie Run a Crooked Mile (1969), and after the conclusion of her series in 1977, she starred in several television movies, including First, You Cry (1978), which brought her an Emmy nomination for portraying NBC correspondent Betty Rollin's struggle with breast cancer. Her later TV films included the medical drama Heartsounds (1984) with James Garner, which brought her another Emmy nomination, Finnegan Begin Again (1985) with Robert Preston, which earned her a CableACE Award nomination, the 1988 mini-series Lincoln, which brought her another Emmy nod for playing Mary Todd Lincoln, | films with the independent hit Flirting with Disaster (1996). Moore appeared in the television movie Run a Crooked Mile (1969), and after the conclusion of her series in 1977, she starred in several television movies, including First, You Cry (1978), which brought her an Emmy nomination for portraying NBC correspondent Betty Rollin's struggle with breast cancer. Her later TV films included the medical drama Heartsounds (1984) with James Garner, which brought her another Emmy nomination, Finnegan Begin Again (1985) with Robert Preston, which earned her a CableACE Award nomination, the 1988 mini-series Lincoln, which brought her another Emmy nod for playing Mary Todd Lincoln, and Stolen Babies, for which she won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in 1993. Later she reunited with old co-stars in Mary and Rhoda (2000) with Valerie Harper, and The Gin Game (2003) (based on the Broadway play), reuniting her with Dick Van Dyke. Moore starred in Like Mother, Like Son (2001), playing convicted murderer Sante Kimes. Memoirs Moore wrote two memoirs. In the first, After All, published in 1995, she acknowledged being a recovering alcoholic, while in Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes (2009), she focuses on living with type 1 diabetes. MTM Enterprises In 1969, Moore and her husband Grant Tinker founded MTM Enterprises, Inc., which produced The Mary Tyler Moore Show and other successful television shows and films. It also included a record label, MTM Records. MTM Enterprises produced American sitcoms and drama television series such as Rhoda, Lou Grant and Phyllis (all spin-offs from The Mary Tyler Moore Show), The Bob Newhart Show, The Texas Wheelers, The Bob Crane Show, Three for the Road, The Tony Randall Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, The White Shadow, Friends and Lovers, St. Elsewhere, Newhart, and Hill Street Blues, and was later sold to Television South, an ITV Franchise holder in 1988. The MTM logo resembles the Metro Goldwyn Mayer logo, but includes a cat named Mimsie instead of a lion. Currently, the shows of MTM Enterprises are distributed by 20th-Century Fox, which is owned by The Walt Disney Company. Personal life At age 18 in 1955, Moore married 28-year-old salesman Richard Meeker, and within six weeks she was pregnant with her only child, Richard Carleton Meeker Jr. Meeker and Moore divorced in 1962. Later that year, Moore married Grant Tinker, a CBS executive and later chairman of NBC, and in 1970 they formed the television production company MTM Enterprises, which created and produced the company's first television series, The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Moore and Tinker announced their separation in 1979 and divorced two years later. In the early 1980s, Moore dated Steve Martin and Warren Beatty. On October 14, 1980, at the age of 24, Moore's son Richard died of an accidental gunshot to the head while handling a small .410 shotgun. The model was later taken off the market because of its "hair trigger". Three and a half weeks earlier, Ordinary People had been released where she played a mother who was grieving over the accidental death of her son. Moore married cardiologist Robert Levine on November 23, 1983, at the Pierre Hotel in New York City. They met when he treated Moore's mother in New York City on a weekend house call, after Moore and her mother returned from a visit to the Vatican where they had a personal audience with Pope John Paul II. Moore and Levine remained married for 34 years until her death in 2017. Health issues and death Moore was a recovering alcoholic and had been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1969 after having a miscarriage. In 2011, she had surgery to remove a meningioma, a benign brain tumor. In 2014, friends reported that Moore had heart and kidney problems in addition to being nearly blind due to diabetes. Moore died at the age of 80 on January 25, 2017, at Greenwich Hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut, from cardiopulmonary arrest complicated by pneumonia after having been placed on a ventilator the previous week. She was interred in Oak Lawn Cemetery in Fairfield, Connecticut, during a private ceremony. Philanthropy In addition to her acting work, Moore was the International Chairperson of JDRF (the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation). In this role, she used her celebrity status to help raise funds and awareness of diabetes mellitus type 1. In 2007, in honor of Moore's dedication to the Foundation, JDRF created the "Forever Moore" research initiative which will support JDRF's Academic Research and Development and JDRF's Clinical Development Program. The program works on translating basic research advances into new treatments and technologies for those living with type 1 diabetes. Moore advocated for animal rights for years and supported charities like the ASPCA and Farm Sanctuary. She helped raise awareness about factory farming methods and promoted more compassionate treatment of farm animals. Moore appeared as herself in 1996 on an episode of the Ellen DeGeneres sitcom Ellen. The storyline of the episode includes Moore honoring Ellen for trying to save a 65-year-old lobster from being eaten at a seafood restaurant. She was also a co-founder of Broadway Barks, an annual animal adopt-a-thon held in New York City. Moore and friend Bernadette Peters worked to make it a no-kill city and to encourage adopting animals from shelters. In honor of her father, George Tyler Moore, a lifelong American Civil War enthusiast, in 1995 Moore donated funds to acquire an historic structure in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, for Shepherd College (now Shepherd University) to be used as a center for Civil War studies. The center, named the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War, is housed in the historic Conrad Shindler House (c. 1795), which is named in honor of her great-great-great-grandfather, who owned the structure from 1815 to 1852. Moore also contributed to the renovation of a historic house in Winchester, Virginia that had been used as headquarters by Confederate Major General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson during his Shenandoah Valley campaign in 1861–62. The house, now known as the Stonewall Jackson's Headquarters Museum, had been owned by Moore's great-grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Tilghman Moore, commander of the 4th Virginia Infantry in Jackson's Stonewall Brigade. Politics During the 1960s and 1970s, Moore had a reputation as a liberal or moderate, although she endorsed President Richard Nixon for re-election in 1972. She endorsed President Jimmy Carter for re-election in a 1980 campaign television ad. In 2011, her friend and former co-star Ed Asner said during an interview on The O'Reilly Factor that Moore "has become much more conservative of late". Bill O'Reilly, host of that program, stated that Moore had been a viewer of his show and that her political views had leaned conservative in recent years. In a Parade magazine article from March 22, 2009, Moore identified herself as a libertarian centrist who watched Fox News. She stated: "when one looks at what's happened to television, there are so few shows that interest me. I do watch a lot of Fox News. I like Charles Krauthammer and Bill O'Reilly... If McCain had asked me to campaign for him, I would have." In an interview for the 2013 PBS series Pioneers of Television, Moore said that she was recruited to join the feminist movement of the 1970s by Gloria Steinem but did not agree with Steinem's views. Moore said she believed that women have an important role in raising children and that she did not believe in Steinem's view that women owe it to themselves to have a career. Awards and honors In February 1981, Moore was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the drama film Ordinary People but lost to Sissy Spacek for her role in Coal Miner's Daughter. In 1981 she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama for that role. Moore received a total of seven Emmy Awards. Four for portraying Mary Richards on MTM Show, two for her portrayal of Laura Petrie. On Broadway, Moore received a Special Tony Award for her performance in Whose Life Is It Anyway? in 1980, and was nominated for a Drama Desk |
or leberopal (German), due to its color. It is called menilite because it was first described from Ménilmontant (Paris), France, where it occurs as concretions within | mineraloid opal. It is also known as liver opal or leberopal (German), due to its color. It is called menilite because it |
Baháʼí to circle the globe on teaching trips, along with his companion Howard Struven. Robert Stockman wrote of his journeys: According to William Garlington, Washington D.C. became the third most influential group of American Baháʼís in the first decade of the 20th century (after Chicago and New York), because of "its talented membership, which included leaders such as Laura Barney, Mason Remey, and Pauline Hannen." At the first national convention of American Baháʼís in March 1909, Remey was the delegate representing Washington, and was elected to the executive committee of the "Bahai Temple Unity", a precursor to the National Spiritual Assembly. In 1917-1918 Remey chaired a committee investigating the Chicago Reading Room, a study group that combined the teachings of Baháʼu'lláh with those of an Bostonian occultist, ultimately expelling its members as "violators". Remey's loyalty brought him praise from ʻAbdu'l-Bahá and later Shoghi Effendi mentioned him as one of the most eminent Baháʼís in America. Remey was also a prolific writer, and published several volumes on Baháʼí history and teachings. His first pamphlet was published in 1905 and was among the first material on the religion available to American Baháʼís. In part due to his fear of global cataclysm, Remey compiled much of his records and in 1940 he provided copies to several public libraries, requesting them not to be opened until 1995. Marriage According to Juliet Thompson's diary, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá suggested that she marry Remey, and in 1909 asked her how she felt about it. They were engaged for a time but did not marry. Thompson anguished over her decision, which she felt would cause ʻAbdu'l-Baha disappointment. During the 1930s, Remey lived in Washington, D.C. where he enjoyed an active social life. He was briefly married to heiress Gertrude Heim Klemm from 17 July 1931 until her suicide on 5 August 1932 (Klemm's gravestone gives the Paris wedding as 11 July). They had no children. Architectural projects Having studied architecture, Remey made significant achievements in the design of several Baháʼí buildings. Under the guidance of Shoghi Effendi, his designs were used in the temples in Kampala and Sydney (pictured), both dedicated in 1961. Before 1944 a site was selected and purchased for a House of Worship in Tehran, Iran. Upon the request of Shoghi Effendi, Remey provided a design for this temple, which he approved. The drawing of it was published in The Bahá'í World XIV: 1963-1968, p. 495. The construction of this temple has been delayed indefinitely, however, due to the hostile political situation in Iran. A site has been selected for a House of Worship in the vicinity of the Baháʼí World Centre on Mount Carmel in Haifa, Israel. Since 1971, an obelisk has marked the location where it will be constructed. The design by Mason Remey was approved by Shoghi Effendi. A photo of that model can be found in Baha'i World vol. XII, p. 548. It now stands in the upper hall of the Mansion of Bahjí. Remey also designed the International Archives Building, completed in 1957. His design was based on the Parthenon. He provided many design proposals for the Baháʼí temples in Wilmette and Frankfurt, but Louis Bourgeois and Teuto Rocholl, respectively, were selected instead. He also made suggestions for the design of the Shrine of the Báb. The Remeum Remey had a large personal fortune from his family and his late wife. He spent much of it on two projects: his mansion on Embassy Row in Washington, built around 1930, and the "Remeum". Remey contracted with Pohick Church in 1937 to build a huge family mausoleum on its grounds in Virginia, to be located on five acres of land about one half-mile south of the church building. Construction began in 1939. According to an article in the Washington Evening Star and Daily News, the mausoleum was planned as a "magnificent complex of walled courtyards, underground chambers with soaring vaulted ceilings, marble reliefs and statues, carved pillars, chapels and burial vaults". It was to be four times the size of Pohick Church, using over two million bricks, and costing over a million dollars ($18.9 million in 2021 dollars). It had relief panels depicting historical events in the life of Remey's family, such as the landing of the Mayflower and the sinking of the USS Yorktown; a pair of massive lions guarding the entrance; life-size statues; depictions of Christian saints; and a huge ornate sarcophagus of Portuguese marble was prepared for himself. Remey transported the bodies of fifteen relatives to the Remeum. The grounds were landscaped. The complex had electric chandeliers, ventilation and plumbing. A trust account was established with the church for maintenance. Remey planned to crown it with a three-story structure that would have dwarfed the church. The Remeum was never finished. Problems soon developed in the 1950s, and the mausoleum site became the target of vandals. As a preventative measure, the entrance was bricked up to prevent access, but the wall was breached in 1956 by high school boys with axes, as reported by the Morning Star: By 1958 the church vestry became concerned, and in 1962 refused to grant permission for any more work to be done on the site. Soon negotiations began to break the original contract; in 1968 the property reverted to the church, and Remey was given five years to remove anything of value from the site. Most of the dead were taken by relatives to another family cemetery in New York; Remey's wife Gertrude was reinterred in the main church cemetery. After the last of the bodies was removed, the Remeum was demolished beginning in 1973 on the orders of the Episcopal church, and the last of the aboveground ruins was finally bulldozed ten years later. Little remains on the site to mark the former presence of the complex save an obelisk dedicated to Remey's parents and a pair of structures which served as chimneys or vents. Robert Stockman wrote: Service in Haifa, 1950-1959 In November 1950, Shoghi Effendi announced to a small group, including Remey, his intention of appointing them to an International Baháʼí Council. Remey moved his residence from Washington to Haifa, and the public announcement of the Council was made on 9 January 1951. The Council was the first international Baháʼí body, intended to be a forerunner to the Universal House of Justice while forging links with authorities in the newly emerged Israel, assisting with the completion of the Shrine of the Báb, and negotiating for status as a religious court in Israel. Remey was appointed president of the council in March 1951, with Amelia Collins as vice-president. A further announcement in March 1952 appointed several more officers to the Council and Rúhíyyih Khánum as the liaison between the Council and the Guardian. Remey was included in Shoghi Effendi's first contingent of 12 appointments to the rank of Hand of the Cause on 24 December 1951. Remey attended all four international teaching conferences in 1953, in Kampala, Chicago, Stockholm, and New Delhi. During this time he continued several Baháʼí architectural projects. Death of Shoghi Effendi The Baháʼí world entered a leadership crisis upon the death of Shoghi Effendi, who died without children or an appointed successor. All male descendants of Baha'u'llah were either dead or excommunicated, and the hereditary institution of the Guardian was defunct. When Shoghi Effendi died on 4 November 1957, Shoghi Effendi's personal room and safe were sealed and constantly guarded. 26 of the 27 living Hands arrived by 17 November, and on 19 November, Mason Remey along with 8 others found all seals intact and searched the room for a will, which was not found. First Conclave Later the Hands of the Cause met in a private conclave at Bahjí on 20 November. They decided that the situation of the Guardian having died without being able to appoint a successor was a situation not dealt with in the texts that define the Baháʼí administration, and that the matter would need to be reviewed and adjudicated by the Universal House of Justice, an institution envisaged by Baha'u'llah that had not yet been elected. Their unanimous proclamation made 25 November stated, Remey signed the declaration that Shoghi Effendi died "without having appointed his successor" and was also appointed as one of the Custodians to stay in Haifa. Several other proclamations were made that day specifying the authority and procedural functioning of the Hands and the Custodians. Among them were, "That the entire body of the Hands of the Cause, meeting annually or whenever convened by the nine Hands, shall determine when and how the International Baháʼí Council shall pass through the successive stages outlined by Shoghi Effendi culminating in the election of the Universal House of Justice;" "That the authority to expel violators from the Faith shall be vested in the body of nine Hands..." A longer proclamation, also signed by all the Hands, was sent to the Baháʼís of the world on 25 November, which mentioned several points about the continuation of authority of the Baháʼí Faith: Following these events Time magazine reported that there were debates about two possible candidates for Guardian. Though the Hands dedicated to not disclose any details of the conclaves, Remey later revealed memoirs with details of the events. He wrote that his status as president of the International Baha'i Council was never mentioned in any of the conclaves, and that the idea of not having another Guardian was introduced by Rahmatu'lláh Muhájir. The idea of no single person as the supreme head of the religion was disturbing to some Baháʼí of the time. In 1958 two American Hands, Paul Haney and Corinne True, and the NSA began circulating a document expressing their belief that the "door to the appointment of a second Guardian... is closed", but it was blocked by an urgent cablegram from the custodial Hands in Haifa, indicating that they were "greatly disturbed" and to delete all references to it. Claim to Guardianship, 1960-1974 As early as January 1959, Remey believed that he was the second Guardian and successor to Shoghi Effendi. According to Remey, this idea developed gradually since the first conclave of the Hands, and at the second conclave (November 1958) he warned the others that they were violating Covenant by not allowing the continuation of the Guardianship. At the third conclave (November 1959), Remey refused to sign the joint statement of the Hands, which was converting the International Council from an appointed to an elected body, an act that would end his position as president. He then abandoned his position, moved to Washington, and began to circulate the claim that he should be recognized as the second Guardian. Remey later claimed that after becoming president of the International Baháʼí Council, some Baháʼís told him that if Shoghi Effendi died without appointing a successor, then he would be the next Guardian. Proclamation In April 1960, Remey wrote an announcement that he was the successor to Shoghi Effendi, and requested that it be read at the upcoming national convention. In his cover letter to Charles Wolcott, secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States, he wrote, Remey believed his appointment as president of the international council represented an appointment by Shoghi Effendi as Guardian, because the appointed council was a precursor to the elected Universal House of Justice. In his intended announcement at the convention, he wrote, Remey wrote that his delay in announcing his status was to give others "ample time to discover for themselves", but "until now no one, other than I have discovered that such authority was vested in me". He claimed in the proclamation that he made the declaration as Guardian to the Hands previously (which they claimed was false), and that he had "definitely known for the past twelve years more or less". He said that, Expulsion His letter to the convention was refused. After a brief attempt at reconciliation and some hesitation among the Hands, he was declared a Covenant-breaker by all 26 remaining Hands of the Cause on 26 July 1960, along with anyone actively supporting his claims. Almost the whole Baháʼí world rejected his claim, which did not even address the requirements that Guardians be | of the Episcopal church, and the last of the aboveground ruins was finally bulldozed ten years later. Little remains on the site to mark the former presence of the complex save an obelisk dedicated to Remey's parents and a pair of structures which served as chimneys or vents. Robert Stockman wrote: Service in Haifa, 1950-1959 In November 1950, Shoghi Effendi announced to a small group, including Remey, his intention of appointing them to an International Baháʼí Council. Remey moved his residence from Washington to Haifa, and the public announcement of the Council was made on 9 January 1951. The Council was the first international Baháʼí body, intended to be a forerunner to the Universal House of Justice while forging links with authorities in the newly emerged Israel, assisting with the completion of the Shrine of the Báb, and negotiating for status as a religious court in Israel. Remey was appointed president of the council in March 1951, with Amelia Collins as vice-president. A further announcement in March 1952 appointed several more officers to the Council and Rúhíyyih Khánum as the liaison between the Council and the Guardian. Remey was included in Shoghi Effendi's first contingent of 12 appointments to the rank of Hand of the Cause on 24 December 1951. Remey attended all four international teaching conferences in 1953, in Kampala, Chicago, Stockholm, and New Delhi. During this time he continued several Baháʼí architectural projects. Death of Shoghi Effendi The Baháʼí world entered a leadership crisis upon the death of Shoghi Effendi, who died without children or an appointed successor. All male descendants of Baha'u'llah were either dead or excommunicated, and the hereditary institution of the Guardian was defunct. When Shoghi Effendi died on 4 November 1957, Shoghi Effendi's personal room and safe were sealed and constantly guarded. 26 of the 27 living Hands arrived by 17 November, and on 19 November, Mason Remey along with 8 others found all seals intact and searched the room for a will, which was not found. First Conclave Later the Hands of the Cause met in a private conclave at Bahjí on 20 November. They decided that the situation of the Guardian having died without being able to appoint a successor was a situation not dealt with in the texts that define the Baháʼí administration, and that the matter would need to be reviewed and adjudicated by the Universal House of Justice, an institution envisaged by Baha'u'llah that had not yet been elected. Their unanimous proclamation made 25 November stated, Remey signed the declaration that Shoghi Effendi died "without having appointed his successor" and was also appointed as one of the Custodians to stay in Haifa. Several other proclamations were made that day specifying the authority and procedural functioning of the Hands and the Custodians. Among them were, "That the entire body of the Hands of the Cause, meeting annually or whenever convened by the nine Hands, shall determine when and how the International Baháʼí Council shall pass through the successive stages outlined by Shoghi Effendi culminating in the election of the Universal House of Justice;" "That the authority to expel violators from the Faith shall be vested in the body of nine Hands..." A longer proclamation, also signed by all the Hands, was sent to the Baháʼís of the world on 25 November, which mentioned several points about the continuation of authority of the Baháʼí Faith: Following these events Time magazine reported that there were debates about two possible candidates for Guardian. Though the Hands dedicated to not disclose any details of the conclaves, Remey later revealed memoirs with details of the events. He wrote that his status as president of the International Baha'i Council was never mentioned in any of the conclaves, and that the idea of not having another Guardian was introduced by Rahmatu'lláh Muhájir. The idea of no single person as the supreme head of the religion was disturbing to some Baháʼí of the time. In 1958 two American Hands, Paul Haney and Corinne True, and the NSA began circulating a document expressing their belief that the "door to the appointment of a second Guardian... is closed", but it was blocked by an urgent cablegram from the custodial Hands in Haifa, indicating that they were "greatly disturbed" and to delete all references to it. Claim to Guardianship, 1960-1974 As early as January 1959, Remey believed that he was the second Guardian and successor to Shoghi Effendi. According to Remey, this idea developed gradually since the first conclave of the Hands, and at the second conclave (November 1958) he warned the others that they were violating Covenant by not allowing the continuation of the Guardianship. At the third conclave (November 1959), Remey refused to sign the joint statement of the Hands, which was converting the International Council from an appointed to an elected body, an act that would end his position as president. He then abandoned his position, moved to Washington, and began to circulate the claim that he should be recognized as the second Guardian. Remey later claimed that after becoming president of the International Baháʼí Council, some Baháʼís told him that if Shoghi Effendi died without appointing a successor, then he would be the next Guardian. Proclamation In April 1960, Remey wrote an announcement that he was the successor to Shoghi Effendi, and requested that it be read at the upcoming national convention. In his cover letter to Charles Wolcott, secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the United States, he wrote, Remey believed his appointment as president of the international council represented an appointment by Shoghi Effendi as Guardian, because the appointed council was a precursor to the elected Universal House of Justice. In his intended announcement at the convention, he wrote, Remey wrote that his delay in announcing his status was to give others "ample time to discover for themselves", but "until now no one, other than I have discovered that such authority was vested in me". He claimed in the proclamation that he made the declaration as Guardian to the Hands previously (which they claimed was false), and that he had "definitely known for the past twelve years more or less". He said that, Expulsion His letter to the convention was refused. After a brief attempt at reconciliation and some hesitation among the Hands, he was declared a Covenant-breaker by all 26 remaining Hands of the Cause on 26 July 1960, along with anyone actively supporting his claims. Almost the whole Baháʼí world rejected his claim, which did not even address the requirements that Guardians be descendants of Baha'u'llah — making him ineligible — and that appointments must be clearly confirmed by the nine resident Hands of the Cause in Haifa. Remey gained very little support around the world, and himself noted that "almost the entire Baha'i world" rejected his claim. He sent his proclamation to other National Spiritual Assemblies, and a majority of the one in France accepted him. The 11 other extant National Assemblies rejected him. He gained supporters mostly from the United States, but also in parts of Europe, Pakistan (mostly in Faisalabad and Sialkot), and in Lucknow, India. Estimates of Remey's initial following range from 15, to 100, to 150, to several hundred individuals. The Hands sent Abu'l-Qásim Faizi to France as their representative, with specific instructions to dissolve the National Assembly and call for a new election. Although initially disturbing, the mainstream Baháʼís paid little attention to his movement within a few years. The Universal House of Justice was elected in 1963, and the Custodians officially passed their authority as the head of the Faith to the Universal House of Justice, which soon announced that it did not have the power to appoint or legislate to make possible the appointment of a second Guardian to succeed Shoghi Effendi. Consolidation Remey wrote three letters to his supporters soon after his excommunication, sharing his belief that "the only true and legitimate Baha'is are those now serving under the Second Guardian of the Faith." He initially called his sect the Orthodox Baha'is Under the Hereditary Guardianship. Remey settled in Florence, Italy, until the end of his life. From there he appointed three local spiritual assemblies in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and Lucknow, India, then organized the election of two National Assemblies in 1963 - in the United States and Pakistan. In 1964 the Santa Fe assembly filed a lawsuit against the National Spiritual Assembly (NSA) of the Baháʼís of the United States to receive the legal title to the Baháʼí House of Worship in Illinois, and all other property owned by the NSA. The NSA counter-sued and won. The Santa Fe assembly lost the right to use the term "Baháʼí" in printed material. Remey then changed the name of his sect from "Baháʼís Under the Hereditary Guardianship" to "Abha World Faith" and also referred to it as the "Orthodox Faith of Baháʼu'lláh" or "Orthodox Abha World Faith", and himself as the "Guardian of the Orthodox Baha'is". In 1966, Remey asked the Santa Fe assembly to dissolve, as well as the second International Baháʼí Council that he had appointed with Joel Marangella, residing in France, as president. Fracturing Beginning in 1966-67, Remey was abandoned by almost all of his followers, and his movement began to weaken and decline rapidly. Besides dissolving the institutions that he had organized, Remey began focusing on impending global catastrophe and criticizing Shoghi Effendi. In the late 1940s, he expressed his belief that nuclear war would destroy much of the world, and by the 1960s he stated publicly that the earth's axis would tilt and produce global floods. He encouraged his followers to move to high ground in the Rocky Mountains to avoid the imminent floods. These beliefs were the foundation of why he deposited copies of his memoirs in several prominent libraries in 1940, to ensure that a set would survive. In 1966 he became very critical of Shoghi Effendi. In a letter that year he reasoned that Shoghi Effendi had been practicing the religion of the Báb, and that, In a further letter the following year, Remey again repeated that, "the First Guardian Shoghi Effendi built his Administration about the Babi Faith and not about the Baha'i Faith. Shoghi Effendi was a very confused soul. He was an ego maniac. He flaunted and disobeyed the laws of the Aqdas and created all this confusion himself." These ideas came as a surprise to Remey's small band of followers, and nearly all of them abandoned him. They were not organized until several of them began forming their own groups based on different understandings of succession, even before his death in 1974. The majority of them claimed that Remey was showing signs of senility. The number of people who recognized his claim had greatly diminished by the time of his death. Burial From 1962, Remey resided in Florence, Italy, and died there on 4 February 1974, at the age of 99. Having been abandoned by all of his followers, he was buried by his non-Baháʼí secretary without religious ceremony in Florence. His obituary in the Washington Star accidentally gave his name as George Mason Remey. Resultant groups Remey's claim to Guardianship resulted in the largest schism in the history of the religion, and several small groups continue the belief that Remey was the Guardian and successor to Shoghi Effendi. They are now largely confined to the United States, with few members and no communal religious life. Accurate estimates on size are scarce and dated. Joel Marangella In 1961 Joel Marangella (b. 1918) received a letter from Remey, and a note that, "...in or after 1963. You will know when to break |
concepts of light, idea and space. Light is essential and achieves the relationship between inhabitants and the building. Ideas are to meet the function and context of space, forms, and construction. Space is shaped by the minimal geometric forms to avoid decoration that is not essential. Literature Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist writers eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in creating the story, to "choose sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than react to directions from the writer. Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classify this prose style as minimalism. Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the metafiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also sparse with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter. Minimalist writers, or those who are identified with minimalism during certain periods of their writing careers, include the following: Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, K. J. Stevens, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, Richard Ford, Patrick Holland, Cormac McCarthy, and Alicia Erian. American poets such as Stephen Crane, William Carlos Williams, early Ezra Pound, Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, and Aram Saroyan are sometimes identified with their minimalist style. The term "minimalism" is also sometimes associated with the briefest of poetic genres, haiku, which originated in Japan, but has been domesticated in English literature by poets such as Nick Virgilio, Raymond Roseliep, and George Swede. The Irish writer Samuel Beckett is well known for his minimalist plays and prose, as is the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse. Dimitris Lyacos's With the People from the Bridge, combining elliptical monologues with a pared-down prose narrative is a contemporary example of minimalist playwrighting. In his novel The Easy Chain, Evan Dara includes a 60-page section written in the style of musical minimalism, in particular inspired by composer Steve Reich. Intending to represent the psychological state (agitation) of the novel's main character, the section's successive lines of text are built on repetitive and developing phrases. Music The term "minimal music" was derived around 1970 by Michael Nyman from the concept of minimalism, which was earlier applied to the visual arts. More precisely, it was in a 1968 review in The Spectator that Nyman first used the term, to describe a ten-minute piano composition by the Danish composer Henning Christiansen, along with several other unnamed pieces played by Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. However, the roots of minimal music are older. In France between 1947 and 1948, Yves Klein conceived his Monotone Symphony (1949, formally The Monotone-Silence Symphony) that consisted of a single 20-minute sustained chord followed by a 20-minute silence – a precedent to both La Monte Young's drone music and John Cage's 4′33″. Film and cinema In film, minimalism usually is associated with filmmakers such as Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Yasujirō Ozu. Their films typically tell a simple story with straightforward camera usage and minimal use of score. Paul Schrader named their kind of cinema: "transcendental cinema". In the present, a commitment to minimalist filmmaking can be seen in low-budget film movements such as Dogme 95 and mumblecore. Abbas Kiarostami and Elia Suleiman are also considered creators of minimalistic films. The Minimalists – Joshua Fields Millburn, Ryan Nicodemus, and Matt D'Avella – directed and produced the film Minimalism: A Documentary, which showcased the idea of minimal living in the modern world. Software and UI design In software and user interface design, minimalism describes the usage of fewer design elements, flat design, fewer options and features, and tendentially less occupied screen space. Examples Galaxy S6 One example is the user interface of the Samsung Galaxy S6, where many options and items from menus and settings were pruned. Samsung 2015 stand-by menu The update to Android Lollipop removed the shortcuts to "Silent", "Vibration only", and "Sound on" in the stand-by menu. iOS 7 and Android Lollipop update The Android Lollipop update (late 2014–2015) applied to both stock Android and TouchWiz UI devices changes the appearance of the user interface, especially the setting menus of which the use of icons, border lines, edges, and contrast elements have been reduced to a minimum. Furthermore, the remaining icons have become less skeumorphistic and more abstract, adapting to flat design language. The density of the elements on the user interface has decreased. There is more whitespace, or unoccupied screen space. Similar changes happened with the update from iOS 6 to iOS 7. Context menu icons In 2014, the icons from context menus of Samsung's TouchWiz applications (Samsung Gallery, S Browser, telephone app, etc.) were pruned. Unavailable options Prior to Samsung's TouchWiz Nature UX 3.0, menu options that are currently unavailable (e.g. "Search for text in page" in the Internet browser during a page load) were shown, but grayed out, which has the advantage of informing the user about their existence but that the option is unavailable. Since then, unavailable options are hidden completely, which makes the context menu occupy less screen space, but it might cause the user to not realize immediately that the feature is unavailable. Browser's URL bar only shows domain name Started in Safari browser for iOS and adapted by Samsung's "S Browser", some browsers only show the domain name instead of the full URL, even if there is spare space in the URL bar. Instagram website redesign In June 2015, the layout of Instagram's website was fully redesigned to resemble the mobile application and mobile website, pruning many user interface elements, for example, the slideshow banner. Skype design overhaul Another example is the Skype redesign, where many icons from context menus were removed, colour gradients were replaced with flat colors, and the density of user interface elements was decreased. In other fields Cuisine and cooking Breaking from the complex, hearty dishes established as orthodox haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine was a culinary movement that consciously drew from minimalism and conceptualism. It emphasized more basic flavors, careful presentation, and a less involved preparation process. The movement was mainly in vogue during the 1960s and 1970s, after which it once again gave way to more traditional haute cuisine, retroactively titled cuisine classique. However, the influence of nouvelle cuisine can still be felt through the techniques it introduced. Fashion The capsule wardrobe is an example of minimalism in fashion. Constructed of only a few staple pieces that do not go out of style, and generally dominated by only one or two colors, capsule wardrobes are meant to be light, flexible and adaptable, and can be paired with seasonal pieces when the situation calls for them. The modern idea of a capsule wardrobe dates back to the 1970s, and is credited to London boutique owner Susie Faux. The concept was further popularized in | For example, the Japanese floral art, also known as Ikebana, has the central principle of letting the flower express itself. People cut off the branches, leaves and blossoms from the plants and only retain the essential part of the plant. This conveys the idea of essential quality and innate character in nature. Minimalist architects and their works The Japanese minimalist architect Tadao Ando conveys the Japanese traditional spirit and his own perception of nature in his works. His design concepts are materials, pure geometry and nature. He normally uses concrete or natural wood and basic structural form to achieve austerity and rays of light in space. He also sets up dialogue between the site and nature to create relationship and order with the buildings. Ando's works and the translation of Japanese aesthetic principles are highly influential on Japanese architecture. Another Japanese minimalist architect, Kazuyo Sejima, works on her own and in conjunction with Ryue Nishizawa, as SANAA, producing iconic Japanese Minimalist buildings. Credited with creating and influencing a particular genre of Japanese Minimalism, Sejimas delicate, intelligent designs may use white color, thin construction sections and transparent elements to create the phenomenal building type often associated with minimalism. Works include New Museum (2010) New York City, Small House (2000) Tokyo, House surrounded By Plum Trees (2003) Tokyo. In Vitra Conference Pavilion, Weil am Rhein, 1993, the concepts are to bring together the relationships between building, human movement, site and nature. Which as one main point of minimalism ideology that establish dialogue between the building and site. The building uses the simple forms of circle and rectangle to contrast the filled and void space of the interior and nature. In the foyer, there is a large landscape window that looks out to the exterior. This achieves the simple and silence of architecture and enhances the light, wind, time and nature in space. John Pawson is a British minimalist architect; his design concepts are soul, light, and order. He believes that though reduced clutter and simplification of the interior to a point that gets beyond the idea of essential quality, there is a sense of clarity and richness of simplicity instead of emptiness. The materials in his design reveal the perception toward space, surface, and volume. Moreover, he likes to use natural materials because of their aliveness, sense of depth and quality of an individual. He is also attracted by the important influences from Japanese Zen Philosophy. Calvin Klein Madison Avenue, New York, 1995–96, is a boutique that conveys Calvin Klein's ideas of fashion. John Pawson's interior design concepts for this project are to create simple, peaceful and orderly spatial arrangements. He used stone floors and white walls to achieve simplicity and harmony for space. He also emphasises reduction and eliminates the visual distortions, such as the air conditioning and lamps to achieve a sense of purity for interior. Alberto Campo Baeza is a Spanish architect and describes his work as essential architecture. He values the concepts of light, idea and space. Light is essential and achieves the relationship between inhabitants and the building. Ideas are to meet the function and context of space, forms, and construction. Space is shaped by the minimal geometric forms to avoid decoration that is not essential. Literature Literary minimalism is characterized by an economy with words and a focus on surface description. Minimalist writers eschew adverbs and prefer allowing context to dictate meaning. Readers are expected to take an active role in creating the story, to "choose sides" based on oblique hints and innuendo, rather than react to directions from the writer. Some 1940s-era crime fiction of writers such as James M. Cain and Jim Thompson adopted a stripped-down, matter-of-fact prose style to considerable effect; some classify this prose style as minimalism. Another strand of literary minimalism arose in response to the metafiction trend of the 1960s and early 1970s (John Barth, Robert Coover, and William H. Gass). These writers were also sparse with prose and kept a psychological distance from their subject matter. Minimalist writers, or those who are identified with minimalism during certain periods of their writing careers, include the following: Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bret Easton Ellis, Charles Bukowski, Ernest Hemingway, K. J. Stevens, Amy Hempel, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Grace Paley, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Robison, Frederick Barthelme, Richard Ford, Patrick Holland, Cormac McCarthy, and Alicia Erian. American poets such as Stephen Crane, William Carlos Williams, early Ezra Pound, Robert Creeley, Robert Grenier, and Aram Saroyan are sometimes identified with their minimalist style. The term "minimalism" is also sometimes associated with the briefest of poetic genres, haiku, which originated in Japan, but has been domesticated in English literature by poets such as Nick Virgilio, Raymond Roseliep, and George Swede. The Irish writer Samuel Beckett is well known for his minimalist plays and prose, as is the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse. Dimitris Lyacos's With the People from the Bridge, combining elliptical monologues with a pared-down prose narrative is a contemporary example of minimalist playwrighting. In his novel The Easy Chain, Evan Dara includes a 60-page section written in the style of musical minimalism, in particular inspired by composer Steve Reich. Intending to represent the psychological state (agitation) of the novel's main character, the section's successive lines of text are built on repetitive and developing phrases. Music The term "minimal music" was derived around 1970 by Michael Nyman from the concept of minimalism, which was earlier applied to the visual arts. More precisely, it was in a 1968 review in The Spectator that Nyman first used the term, to describe a ten-minute piano composition by the Danish composer Henning Christiansen, along with several other unnamed pieces played by Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. |
is rotated and the coil remains stationary. As the magnet moves with respect to the coil, the magnetic flux linkage of the coil changes. This induces an EMF in the coil, which in turn causes a current to flow. One or more times per revolution, just as the magnet pole moves away from the coil and the magnetic flux begins to decrease, a cam opens the contact breaker (called “the points” in reference to the two points of a circuit breaker) and interrupts the current. This causes the electromagnetic field in the primary coil to collapse rapidly. As the field collapses rapidly there is a large voltage induced (as described by Faraday's Law) across the primary coil. As the points begin to open, point spacing is initially such that the voltage across the primary coil would arc across the points. A capacitor is placed across the points which absorbs the energy stored in the leakage inductance of the primary coil, and slows the rise time of the primary winding voltage to allow the points to open fully. The capacitor's function is similar to that of a snubber as found in a flyback converter. A second coil, with many more turns than the primary, is wound on the same iron core to form an electrical transformer. The ratio of turns in the secondary winding to the number of turns in the primary winding, is called the turns ratio. Voltage across the primary coil results in a proportional voltage being induced across the secondary winding of the coil. The turns ratio between the primary and secondary coil is selected so that the voltage across the secondary reaches a very high value, enough to arc across the gap of the spark plug. As the voltage of the primary winding rises to several hundred volts, the voltage on the secondary winding rises to several tens of thousands of volts, since the secondary winding typically has 100 times as many turns as the primary winding. The capacitor and the coil together form a resonant circuit which allows the energy to oscillate from the capacitor to the coil and back again. Due to the inevitable losses in the system, this oscillation decays fairly rapidly. This dissipates the energy that was stored in the condenser in time for the next closure of the points, leaving the condenser discharged and ready to repeat the cycle. On more advanced magnetos the cam ring can be rotated by an external linkage to alter the ignition timing. In a modern installation, the magneto only has a single low tension winding which is connected to an external ignition coil which not only has a low tension winding, but also a secondary winding of many thousands of turns to deliver the high voltage required for the spark plug(s). Such a system is known as an "energy transfer" ignition system. Initially this was done because it was easier to provide good insulation for the secondary winding of an external coil than it was in a coil buried in the construction of the magneto (early magnetos had the coil assembly externally to the rotating parts to make them easier to insulate—at the expense of efficiency). In more modern times, insulation materials have improved to the point where constructing self-contained magnetos is relatively easy, but energy transfer systems are still used where the ultimate in reliability is required such as in aviation engines. Aviation Because it requires no battery or other source of electrical energy, the magneto is a compact and reliable self-contained ignition | secondary coils to fire the spark plugs) and high voltage magnetos (to fire the spark plug directly, similar to coil ignitions, introduced by Bosch in 1903). Operation In the type known as a shuttle magneto, the engine rotates a coil of wire between the poles of a magnet. In the inductor magneto, the magnet is rotated and the coil remains stationary. As the magnet moves with respect to the coil, the magnetic flux linkage of the coil changes. This induces an EMF in the coil, which in turn causes a current to flow. One or more times per revolution, just as the magnet pole moves away from the coil and the magnetic flux begins to decrease, a cam opens the contact breaker (called “the points” in reference to the two points of a circuit breaker) and interrupts the current. This causes the electromagnetic field in the primary coil to collapse rapidly. As the field collapses rapidly there is a large voltage induced (as described by Faraday's Law) across the primary coil. As the points begin to open, point spacing is initially such that the voltage across the primary coil would arc across the points. A capacitor is placed across the points which absorbs the energy stored in the leakage inductance of the primary coil, and slows the rise time of the primary winding voltage to allow the points to open fully. The capacitor's function is similar to that of a snubber as found in a flyback converter. A second coil, with many more turns than the primary, is wound on the same iron core to form an electrical transformer. The ratio of turns in the secondary winding to the number of turns in the primary winding, is called the turns ratio. Voltage across the primary coil results in a proportional voltage being induced across the secondary winding of the coil. The turns ratio between the primary and secondary coil is selected so that the voltage across the secondary reaches a very high value, enough to arc across the gap of the spark plug. As the voltage of the primary winding rises to several hundred volts, the voltage on the secondary winding rises to several tens of thousands of volts, since the secondary winding typically has 100 times as many turns as the primary winding. The capacitor and the coil together form a resonant circuit which allows the energy to oscillate from the capacitor to the coil and back again. Due to the inevitable losses in the system, this oscillation decays fairly rapidly. This dissipates the energy that was stored in the condenser in time for |
he had mentioned the show and its premise to Vonnegut, the author suggested that even people who work hard on bad films deserve some respect. Murphy then invited Vonnegut to dine with his group, which Vonnegut declined, claiming that he had other plans. When Murphy and friends ate later that night, he saw Vonnegut dining alone in the same restaurant, and remarked that he had been "faced...but nicely faced" by one of his literary heroes. Dark Horse Comics announced on February 16, 2017 that it had planned a MST3K comic book series that was set for initial release in 2017. In June 2018, Dark Horse affirmed that the six-issue series would launch in September 2018, and would feature Jonah and the bots riffing on public domain comic books. The first comic was released on September 12, 2018 and it focuses on Jonah and the Bots trying to get out of comics while trying to save Crow when he starts to become a monster in the pages of Horrific. Hodgson oversaw the writing. Live shows The first MST3K live event was held on June 5 and 6, 1989 at the Comedy Gallery in Minneapolis. Jim Mallon served as the emcee of the event that featured stand-up sets by Joel, Josh Weinstein, and Trace Beaulieu. A Q&A session about the show was conducted, and the show's original pilot was shown. The robots and various props were on display for attendees to see. The first live riffing event, called MST Alive! was held at the Uptown Theater in Minneapolis on July 11, 1992. There were two showings, both with live riffing of the feature film World Without End, as well as sing-alongs of different songs from the show, followed by a Q&A session. The event was hosted, in character, by Dr. Forrester, TV's Frank, Joel, and the Bots. A second version of "MST Alive!" was presented as a part of the first ever MST3K "ConventioCon ExpoFest-A-Rama" in 1994. In this show, Forrester and Frank forced Mike and the bots to watch This Island Earth, a film which was later riffed as a part of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. Hodgson and the team for the 2017 revival announced an MST3K "Watch Out For Snakes Tour" during mid-2017 covering 29 cities in the United States and Canada. Jonah and the Bots riff on one of two films live for audiences, either Eegah (which had already been featured on the original run of MST3K, and which popularized the riff "Watch out for snakes", but featured new riffs for this tour) or an unannounced surprise film: Argoman the Fantastic Superman. The tour featured Ray, Yount and Hanson reprising their roles as Jonah Heston, Crow and Gypsy/Synthia. Vaughn was unavailable to perform Servo due to the birth of his child and the role was covered by Tim Ryder. The tour also featured Grant Baciocco as Terry the Bonehead, pre-recorded appearances from Day and Oswalt as Kinga and Max, and a live introduction from Hodgson. Hodgson and Ray also toured in late 2018 as part of a 30th anniversary of MST3K in a similar format to the 2017 tour. Hodgson reprised the role of Joel Robinson and riffed movies alongside Ray and the bots during these shows. Ryder continued to perform Tom Servo, while Grant Baciocco, the lead puppeteer, voiced Crow. Rebecca Hanson also joined in her role as Synthia as the host of the show. Movies riffed at these shows included The Brain and Deathstalker II. During the tour, Hodgson announced that Deanna Rooney will be joining the cast in the twelfth season as a new "Mad" working with Kinga and Max. The 2019 live tour, The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour, is promoted as Hodgson's "final live tour". Most of the tour dates feature the film No Retreat, No Surrender, while a few show Circus of Horrors. The tour was promoted with video production updates and on-the-road updates via the tour's official website. In addition to Joel, the parts of Crow and Servo are portrayed by Nate Begle and Conor McGiffin respectively. Yvonne Freese plays the part of Gypsy and Mega-Synthia, a clone of both Pearl Forrester and the original Synthia. Emily Marsh also features in the tour as the new character Crenshaw. The Time Bubble Tour started on November 2, 2021 in Cleveland, OH with Emily Marsh, Yvonne Freese, Nate Begle and Conor McGiffin reprising their parts from the 2019 tour. Kelsey Brady joined the cast as Swing Puppeteer. The film was Roland Emmerich's Making Contact (1985). Other appearances In 1996, during promotion for the film, Nelson and the bots were interviewed in-character on MTV, and seen in silhouettes heckling footage from MTV News featuring the band Radiohead. Also that year, Hodgson was a featured guest on Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast. In 1997, the videogame magazine PlayStation Underground (Volume 2, Number 1) included a Best Brains-produced MST3K short on one of their promotional discs. The video opened with a host segment of Mike and the Bots playing some PlayStation games, only to go into the theater to riff on some videos from the magazine's past. The feature is about seven minutes long. An Easter egg on the disc has some behind-the-scenes footage of Best Brains filming the sequences. Nelson and the robot characters appeared in silhouette on an episode of "Cheap Seats", a TV series in which The Sklar Brothers commented on clips of sporting events in a manner similar to MST3K. In 2007, a new online animated web series, referred to as "The Bots Are Back!", was produced by Mallon. The series planned a weekly adventure featuring Crow, Tom Servo, and Gypsy, with Mallon reprising his role as Gypsy and Paul Chaplin as Crow. However, only a handful of episodes were released, and the series was abandoned due to budgetary issues. The general internet response to the webisodes was largely negative. In May 2020, Hodgson announced a special Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live Riff-Along with a planned date of May 3; the show featured Hodgson along with Emily Marsh, Conor McGiffin, Nate Begle, and Yvonne Freese, who had joined him during the 2019 MST3K live tour riffing atop the MST3K season one episode featuring Moon Zero Two and then riffing to a new short "Circus Days". In another charitable event, Hodgson, alongside Weinstein and Corbett reprising their voice roles as Crow and Tom Servo, riffed two new shorts as part of a crowdfunded effort to support MIGIZI, a Native American youth non-profit group whose headquarters were destroyed during the George Floyd protests in May 2020. Reception and legacy In 2004, the show was listed as in a featured TV Guide article, "25 Top Cult Shows Ever!", and included a sidebar which read, "Mike Nelson, writer and star (replacing creator Joel Hodgson), recently addressed a college audience: 'There was nobody over the age of 25. I had to ask, "Where are you seeing this show?" I guess we have some sort of timeless quality.'" Three years later, TV Guide rewrote the article, and bumped MST3K to #13. In 2007, the show was listed as one of Time magazine's "100 Best TV Shows of All-Time" (it was also chosen as one of the magazine's top 10 shows of 1990). In 2012, the show was listed as #3 in Entertainment Weeklys "25 Best Cult TV Shows from the Past 25 Years", with the comment that "MST3K taught us that snarky commentary can be way more entertaining than the actual media." The 2017 relaunch was met with critical acclaim; the first reboot season currently has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Reactions by those parodied The reactions of those parodied by MST3K have been mixed. Some notable negative reactions include that of Sandy Frank, who held the rights to several Gamera films parodied on the show. He said he was "intensely displeased" by the mockery directed at him. (The crew once sang the "Sandy Frank Song", which said that Frank was "the source of all our pain", "thinks that people come from trees", Steven Spielberg "won't return his calls", and implied that he was too lazy to make his own films.) Because of this, Frank reportedly refused to allow the shows to be rebroadcast once MST3Ks rights ran out. However, this may in fact be a rumor, as other rumors indicate that the Gamera films distribution rights prices were increased beyond what Best Brains could afford as a result of the show's success. According to Shout! Factory, the Japanese movie studio Kadokawa Pictures were so horrified with MST3K's treatment of five Gamera films that they refused to let Shout release the episodes on home video. Brian Ward (one of the members of Shout! Factory) explained to fans on the forums of the official Shout! Factory website that they tried their best to convince them, but "...the Japanese take their Gamera films very seriously and do not appreciate them being mocked". However, eventually Shout was able to clear the episodes for a special 2011 release due to the rights in North America shifting away from the Japanese to another, North American entity that had no such qualms. Kevin Murphy has said that Joe Don Baker wanted to "beat up" the writers of the show for attacking him during riffing of Mitchell. Murphy later stated that Baker probably meant it in a joking manner, although Mike Nelson has said that he had deliberately avoided encountering Baker while the two happened to be staying at the same hotel. Jeff Lieberman, director of Squirm, was also quite angry at the MST3K treatment of his film. Director Rick Sloane was shocked at his treatment at the conclusion of Hobgoblins, in which Sloane himself was mercilessly mocked over the film's end credits. In a 2008 interview, however, Sloane clarified his comments, saying that "I laughed through the entire MST3K episode, until the very end. I wasn't expecting the humor to suddenly be at my own expense. I was mortified when they dragged out the cardboard cutout and pretended to do an interview with me. I was caught off guard. I had never seen them rip apart any other director before on the show." However, he credits the success of the MST3K episode with inspiring him to make a sequel to Hobgoblins, released in 2009. Others, however, have been more positive: Robert Fiveson and Myrl Schriebman, producers of Parts: The Clonus Horror, said they were "flattered" to see the film appear on MST3K. Actor Miles O'Keeffe, the star of the film Cave Dwellers, called Best Brains and personally requested a copy of the MST3K treatment of the film, saying he enjoyed their skewering of what he had considered to be a surreal experience; according to Hodgson, O'Keeffe said his friends always heckled his performance in the film when it was on, and he appreciated the MST3K treatment. In the form of an essay and E. E. Cummings-esque poem, Mike Nelson paid tribute to O'Keeffe with a humorous mix of adulation and fear. Rex Reason, star of This Island Earth, made appearances at several MST3K events and credits MST3K with introducing the film to a new generation. The crew of Time Chasers held a party the night the MST3K treatment of their film aired and, while reactions were mixed, director David Giancola said, "Most of us were fans and knew what to expect and we roared with laughter and drank way too much. I had a blast, never laughed so hard in my life." Actor Adam West, star of the 1960s Batman TV series, co-starred in Zombie Nightmare, another film MST3K mocked. West apparently held no grudges, as he hosted the 1994 "Turkey Day" marathon in which the episode featuring Zombie Nightmare had its broadcast premiere. Mamie Van Doren (who appeared in episode 112, Untamed Youth, and episode 601, Girls Town), Robert Vaughn (star of episode 315, Teenage Cave Man, which he called the worst movie ever made) and Beverly Garland (who had appeared in many MST3K-featured Roger Corman films) also hosted at the marathon. Awards In 1993, MST3K won a Peabody Award for "producing an ingenious eclectic series": "With references to everything from Proust to Gilligan's Island, Mystery Science Theater 3000 fuses superb, clever writing with wonderfully terrible B-grade movies". In 1994 and 1995, the show was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing for a Variety or Music Program, but lost both times to Dennis Miller Live. Every year from 1992 to 1997, it was also nominated for CableACE Awards. Its DVD releases have been nominated for Saturn Awards in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2018. The revival's first season was nominated for a Best Presentation on Television Saturn Award and a OFTA Television Award nod for Best Variety Program. Influence Through MST3K, many obscure films have been more visible to the public, and several have since been considered some of the worst films ever made and are voted into the Bottom 100 on the Internet Movie Database. Of note is Manos: The Hands of Fate, which was riffed on by MST3K in its fourth season. Manos was a very low-budget film produced by Hal Warren, a fertilizer salesman at the time, taking on a dare from a screenwriter friend to show that anyone could make a horror film. The film suffered from numerous production issues due to its limited filming equipment, and many critics describe the result using a riff from MST3K, in that "every frame of this movie looks like someone's last-known photograph". The MST3K episode featuring Manos was considered one of its most popular and best episodes, and brought Manos into the public light as one of the worst films ever produced. The film gained a cult following, and an effort was made to restore the film to high-definition quality from its original film reels. MST3K also riffed on three films directed by Coleman Francis: Red Zone Cuba, The Skydivers, and The Beast of Yucca Flats, which brought awareness of Francis' poor direction and low-budget films, similar to that of Ed Wood. MST3K also brought to the limelight lackluster works by Bert I. Gordon, primarily giant monster B-movies, that gained attention through the show, and many Japanese kaiju movies imported and dubbed through producer Sandy Frank (jokingly referred to as "the source of all our pain"), particularly those in the Gamera series. MST3Ks riffing style to poke fun at bad movies, films, and TV shows, have been used in other works. In 2003, the television series Deadly Cinema, starring Jami Deadly, debuted, which featured the cast making fun of bad movies, MST3K-style. In 2004, the ESPN Classic series Cheap Seats, debuted, which featured two brothers making fun of clips of old sporting events, MST3K-style, and is noteworthy for containing an episode in which Mike, Crow, and Tom Servo briefly appeared in a cameo to make fun of the hosts' own skits. In 2008, the internet and direct-to-DVD comedy series Incognito Cinema Warriors XP, debuted, which used the same "host segment-movie segment" format the show established, while featuring completely original characters and plot. ICWXP gained a similar cult following, even earning the praises of former MST3K host Michael J. Nelson. In 2010, the television series This Movie Sucks! (and its predecessor Ed's Nite In), starring Ed the Sock and co-hosts Liana K and Ron Sparks, debuted. It features the cast making fun of bad movies. Creator Steven Kerzner, however, was quick to point out that MST3K was not "the creator of this kind of format, they're just the most recent and most well-known". In 2011, the theater silhouette motif was parodied by golf commentator and talk show host David Feherty in an episode of Feherty. He is shown sitting in front of a large screen and "riffing" while viewing footage of golfer Johnny Miller and is joined in the theater by his stuffed rooster (Frank) and his gnome statue (Costas). Further, the riffing style from MST3K is considered part of the influence for DVD commentaries and successful YouTube reviewers and Let's Play-style commentators. DVD releases for both Ghostbusters and Men in Black used a similar format to Shadowrama for an "in-vision" commentary features. The concept of social television, where social media is integrated into the television viewing experience, was significantly influenced by MST3K. This social media practice of live-tweeting riffs and jokes on broadcast shows, such as for films like Sharknado, has its roots in MST3K. The MST3K approach has inspired Internet movie critics to create comedic movie reviews approaches, such as through RedLetterMedia and Screen Junkies which are considered more than just snarking on the movie but aim to help the viewer understand film and story techniques and their flawed use in poorly-received films. Public performances of live riffing have been hosted by various groups in different cities across the U.S. and Canada, including Cineprov (Atlanta, Georgia), Master Pancake Theater (Austin, TX), The Gentlemen Hecklers (Vancouver, BC Canada), Counterclockwise Comedy (Kansas City, Missouri), FilmRoasters (Richmond, Virginia), Moxie Skinny Theatre 3000 (Springfield, Missouri), Riff Raff Theatre (Iowa City, Iowa), Twisted Flicks (Seattle, Washington), and Turkey Shoot (Metro Cinema at the Garneau, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada). Canadian sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun produced the show Unskippable for The Escapist website, which applied the MST3K premise to video game cut scenes. The Center for Puppetry Arts crowdfunded and successfully acquired Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot in 2019. Fandom MST3K, broadcasting during the emergence of the Internet for public use, developed a large fan base during its initial broadcast; which has continued to thrive since then. The show had already had its postal-based fan club, which people could write into and which some letters and drawings read on subsequent episodes, and the producers encouraged fans to share recordings of their episodes with others. At its peak, the "MST3K Fan Club" had over 50,000 members, and Best Brains were receiving over 500 letters each week. Fans of the show generally refer to themselves as "MSTies". Usenet newsgroups rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc and rec.arts.tv.mst3k.announce were established in the mid-1990s for announcements and discussions related to the show. A type of fan fiction called MiSTings, in which fans would add humorous comments to other, typically bad, fan fiction works, was popular on these groups. The fan-run website Satellite News continues to track news and information about the show and related projects from its cast members. Another fan site, The Annotated MST, attempts to catalog and describe all the obscure popular culture references used in a given episode. In addition to the show's fandom, a number of celebrities have expressed their love for the show. One of the earliest known celebrity fans was Frank Zappa, who went so far as to telephone Best Brains, calling MST3K as "the funniest fucking thing on TV" (according to Beaulieu). Zappa became a friend of the show, and following his death, episode 523 was dedicated to him. Other known celebrities fans include Al Gore, Neil Patrick Harris, Penn Jillette, and Patton Oswalt (who would later become TV's Son of TV's Frank in the revival). Filmmaker Jordan Vogt-Roberts (Kong: Skull Island) also praised MST3K: "Mystery Science Theater built something artful, endearing and comedic on top of the foundation other people's work. It had merit to itself." There were two official fan conventions in Minneapolis (run by the series' production company Best Brains) called "ConventioCon ExpoFest-A-Rama" (1994) and "ConventioCon ExpoFest-A-Rama 2: Electric Bugaloo" (1996). At least 2,500 people attended the first convention. Related post-show projects The various cast and crew from the show's broadcast run have continued to produce comedy works following the show. Two separate projects were launched that specifically borrowed on the theme of riffing on bad movies. After the short-lived The Film Crew in 2006, Nelson started RiffTrax, providing downloadable audio files containing MST3K-style riffs that the viewer can synchronize to their personal copy of a given popular movie (such as Star Wars: Episode I); this was done to avoid copyright and licensing issues with such films. RiffTraxs cast expanded to include Murphy and Corbett along with occasional guest stars, and are able to use a wider range of films, including films and shorts in the public domain, and films which they could get the license to stream and distribute. In addition, they launched production of RiffTrax Live shows for various films, where they perform their riffing in front of a live audience that is simultaneously broadcast to other movie theaters across the country and later made available as on-demand video. , RiffTrax continues to offer new material and shows. As part of a tribute to their roots, RiffTrax has performed some works that previously appeared on MST3K, including Manos: the Hands of Fate, Santa Claus, and Time Chasers. Similarly, Hodgson, after some experimental creative works such as The TV Wheel, started Cinematic Titanic with Beaulieu, Weinstein, Conniff, and Pehl in 2007. Like MST3K, the five riffed on bad movies they were able to acquire the licenses for (including Santa Claus Conquers the Martians), which then were distributed through on-demand video and streaming options. They later did a number of live shows across the United States, some which were made available for digital demand. Other related projects by the MST3K crew following the show's end include: In 2000, most of the cast of the Sci-Fi era of the show collaborated on a humor website, Timmy Big Hands, that closed in 2001. In 2001, Mike Nelson, Patrick Brantseg, Bill Corbett, Kevin Murphy and Paul Chaplin created The Adventures of Edward the Less, an animated parody of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and others in the fantasy genre, with additional vocals by Mary Jo Pehl and Mike Dodge, for the Sci Fi Channel website. In 2008, Bill Corbett and fellow writer Rob Greenberg wrote the screenplay for Meet Dave, a family comedy starring Eddie Murphy about a tiny Star Trek-like crew operating a spaceship that looks like a man. The captain of the crew and the spaceship were both played by Murphy. Originally conceived as a series called Starship Dave for SciFi.com, it was dropped in favor of Edward the Less. The script (along with the title) were changed drastically by studio executives and other writers, although Corbett and Greenberg received sole screenwriter credit. In 2010, Trace Beaulieu, Frank Conniff, Joel Hodgson, Mary Jo Pehl, Josh Weinstein, Beth McKeever and Clive Robertson voiced characters for Darkstar: The Interactive Movie, a computer game created by J. Allen Williams. In 2013, Frank Conniff and animation historian Jerry Beck debuted Cartoon Dump, a series of classically bad cartoons, which are also occasionally performed live. Trace Beaulieu and Joel Hodgson were featured in the Yahoo! Screen series Other Space in 2015, with Beaulieu voicing a robot companion of Hodgson's character, a burned-out spaceship engineer. Series creator Paul Feig, a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, said that he envisioned Hodgson and Beaulieu as their respective characters while writing them. Also in 2015, Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff began performing together as "The Mads", riffing movies at live screenings across the U.S. Reunions In 2008, to commemorate the show's 20th anniversary, the principal cast and writers from all eras of the show reunited for a panel discussion at the San Diego Comic-Con, which was hosted by actor-comedian Patton Oswalt (who would later go on to star in the revived series). The event was recorded and included as a bonus feature on the 20th Anniversary DVD release via Shout! Factory. Also that year, several original MST3K members (including Joel Hodgson, Trace Beaulieu and Frank Conniff) reunited to shoot a brief sketch to be included on the web-exclusive DVD release of The Giant Gila Monster. The new disc was added to Volume 10 | host and were dropped entirely once the show moved onto the Sci-Fi Channel. The final sketch of an episode typically ends on the Mads, with the lead Mad asking their lackey to "push the button" to end the transmission and transitioning to the credit sequence. After the credits, a humorous short clip from the featured film (or the accompanying short, on occasion) is replayed as a "stinger" to end the episode. In November 1993, a limited selection of episodes were repackaged into an hour-long show titled Mystery Science Theater Hour, meant to be better suited for off-network syndication. In these, the original episode was split into two parts of roughly 45 minutes each excluding commercials. New skits leading and ending each episode incorporated Mike Nelson portraying television host Jack Perkins in a parody of Perkins' Biography series in mock flattery of the MST3K episode being shown. Production history Concept Hodgson is credited for devising the show's concept. Prior to the show, Hodgson was an up-and-coming comedian from Minneapolis having moved to Los Angeles and made appearances on Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. He had been invited by Brandon Tartikoff to be on a NBC sitcom co-starring Michael J. Fox, but Hodgson felt the material was not funny and declined (the proposed sitcom went unrealized). He further became dissatisfied with the Hollywood attitudes when they tried to double their offer, acquiring what he called a "healthy disrespect" for the industry. He moved back to Minneapolis-St. Paul, taking a job in a T-shirt printing factory that allowed him to conceive of new comedy ideas while he was bored. One such idea was the basis of MST3K, a show to comment humorously on movies and that would also allow him to showcase his own prop comedy-style humor. Hodgson referred to these jokes as "riffs", based both on the idea of musical riffs as well as the idea of comedy riffs, a term he attributes to The Simpsonss writer Dana Gould. In terms of movie selection, Hodgson had recalled that his college roommate had a copy of The Golden Turkey Awards, and he had previously wondered why no one had made any program about these "adorable, weird movies" listed within it. Hodgson said that part of the idea for MST3K came from the illustration for the song "I've Seen That Movie Too" (drawn by Mike Ross) in the liner notes from Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road album, showing silhouettes of two people in a theater watching a movie. Hodgson also likened the show's setting to the idea of a pirate radio station broadcasting from space. Hodgson credits Silent Running, a 1972 science-fiction film directed by Douglas Trumbull, as being perhaps the biggest direct influence on the show's concept. The film is set in the future and centers on a human, Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), who is the last crew member of a spaceship containing Earth's last surviving forests. His remaining companions consist only of three robot drones. MST3K and the Joel Robinson character occasionally reflected Lowell's hippie-like nature. Hodgson wanted the feel of the show to appear homemade, and cited the example of a crude mountain prop used during the Saturday Night Live sketch "Night on Freak Mountain" that received a humorous reaction from the studio audience as the type of aesthetic he wanted for the show. Hodgson had made dozens of such robots from random parts before as art that he sold to friends and others, and knew he could incorporate that into the show. Both old movies and music inspired several of the show's character names as developed by Hodgson. The show's name came from the promotional phrase "Mystery Scientist" used by magician Harlan Tarbell and a play on the name of Sun Ra's band, the Myth Science Arkestra. The "3000" was added to spoof the common practice of adding "2000" to show and product names in light of then-upcoming 21st century, and Hodgson thought it would set his show apart to make it "3000". Dr. Forrester was named after the main character of The War of the Worlds. The Satellite of Love was named after the song of the same name by Lou Reed. Crow T. Robot was inspired by the song "Crow" from Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy, while Rocket Number 9's name was inspired by the original name of Sun Ra's album Interstellar Low Ways. The theater shots, the primary component of an episode, is taped in "Shadowrama". The "seats" were a black-painted foam core board sitting behind the seat (towards the camera) for the host, and stages for the Crow and Tom puppets. The human host wore black clothing while the robot puppets were painted black; the screen they watched was a white luma key screen as to create the appearance of silhouettes. The actors would follow the movie and the script through television monitors located in front of them, as to create the overall theater illusion. The "door sequence" was created to transition from host segments to the theater segments, which Hodgson took inspiration from the Mickey Mouse Club, noting that the commonality to the title credits of Get Smart were coincidental. In devising this sequence, this also led to Beaulieu creating the dogbone-like shape of the Satellite of Love with additional inspiration taken from the bone-to-ship transition in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hodgson had wanted to use a "motivated camera" for taping, a concept related to motivated lighting; in this mode, all the shots would appear to have been taken from an actual camera that was part of the scene to make the scene appear more realistic. This led to the creation of Cambot as a robot that the host would speak to during host segments or recording them while in the theater, and Rocket Number Nine to show footage outside of the Satellite of Love. The show's theme song, the "Love Theme from Mystery Science Theater 3000", was written by Hodgson and Weinstein, which helped to cement some of the broader narrative elements of the show, such as the Mads and Joel being part of an experiment. The song was composed by Charlie Erickson with help from Hodgson in the style of Devo, The Replacements, and The Rivieras (particularly their cover of the song "California Sun") and sung by Hodgson. Initial shows used foam letters to make the show's title, but they later created the spinning-moon logo out of a 2-foot (0.6m) diameter fiberglass ball, covered with foam insulation and the lettering cut from additional foam pieces. Hodgson felt they needed a logo with the rotating effect as opposed to a flat 2D image, and though they had envisioned a more detailed prop, with the letters being the tops of buildings on this moon, they had no time or budget for a project of that complexity and went with what they had. Musical numbers would also be used as part of the host segments, which Hodgson said came out naturally from the riffing process; they would find themselves at times singing along with the movie instead of just riffing at it, and took that to extend songs into the host segments. KTMA era (1988–1989) Hodgson approached Jim Mallon, at the time the production manager of KTMA, a low-budget local television station, with his idea of a show based on riffing on movies, using robots that were created out of common objects. Mallon agreed to help produce a pilot episode, and Hodgson hired on local area comedians J. Elvis Weinstein (initially going by Josh Weinstein but later changed to J. Elvis as to distinguish himself from Josh Weinstein, a well-known writer for The Simpsons) and Trace Beaulieu to develop the pilot show. By September 1988, Hodgson, Mallon, Weinstein, and Beaulieu shot a 30-minute pilot episode, using segments from the 1968 science-fiction film The Green Slime. The robots and the set were built by Hodgson in an all-nighter. Joel watched the movie by himself, and was aided during the host segments by his robots, Crow (Beaulieu), Beeper, and Gypsy (Weinstein). Hodgson used the narrative that his character named "Joel Hodgson" (not yet using his character name of Robinson) had built the Satellite of Love and launched himself into space. Camera work was by Kevin Murphy, who was employed by KTMA. Murphy also created the first doorway sequence and theater seat design. These initial episodes were recorded at the long since-defunct Paragon Cable studios and customer service center in Hopkins, Minnesota. On review, Hodgson found that of the robots, Beeper's design was not working well, and tried a quick modification by replacing its head with a toy gumball machine top, creating the basis of Tom Servo. Mallon met with KTMA station manager Donald O'Conner the next month and managed to get signed up for thirteen episodes. Show production was generally done on a 24-hour cycle, starting with Mallon offering a few films from KTMA's library for the writers to select from. Riffing in these episodes was ad-libbed during taping using notes made during preliminary viewings of the selected film. The show had some slight alterations from the pilot — the set was lit differently, the robots (now Crow, Servo and Gypsy) joined Joel in the theater, and a new doorway countdown sequence between the host and theater segments was shot. The puppeteers worked personalities into their robots: Crow (Beaulieu) was considered a robotic Groucho Marx, Tom Servo (Weinstein) as a "smarmy AM radio DJ", and Gypsy (Mallon) modeled after Mallon's mother who had a "heart of gold" but would become disoriented when confronted with a difficult task. The development of the show's theme song would lead to establishing elements for the show's ongoing premise, with Hodgson now portraying himself as the character Joel Robinson. Mystery Science Theater 3000 premiered on KTMA at 6:00 p.m. on Thanksgiving Day, November 24, 1988 with its first episode, Invaders from the Deep, followed by a second episode, Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars at 8:00 p.m. The choice of running the premiere on Thanksgiving was by happenstance, as the station felt the show was ready to go at that point, according to Hodgson. Initially, the show's response was unknown, until Mallon set up a phone line for viewers to call in. Response was so great that the initial run of 13 episodes was extended to 21, with the show running to May 1989. Hodgson and Mallon negotiated to secure the rights for the show for themselves, creating Best Brains, Inc., agreeing to split ownership of the idea equally. During this time a fan club was set up and the show held its first live show at Scott Hansen's Comedy Gallery in Minneapolis, to a crowd of over 600. Despite the show's success, the station's overall declining fortunes forced it to file for bankruptcy reorganization in July 1989. At the same time, HBO was looking to build a stable of shows for their upcoming Comedy Channel cable network. HBO approached Best Brains and requested a sample of their material. Hodgson and Mallon provided a seven-minute demo reel, which led to the network greenlighting MST3K as one of the first two shows picked up by the new network. Comedy Channel/Comedy Central era (1989–1996) The Comedy Channel offered Best Brains $35,000 per episode but allowed Best Brains to retain the show's rights. Best Brains was also able to keep production local to Minnesota instead of the network's desire to film in New York City or Los Angeles, as it would have cost four times more per episode, according to Hodgson. Best Brains established an office and warehouse space in Eden Prairie for filming. With an expanded but still limited budget, they were able to hire more writers, including Mike Nelson, Mary Jo Pehl, and Frank Conniff, and build more expansive sets and robot puppets. They created the characters of Dr. Forrester (Beaulieu) and Dr. Erhardt (Weinstein) and crafted the larger narrative of each episode being an "experiment" they test on Joel. The show began its national run shortly after the Comedy Channel went on the air in November 1989. MST3K was considered Comedy Channel's signature program, generating positive press about the show despite the limited availability of the cable channel nationwide. After the second season, The Comedy Channel and rival comedy cable network HA! merged to become CTV: The Comedy Network (later changed to Comedy Central). During this period, MST3K became the newly merged cable channel's signature series, expanding from 13 to 24 episodes a year. To take advantage of the show's status, Comedy Central ran "Turkey Day", a 30-hour marathon of MST3K episodes during Thanksgiving 1991. The name of the event was not only inspired by the traditional turkey meal served on Thanksgiving, but also by use of "Turkey" from The Golden Turkey Awards to represent bad movies. This tradition would be continued through the rest of the Comedy Central era. Though the show did not draw large audience numbers compared to other programming on Comedy Central, such as reruns of Saturday Night Live, the dedicated fans and attention kept the show on the network. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie was produced during the later half of the Comedy Central era and had a very limited theatrical release in 1996 through Universal Pictures and Gramercy Pictures. It featured Mike and the bots subjected to the film This Island Earth by Dr. Forrester. Though well received by critics and fans, the film was a financial disappointment due to its limited distribution. Writing and taping The cable network was able to provide a wider library of films for Best Brains to riff from. To ensure that they would be able to produce a funny episode, at least one member of the staff would watch the suggested films completely, generally assuring that the movie would be prime for jokes throughout. Conniff stated that he often would have to watch around twenty films in their entirety before selecting one to use for the show. In one specific case, the second-season episode with the 1969 film The Sidehackers, they had only skimmed the first part of the movie before making the decision to use it, and only later discovered that it contained a scene where a female character is brutally raped and murdered. They decided to stay committed to the film, but cut out the offending scene and had to explain the sudden absence of the affected character to the audience. After this, they carefully scrutinized entire films for other such offensive content, and once one was selected and assured the rights, committed to completing the episode with that film. Obtaining the rights was handled by the cable networks. Some licensing required buying film rights in packages, with the selected bad movies included in a catalog of otherwise good films, making the negotiations odd since the network was only interested in the bad film. Other times, the rights to the film were poorly documented, and the network would follow the chain of custody to locate the copyright owner as to secure broadcast rights. In contrast to the ad-libbing of riffs from KTMA, the riffs were scripted ahead of time by the writers. An average episode (approximately 90 minutes running time) would contain more than 600 such riffs, and some with upwards of 800 riffs. Riffs were developed with the entire writing staff watching the film together several times through, giving off-the-cuff quips and jokes as the film went along, or identifying where additional material would be helpful for the comedy. The best jokes were polished into the script for the show. Riffs were developed to keep in line with the characterization of Joel, Mike, and the 'bots. Further, the writers tried to maintain respect for the films and avoided making negative riffs about them, taking into consideration that Joel, Mike, and the 'bots were companions to the audience while watching the movie, and they did not want to come off sounding like jerks even if the negative riff would be funny. Hodgson stated that their goal in writing riffs is not to ridicule films as some have often mistaken, but to rather instead consider what they are doing as "a variety show built on the back of a movie". Production of an average episode of MST3K during the Comedy Central period took about five to nine days once the movie was selected and its rights secured. The first few days were generally used for watching the movie and scripting out the riffs and live action segments. The subsequent days were then generally used to start construction of any props or sets that would be needed for the live action segments while the writers honed the script. A full dress rehearsal would then be held, making sure the segments and props worked and fine tuning the script. The host segments would then be taped on one day, and the theater segments on the next. A final day was used to review the completed work and correct any major flaws they caught before considering the episode complete. Live scenes used only practical special effects, and there was minimal post-editing once taping was completed. Cast changes Weinstein left the show after the first Comedy Channel season, reportedly in disagreement with Hodgson about moving toward using scripted rather than ad-libbed jokes. Murphy replaced him as the voice of Tom Servo, portraying the 'bot as a cultured individual, while Dr. Erhardt was replaced with TV's Frank (Conniff). Hodgson decided to leave the series halfway through Season Five due to his dislike of being on camera and his disagreements with producer Mallon over creative control of the program. Hodgson also stated that Mallon's insistence on producing a feature film version of the show led to his departure, giving up his rights on the MST3K property to Mallon. Hodgson later told an interviewer: "If I had the presence of mind to try and work it out, I would rather have stayed. 'Cause I didn't want to go, it just seemed like I needed to." Though they held casting calls for a replacement for Hodgson on camera, the crew found that none of the potential actors really fit the role; instead, having reviewed a test run that Nelson had done with the 'bots, the crew agreed that having Nelson (who had already appeared in several guest roles on the show) replace Hodgson would be the least jarring approach. The replacement of Joel by Mike would lead to an oft-jokingly "Joel vs. Mike flame war" among fans, similar to the "Kirk vs. Picard" discussions in the Star Trek fandom. Conniff left the show after Season Six, looking to get into writing TV sitcoms in Hollywood. TV's Frank was soon replaced on the show by Dr. Forrester's mother, Pearl (Pehl). Cancellation By 1996, Comedy Central had started creating an identity for its network under new leadership of Doug Herzog, which would lead to successful shows like The Daily Show, Win Ben Stein's Money, South Park and Dr. Katz Professional Therapist leaving MST3K as an oddity on the network taking up limited program space. Herzog, though stating that MST3K "helped put the network on the map" and that its fans were "passionate", believed it was necessary to change things around due to the show's declining and lackluster ratings. The network cancelled MST3K after a six-episode seventh season. Sci-Fi Channel era (1997–1999) The show staff continued to operate for as long as they still had finances to work with. MST3Ks fan base staged a write-in campaign to keep the show alive. This effort led the Sci-Fi Channel, a subsidiary of USA Networks, to pick up the series. Rod Perth, then-president of programming for USA Networks, helped to bring the show to the Sci-Fi Channel, stating himself to be a huge fan of the show and believing that "the sci-fi genre took itself too seriously and that this show was a great way of lightening up our own presentation". Writing and production of the show remained relatively unchanged from the Comedy Central period. Before Season Eight commenced filming, Beaulieu opted to leave the show, feeling that anything creative that would be produced by Best Brains would belong to Mallon, and wanted to have more creative ownership himself. To replace Dr. Forrester, two new sidekicks to Pearl were introduced: Professor Bobo (Murphy) and the Observer a.k.a. "Brain Guy" (Corbett). In addition, Corbett took over Crow's voice and puppetry and Best Brains staffer Patrick Brantseg took over Gypsy in the middle of Season Eight. With this replacement, the series' entire original cast had been turned over. MST3K ran for three more seasons on the Sci-Fi Channel. During the Sci-Fi era, Best Brains found themselves more limited by the network: the pool of available films was smaller and they were required to use science fiction films (as per the network's name and programming focus), and the USA Network executives managing the show wanted to see a story arc and had more demands on how the show should be produced. Conflict between Best Brains and the network executives would eventually lead to the show's second cancellation. Peter Keepnews, writing for The New York Times, noted that the frequent cast changes, as well as the poorer selection of films that he felt were more boring than bizarre in their execution, had caused the show to lose its original appeal. Another campaign to save the show was mounted, including |
a much broader time frame (up to 30 years, compared to the current hits of a top-40 station) from which to draw their playlist and can thus play a greater variety of songs than a station bound to devote the majority of its spins to a limited list. The ideal "classic" station (of whatever format) finds the balance between playing listener favorites frequently enough to develop a base while at the same time cultivating a playlist broad enough not to breed contempt. Nevertheless, there seems to be a cottage industry of Internet stations specializing in specific forms of classic rock and oldies, particularly psychedelic rock and progressive rock. The oldies and classic rock formats have a strong niche market, but as the audience becomes older the station becomes less attractive to advertisers. Advertisers perceive older listeners as set in their brand choices and not as responsive to advertising as younger, more impulsive listeners. Oldies stations must occasionally change to more youthful music formats; as a result, the definition of what constitutes an "oldies" station has gradually changed over the years (and the phrase "oldies" itself is falling out of use except for the stations that still regularly play music from the 1960s and earlier). This is why many oldies stations, like WCBS-FM in New York City and WJMK in Chicago, have switched over to the younger-oriented Jack FM format in recent years—although WCBS-FM adopted a Classic Hits format on July 12, 2007, and the "Jack FM" format was moved to its HD2 subchannel. Unlike WCBS-FM's pre-JACK format which was centered on the 1955-1979 era, the post-JACK station was based on the 1964-1989 era because of the aging listener demographics of the original format. This preference for younger listeners caused the decline of the "Big Band" or "Standards" music formats that covered music from the 1930s to the 1950s. As the audience grew too old for advertisers, the radio stations that carried these formats saw a sharp loss of ratings and revenue. This left them with no choice but to adopt more youthful formats, though the Standards format (also known as the Great American Songbook from the series of albums produced by rocker Rod Stewart) has undergone something of an off-air revival, with artists such as Stewart, Tony Bennett and Queen Latifah putting their own interpretation on the music. During the mid-to-late-1990s, the "Mix" format—a loosely defined mixture of Top-40 and classic rock with something of an emphasis on adult contemporary music—began to appear across the country. While the format has no particular standard identity, most "mix" stations have rotations consisting largely of pop and rock music from the 1980s and 1990s (and often the 1970s), with some current material mixed in. In addition, stations devoted to the pop music of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s on their own have developed as the audiences that grew up with that music grew older and nostalgic for the sounds of their youth. The continued play of such songs on such stations has also exposed the music to younger generations that can take a renewed interest in the music, prolonging its shelf life beyond what conventional wisdom in the industry may suggest. The full service format is a more freeform variant of this type of format. Full-service stations will often mix the oldies, classic rock, classic hits, and adult standards music, occasionally with music found in formats such as beautiful music, adult contemporary, or classic country. On weekends, specialty or niche programs focusing on formats such as Celtic music, polka and Italian music (depending on the ethnicity of the area) are common. In addition to music, a limited amount of local talk programming is heard on most full-service stations. Full service tends to be heard primarily on rural stations. Classical, pop, easy-listening, jazz, dance These formats all have small but very loyal audiences in the largest markets. Most follow formats similar to the above (Top 40s, Freeform, AOR and Oldies), except with a different playlist. Public service stations following these formats tend to be "freeform" stations. Regional Mexican Regional Mexican is a Latin music radio format, typically including Banda, Conjunto, Corridos, Duranguense, Grupero, Huapango, Mariachi, New Mexico music, Norteña, Ranchera, and Tejano music. It is the most popular radio format targeting Hispanic Americans in the United States.[2] The large number of immigrants from Northern Mexico can lead to an emphasis upon Norteña on Regional Mexican radio stations,[1] though markets with larger Hispanic audiences can have multiple Regional Mexican stations, with variations in which region from which the music is taken and where it is popular. Easy Listening Easy listening and adult contemporary are related formats that play largely down-tempo pop music of various styles. The difference is mostly in the era and styles covered -- Easy Listening is mostly older music done in the style of standards from the early 20th century (typical artists include Johnny Mathis and Frank Sinatra) combined with Big Band music and more modern performers in the same style such as Céline Dion and Josh Groban, while Adult Contemporary focuses more on newer pop music from the 1970s on. An ancestor to the easy listening format is Beautiful Music, a now-rare format (though XM features one channel of it, called Sunny) focusing mostly on smooth jazz or classical arrangements of pop music and original compositions in a similar vein. Perhaps the best-known Adult Contemporary station currently in operation is WLTW in New York City, better known as 106.7 Lite FM. Jazz stations generally play either traditional jazz forms or smooth jazz. The jazz station, more than any other except the college station, is stereotyped as having a small listenership and a somewhat overly highbrow on-air personality, and many are college-run stations. California State University Long Beach sponsors KJAZZ 88.1, which has a fairly significant online listenership as well. Two very well known smooth jazz stations are WNUA in Chicago and 94.7 The Wave in Los Angeles, both of which were introduced in 1987, and still continue to enjoy tremendous success in the format today. Also, WUCF-FM in Orlando has been playing jazz music since 1978. Both traditional and smooth jazz stations have been in severe decline, both on commercial and noncommercial stations, since the 2000s, in part because of the formats' lower profitability compared to other formats (adult contemporary for commercial stations, NPR-driven news/talk for noncommercial ones). Blues programming is generally limited to niche programs on stations that primarily broadcast other formats. An exception to this is CIDG-FM, an all-blues station based in the Canadian city of Ottawa. Dance music is a niche, and so-called "rhythmic pop" stations have had a fierce but not always commercially sustainable following. There was a wide spectrum of disco-format radio stations during the late 1970s, but virtually all of them died out during the disco backlash; WXKS in Boston is one of the few notable survivors, now a Clear Channel Communications-owned top-40 station of considerable influence. Nevertheless, there are a large number of dance music stations available both on the internet and on satellite radio, mostly specializing in various forms of electronica. Both major US satellite radio services include disco stations. Alternative and modern rock Rock music has a long and honorable radio tradition going back to DJs like Wolfman Jack and Alan Freed, and as a result variations on rock radio are fairly common. The classic rock and oldies formats are discussed above; in addition to those, however, there are several genres of music radio devoted to different aspects of modern rock music. Alternative rock grew out of the grunge scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s and is particularly favored by college radio and adult album alternative stations; there is a strong focus on songwriters and bands with an outsider sound or a more sophisticated sound than the "three chord wonder" cliché. Meanwhile, other stations focus on heavy metal, punk rock, or the various post-punk and pop-influenced sounds known collectively as "modern rock". Narrow-interest rock stations are particularly common on the Internet and satellite radio scenes, broken down into genres such as punk, metal, classic rock, indie music, and the like. There is a general feeling among radio connoisseurs that rock radio is becoming badly watered down by big corporate ownership, leading to a considerable do-it-yourself spirit. Country While stereotyped as rural music, the Country music format is common and popular throughout the United States and in some other countries (particularly Canada and Australia, both of which share much of the same Anglo-Saxon and Celtic roots as the United States). Country has been a popular radio format since the early days of music radio, dating back to the early days of radio itself when barn dance radio programs were widely popular; however, the format was indeed originally a predominantly rural phenomenon, especially on AM radio. Decades worth of efforts at mainstreaming the format eventually paid off when country radio became widely popular among a large number of FM radio stations that signed on in the suburban United States in the 1980s and early 1990s. For most mainstream country stations, the emphasis is generally on current pop country, following the same process as top 40; the remaining music in a particular station's library generally uses music from the past fifteen years (shorter for "hot country" or "new country" stations), with the exact music used varying depending on the station and the style of music the listener wants to hear. Classic country is a variant of the country music format; it is effectively the country music analog to oldies. Classic country is generally preserved in the rural AM stations that country music aired on before its mainstream expansion. Depending on the music mix, it can play either relatively recent classic country tunes from the 1970s to the 1990s (generally more favorable to advertisers) or can span all the way back to the 1920s, thus playing music far older than almost any other radio format available. Due to increasing similarities between country music and some variants of rock music (such as southern rock, country rock and heartland rock), there have been efforts at combining country and rock formats together, most of which have been unsuccessful. An alternative country format is Americana, which eschews the mainstream pop country songs in favor of classic-era, alt country and cult musicians. Like the music it plays, these stations can develop strong cult followings and listener loyalty, but they are also less commercially successful than pop country stations. Urban (hip-hop/R&B) The explosive rise in popularity during the 1980s of rap music has led to a large number of radio stations specializing in rap/hip-hop and R&B music (with the exception of classic R&B such as Motown, which is as often as not the province of Oldies stations). This format is popular among all ethnic groups and social classes. Dance music radio Dance music radio focuses on live DJ sets and hit singles from genres of techno, house, electro, drum and bass, UK garage and big beat. While some stations play all kinds of electronic dance music, others (mainly pirate radio stations) focus on particular genres. This format is popular in England, Germany, Netherlands and some other countries, but less so in the United States (where dance is a niche format often exclusive to internet radio stations). However, the number of U.S. stations airing such content has grown; five terrestrial radio stations in the U.S. with a purely dance-oriented format (one of which airing it part-time during the night and early-morning hours) report their airplay to the Billboard Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart, while top 40 and rhythmic stations may also air EDM songs that have crossed over onto pop-oriented charts due to the recent growth in mainstream popularity of dance music. Christian and gospel music Christian and gospel radio stations usually plays the popular Contemporary Christian music, others playing Gospel music and/or Praise and worship. K-Love and Air1 are among the most popular Christian radio stations. In the United States, Christian music stations (especially ostensibly noncommercial ones) often rely heavily on brokered programming: a Christian music station typically only carries music for part of the day, with the rest of the day filled by evangelists who pay to place recordings of their sermons on the station. Public, commercial and community radio Public radio formats Some music radio is broadcast by public service organizations, such as National Public Radio or the BBC. In the United States, public radio is typically confined to three formats: news/talk, classical music, or jazz, the last of which is declining rapidly as of the late 2000s. In other countries, where national broadcasters hold significantly more clout, formats can vary more widely. Community radio Community radio often relies heavily on the music format because it is relatively cheap and generally makes for easy listening. Commercial radio Commercial stations charge advertisers for the estimated number of listeners. The larger the audience, the higher the stations' rate card can be for commercial advertising. Commercial stations program the format of the station to gain as large a slice of the demographic audience as possible. A station's value is usually measured as a percentage of market share in a market of a certain size. The measurement in U.S. markets has historically been by Arbitron, a commercial statistical service that uses listener diaries. Arbitron diaries were historically collected on Thursdays, and for this reason, most radio stations have run special promotions on Thursdays, hoping to persuade last-minute Arbitron diarists to give them a larger market-share. Stations are contractually prohibited from mentioning Arbitron on the air. Market share is not always a consideration, because not all radio stations are commercial. Public radio is funded by government and private donors. Since most public broadcasting operations don't have to make a profit, no commercials are necessary. (In fact, because most public broadcasting stations operate under noncommercial licenses from their country's broadcasting regulator, they may not be allowed to sell advertising at all.) Underwriting spots, which mention the name of a sponsor and some information but cannot include “calls to action” attempting to convince the listener to patronize the sponsor, may be allowed. Also, satellite radio either charges subscribers or is operated by a public broadcasting service. Therefore, satellite radio rarely carries commercials or tries to raise money from donors. The lack of commercial interruptions in satellite radio is an important advantage. Often the only breaks in a satellite music station's programming are for station identification and DJ introductions. Internet radio stations exist that follow all of these plans. Much early commercial radio was completely freeform; this changed drastically with the payola scandals of the 1950s. As a result, DJs seldom have complete programming freedom. Occasionally a special situation or highly respected, long established personality is given such freedom. Most programming is done by the program director. Program directors may work for the station or at a central location run by a corporate network. The DJ's function is generally reduced to introducing and playing songs. Many stations target younger listeners, because advertisers believe that advertising can change a younger person's product choice. Older people are thought to be less easy to change. Music radio has several possible arrangements. Originally, it had blocks of sponsored airtime that played music from a live orchestra. In the 1930s, phonograph records, especially the single, let a disc jockey introduce individual songs, or introduce blocks of songs. Since then, the program has been arranged so that commercials are followed by the content that is most valuable to the audience. Programming is different for non-traditional broadcasting. The Jack FM format eliminates DJs entirely, as do many internet radio stations. The music is simply played. If it is announced, it is by RDS (for FM broadcast) or ID3 tags (for Internet broadcast). Satellite radio usually uses DJs, but their programming blocks are longer and not distinguished much by the time of day. In addition, receivers usually display song titles, so announcing them is not needed. Internet and satellite broadcasting are not considered public media, so treaties and statutes concerning obscenity, transmission of ciphers and public order do not apply to those formats. So, satellite and internet radio are free to provide sexually explicit, coarse and political material. Typical providers include Playboy Radio, uncensored rap and hard rock | by listening to WWV or WWVH (see atomic clock). These segments are less valued by the most targeted market, young people, so many commercial stations shorten or omit these segments in favor of music. While most music stations that offer news reports simply "tear and read" news items (from the newswires or the Internet), larger stations (generally those affiliated with news/talk stations) may employ an editor to rewrite headlines, and provide summaries of local news. Summaries fit more news in less air-time. Some stations share news collection with TV or newspapers in the same media conglomerate. An emerging trend is to use the radio station's web site to provide in-depth coverage of news and advertisers headlined on the air. Many stations contract with agencies such as Smartraveler and AccuWeather for their weather and traffic reports instead of using in-house staff. Fewer radio stations (except on medium and major market, depending on daypart) maintain a call-in telephone line for promotions and gags, or to take record requests. DJs of commercial stations do not generally answer the phone and edit the call during music plays in non-major markets, as the programming is either delivered via satellite, or voice-tracked using a computer. More and more stations take requests by e-mail and online chat only. The value of a station's advertising is set by the number, age and wealth of its listeners. Arbitron, a commercial statistical service, historically used listener diaries to statistically measure the number of listeners. Arbitron diaries were collected on Thursdays, and for this reason, most radio stations have run special promotions on Thursdays, hoping to persuade last-minute Arbitron diarists to give them a larger market-share. Arbitron contractually prevents mention of its name on the air. Promotions are the on-air equivalent of lotteries for listeners. Promotional budgets usually run about $1 per listener per year. In a large market, a successful radio station can pay a full-time director of promotions, and run several lotteries per month of vacations, automobiles and other prizes. Lottery items are often bartered from advertisers, allowing both companies to charge full prices at wholesale costs. For example, cruising companies often have unused capacity, and when given the choice, prefer to pay their bills by bartering cruise vacations. Since the ship will sail in any case, bartered vacations cost the cruise company little or nothing. The promotion itself advertises the company providing the prize. The FCC has defined a lottery as “any game, contest or promotion that combines the elements of prize, chance and consideration.” Programming by time Most music stations have DJs who play music from a playlist determined by the program director, arranged by blocks of time. Though practices differ by region and format, what follows is a typical arrangement in a North American urban commercial radio station. The first block of the day is the "morning drive time" block in the early morning. Arbitron defines this block between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., though it can begin as early as 5 a.m. (though usually not later than 6), and end as early as 9 a.m. or as late as 11 a.m. This block usually includes news bulletins and traffic and weather advisories for commuters, as well as light comedy from the morning DJ team (many shock jocks started as or still work on drive-time radio). Some stations emphasize music, and reduce gags and call-ins in this period. The midday block (defined by Arbitron as 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., though often extended later to about 5 p.m.) is mostly music, and in many places is at least partially voicetracked from another market. For a period around noon a station may play nonstop music or go to an all-request format for people eating lunch. This block is often occupied by a "no-repeat workday;" stations that offer this feature usually target captive audiences such as retail workers, who have to listen to the station for long periods of time and can become irritated by repetition. In the early evening, or "afternoon drive" (defined by Arbitron as 3 to 7 p.m.), the evening rush-hour programming resembles the midday programming, but adds traffic and weather advisories for commuters. Some stations insert a short snippet of stand-up comedy ("5 O'Clock Funnies") around 5 o'clock when commuters leave work, or play specifically selected "car tunes" ideal for listening while driving. The evening block (defined by Arbitron as 7 p.m. to midnight), if present, returns to music. Syndicated programs such as Tom Kent or Delilah are popular in this shift. The overnight programming, from midnight to the beginning of drive time, is generally low-key music with quiet, if any, announcing. Some stations play documentaries or even infomercials, while some others play syndicated or voicetracked DJs. Complete automation, with no jock, is very common in this day part. It is not uncommon to play more adventurous selections during late night programming blocks, since late night is generally not considered significant for ratings, and are not subject to federal restrictions as stringently as during the daytime. Stations are permitted to sign off during this time; in areas where AM radio is still significant (especially in the United States), local stations may be required to either sign off or cut to low-power to protect clear-channel stations. Weekends, especially Sundays, often carry different programming. The countdown show, ranking the top songs of the previous week, has been a staple of weekend radio programming since 1970; current hosts of countdown shows in various formats include Rick Dees, Ryan Seacrest, Jeff Foxworthy, Kix Brooks, Bob Kingsley, Crook & Chase, Randy Jackson, Walt Love, Al Gross, Dick Bartley, and (via reruns) Casey Kasem. Other types of weekend programming include niche programming, retrospective shows and world music such as the Putumayo World Music Hour. Stations may carry shows with different genres of music such as blues or jazz. Community affairs and religious programming is often on Sunday mornings, generally one of the least listened-to periods of the week. In addition, weekend evenings are particularly specialized; a dance station might have a sponsored dance party at a local club, or a classical station may play an opera. Saturday nights are also similar to this; request shows, both local and national (e.g. Dick Bartley), are very popular on Saturday night. The longest running radio program in the country, the Grand Ole Opry, has aired on Saturday night since its inception in 1925. Many music stations in the United States perform news and timechecks only sparingly, preferring to put more music on the air. News is often restricted to the talk-heavy commuting hours, though weather updates are still very common throughout the day, even on these stations. ABC FM News is an example of an American news network that is designed for music radio stations. The BBC and ABC take a different approach, with all of its stations giving news updates (BBC Radio 1Xtra produces its own news segments under the name TX.) Music formats Some well-known music-radio formats are Top 40, Freeform Rock and AOR (Album Oriented Rock). It turns out that most other stations (such as Rhythm & Blues) use a variation of one of these formats with a different playlist. The way stations advertise themselves is not standardized. Some critical interpretation is needed to recognize classic formulas in the midst of the commercial glitz. See List of music radio formats for further details, and note that there is a great deal of format evolution (or, to borrow a television term, channel drift) as music tastes and commercial conditions change. For example, the Beautiful music format that developed into today's Easy listening and Soft rock formats is nearly extinct due to a lack of interest from younger generations, whereas classic rock has become popular over the last 20 years or so and Jack FM has arisen only since 2000 or so. The most popular format in the U.S. is country music, but rock music sells the most. Top 40 The original formulaic radio format was Top 40 music, now known within the industry as contemporary hit radio or CHR. In this radio format, disc-jockeys would select one of a set of the forty best-selling singles (usually in a rack) as rated by Billboard magazine or from the station's own chart of the local top selling songs. In general, the more aggressive "Top 40" stations could sometimes be better described as "Top 20" stations. They would aggressively skirt listener boredom to play only the most popular singles. Top 40 radio would punctuate the music with jingles, promotions, gags, call-ins, and requests, brief news, time and weather announcements and most importantly, advertising. The distinguishing mark of a traditional top-40 station was the use of a hyperexcited disc-jockey, and high tempo jingles. The format was invented in the US and today can be heard worldwide. Todd Storz and Gordon McLendon invented Top 40 radio. Bill Drake and Rick Sklar have had a lasting modern influence. Variants and hybrids include the freeform-like Jack FM (mentioned below under Freeform Rock) and the "Mix" formats mentioned below under Oldies. Top 40 music is heavily criticized by some music fans as being repetitive and of low quality, and is almost exclusively dominated by large media conglomerates such as iHeartMedia and CBS Corporation. Top 40 tends to be underrepresented on the Internet, being mostly the domain of commercial broadcasters such as Virgin Radio UK. Some of the most famous Top 40 stations have been Musicradio 77 WABC/New York City, Boss Radio 93 KHJ/Los Angeles, The Big 89 WLS/Chicago, 1050 CHUM/Toronto, Famous 56 WFIL/ Philadelphia, and The Big 68 WRKO/Boston. Today, there are popular Top 40 stations such as WHTZ-Z100/New York City, 102.7 KIIS-FM/, and KAMP-97.1 AMP Radio/ in Los Angeles, and Jovem Pan in Brazil Freeform and progressive rock A later development was freeform radio, later commercially developed as progressive rock radio, and still later even more commercially developed as AOR (Album-Oriented Rock), in which selections from an album would be played together, with an appropriate introduction. Traditional free-form stations prided themselves on offering their disc jockeys freedom to play significant music and make significant social commentary and humor. This approach developed commercial problems because disc jockeys attracted to this freedom often had tastes substantially different from the audience, and lost audience share. Also, freeform stations could lack predictability, and listeners' loyalty could then be put at risk. Progressive rock radio (not to be confused with the progressive rock music genre) was freeform in style but constrained so that some kind of rock music was what was always or almost always played. Responsible jocks would realize their responsibility to the audience to produce a pleasant show, and try to keep the station sound predictable by listening to other jocks, and repeating some of their music selections. WNEW-FM in New York during the 1970s exemplified this approach to progressive rock radio. At their best, free-form stations have never been equaled for their degree of social activism, programmatic freedom, and listener involvement. However, to succeed, the approach requires genius jocks, totally in-tune with their audience, who are also committed to the commercial success of the radio station. This is a rare combination of traits. Even if such people are available, they often command extremely high salaries. However, this may be an effective approach for a new station, if talented jocks can be recruited and motivated at low salaries. Freeform radio is particularly popular as a college radio format; offshoots include the recent (and somewhat controversial, due to its lack of on-air personalities) eclectic-pop format known as variety hits, which plays a wide assortment of mostly top-40 music from a span of several decades; and podcast radio, a mostly talk format pioneered by Infinity Broadcasting's KYOU station in California and Adam Curry's Podcast show on Sirius Satellite Radio. AOR (album-oriented rock) AOR (album-oriented rock) developed as a commercial compromise between top-forties-style formulas and progressive rock radio/freeform. A program director or music consultant would select some set of music "standards" and require the playlist to be followed, perhaps in an order selected by the jock. The jock would still introduce each selection, but the jock would have available a scripted introduction to use if he was not personally familiar with a particular piece of music and its artist. Obviously a computer helps a lot in this process. A useful, relatively safe compromise with the artistic freedom of the jocks is that a few times each hour, usually in the least commercially valuable slots of the hour, the disc-jockey can highlight new tracks that he or she thinks might interest the audience. The audience is encouraged to comment on the new tracks, allowing the station to track audience tastes. The freedom to introduce new artists can help a station develop its library. Significant AOR offshoots include classic rock and adult album alternative. Oldies, standards, and classic rock Classic rock or oldies formats have been described as having the weakness of not playing new artists. This is true in a creative sense, but not a commercial one. Conventional wisdom in the radio industry is that stations will not get good ratings or revenue if they frequently play songs unfamiliar to their audience. This is why "Top 40" stations played only the biggest hits and why oldies and classic rock formats do the same for the eras they cover. An inherent danger to this philosophy is that closed-campus work environments, such as retail, foster an environment where listeners hear the station continuously for several hours, multiple days in a row, which can become unpleasant after a short amount of time. Oldies and related formats do have an inherent advantage in that they have a much broader time frame (up to 30 years, compared to the current hits of a top-40 station) from which to draw their playlist and can thus play a greater variety of songs than a station bound to devote the majority of its spins to a limited list. The ideal "classic" station (of whatever format) finds the balance between playing listener favorites frequently enough to develop a base while at the same time cultivating a playlist broad enough not to breed contempt. Nevertheless, there seems to be a cottage industry of Internet stations specializing in specific forms of classic rock and oldies, particularly psychedelic rock and progressive rock. The oldies and classic rock formats have a strong niche market, but as the audience becomes older the station becomes less attractive to advertisers. Advertisers perceive older listeners as set in their brand choices and not as responsive to advertising as younger, more impulsive listeners. Oldies stations must occasionally change to more youthful music formats; as a result, the definition of what constitutes an "oldies" station has gradually changed over the years (and the phrase "oldies" itself is falling out of use except for the stations that still regularly play music from the 1960s and earlier). This is why many oldies stations, like WCBS-FM in New York City and WJMK in Chicago, have switched over to the younger-oriented Jack FM format in recent years—although WCBS-FM adopted a Classic Hits format on July 12, 2007, and the "Jack FM" format was moved to its HD2 subchannel. Unlike WCBS-FM's pre-JACK format which was centered on the 1955-1979 era, the post-JACK station was based on the 1964-1989 era because of the aging listener demographics of the original format. This preference for younger listeners caused the decline of the "Big Band" or "Standards" music formats that covered music from the 1930s to the 1950s. As the audience grew too |
software for a one-time fee, although an increasing trend is for MMORPGs to work using pre-existing "thin" clients, such as a web browser. Depending on the number of players and the system architecture, an MMORPG might be run on multiple separate servers, each representing an independent world, where players from one server cannot interact with those from another; World of Warcraft is a prominent example, with each separate server housing several thousand players. In many MMORPGs the number of players in one world is often limited to around a few thousand, but a notable example of the opposite is EVE Online, which accommodates several hundred thousand players on the same server, with over 60,000 playing simultaneously (June 2010) at certain times. Some games allow characters to appear on any world, but not simultaneously (such as Seal Online: Evolution or Kolossium competition in Dofus); others limit each character to the world in which it was created. World of Warcraft has experimented with "cross-realm" (i.e. cross-server) interaction in player vs player "battlegrounds", using server clusters or "battlegroups" to co-ordinate players looking to participate in structured player vs player content such as the Warsong Gulch or Alterac Valley battlegrounds. Additionally, patch 3.3, released on December 8, 2009, introduced a cross-realm "looking for group" system to help players form groups for instanced content (though not for open-world questing) from a larger pool of characters than their home server can necessarily provide. Business models MMORPGs today use a wide range of business models, from free of charge, free with microtransactions, advertise funded, to various kinds of payment plans. Some MMORPGs require payment or a monthly subscription to play. By definition, "massively multiplayer" games are always online, and most require some sort of continuous revenue (such as monthly subscriptions and advertisements) for maintenance and development purposes. Some games, such as Guild Wars, have disposed of the 'monthly fee' model entirely, and recover costs directly through sales of the software and associated expansion packs. Still others adopt a micropayment model where the core content is free, but players are given the option to purchase additional content, such as equipment, aesthetic items, or pets. Games that make use of this model often have originated in Korea, such as Flyff and MapleStory. This business model is alternately called "pay for perks" or "freemium", and games using it often describe themselves with the term "free-to-play". Free-to-play (F2P) means that there is no cost to purchase the software and there is no subscription charge. Variably applies to traditionally bought and forever available games (see Buy-to-play below). Most newer MMOs that fall under this category now includes microtransactions however, which causes them to overlap with the Freemium model. Freemium (a portmanteau of free-to-play and premium) means that the majority or all of the game's content is available for free but players can pay for extra content, character customization, added perks or faster advancement into the game via microtransactions. Freemium thus overlaps with both the free-to-play and pay-to-play models. Buy-to-play (B2P) means that the MMO can only be played by purchasing the game, but there is no subsequent subscription fee for playing the game. These games may or may not include additional microtransactions, or may sell additional content in the form of expansions instead of asking for an ongoing subscription fee. Pay-to-play (P2P) means that the MMO requires a monthly subscription fee or other ongoing fee in order to continue playing the game. It may also require an up-front purchase of the game in addition to the monthly subscription fee, though many of these up-front purchases include a month of game time. This was once the most common way for MMOs to finance themselves, but has fallen out of favor in recent years as an increasing number of games have switched to other business models due to difficulty in retaining a stable playerbase. History MMORPG is a term coined by Richard Garriott to refer to massive multiplayer online role-playing games and their social communities. Previous to this and related coinages, these games were generally called graphical MUDs; the history of MMORPGs traces back directly through the MUD genre. Through this connection, MMORPGs can be seen to have roots in the earliest multi-user games such as Mazewar (1974) and MUD1 (1978). 1985 saw the release of a roguelike (pseudo-graphical) MUD called Island of Kesmai on CompuServe and Lucasfilm's graphical MUD Habitat. The first fully graphical multi-user RPG was Neverwinter Nights, which was delivered through America Online in 1991 and was personally championed by AOL President Steve Case. Other early proprietary graphical online RPGs include three on The Sierra Network: The Shadow of Yserbius in 1992, The Fates of Twinion in 1993, and The Ruins of Cawdor in 1995. Another milestone came in 1995 as NSFNET restrictions were lifted, opening the Internet up for game developers, which allowed for the first truly "massively"-scoped titles. Finally, MMORPGs as defined today began with Meridian 59 in 1996, innovative both in its scope and in offering first-person 3D graphics, with The Realm Online appearing nearly simultaneously. Ultima Online, released in 1997, is often credited with first popularizing the genre, though more mainstream attention was garnered by 1999's EverQuest and Asheron's Call in the West and 1996's Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds in South Korea. The financial success of these early titles has ensured competition in the genre since that time. MMORPG titles now exist on consoles and in new settings. As of 2008, the market for MMORPGs has Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft dominating as the largest MMORPG, alongside other titles such as Final Fantasy XIV and Guild Wars 2, though an additional market exists for free-to-play MMORPGs, which are supported by advertising and purchases of in-game items. This free-to-play model is particularly common in South Korea such as MapleStory, Rohan: Blood Feud, Atlantica Online and Lost Ark. Also, there are some free-to-play games, such as RuneScape and Tibia, where the game is free, but one would have to pay monthly to play the game with more features. Guild Wars and its sequel avoid some degree of competition with other MMORPGs by only requiring the initial purchase of the game to play. Development The cost of developing a competitive commercial MMORPG title often exceeded $10 million in 2003. These projects require multiple disciplines within game design and development such as 3D modeling, 2D art, animation, user interfaces, client/server engineering, database architecture, and network infrastructure. The front-end (or client) component of a commercial, modern MMORPG features 3D graphics. As with other modern 3D games, the front-end requires expertise with implementing 3D engines, real-time shader techniques and physics simulation. The actual visual content (areas, creatures, characters, weapons, spaceships and so forth) is developed by artists who typically begin with two-dimensional concept art, and later convert these concepts into animated 3D scenes, models and texture maps. Developing an MMOG server requires expertise with client/server architecture, network protocols, security, and database design. MMORPGs include reliable systems for a number of vital tasks. The server must be able to handle and verify a large number of connections, prevent cheating, and apply changes (bug fixes or added content) to the game. A system for recording the games data at regular intervals, without stopping the game, is also important. Maintenance requires sufficient servers and bandwidth, and a dedicated support staff. Insufficient resources for maintenance lead to lag and frustration for the players, and can severely damage the reputation of a game, especially at launch. Care must also be taken to ensure that player population remains at an acceptable level by adding or removing servers. Peer-to-peer MMORPGs could theoretically work cheaply and efficiently in regulating server load, but practical issues such as asymmetrical network bandwidth, CPU-hungry rendering engines, unreliability of individual nodes, and inherent lack of security (opening fertile new grounds for cheating) can make them a difficult proposition. The hosted infrastructure for a commercial-grade MMORPG requires the deployment of hundreds (or even thousands) of servers. Developing an affordable infrastructure for an online game requires developers to scale large numbers of players with less hardware and network investment. In addition, the development team will need to have expertise with the fundamentals of game design: world-building, lore and game mechanics, as well as what makes games fun. Non-corporate development Though the vast majority of MMORPGs are produced by companies, many small teams of programmers and artists have contributed to the genre. As shown above, the average MMORPG development project requires enormous investments of time and money, and running the game can be a long-term commitment. As a result, non-corporate (or independent, or "indie") development of MMORPGs is less common compared to other genres. Still, many independent MMORPGs do exist, representing a wide spectrum of genres, gameplay types, and revenue systems. Some independent MMORPG projects are completely open source, while others feature proprietary content made with an open-source game engine. The WorldForge project has been active since 1998 and formed a community of independent developers who are working on creating framework for a number of open-source MMORPGs. The Multiverse Foundation has also created a platform specifically for independent MMOG developers. Trends As there are a number of wildly different titles within the genre, and since the genre develops so rapidly, it is difficult to definitively state that the genre is heading in one direction or another. Still, there are a few obvious developments. One of these developments is the raid group quest, or "raid", which is an adventure designed for large groups of players (often twenty or more). Instance dungeons Instance dungeons, sometimes shortened to "instances", are game areas that are "copied" for individual players or groups, which keeps those in the instance separated from the rest of the game world. This reduces competition, and also reducing the amount of data that needs to be sent to and from the server, reducing lag. The Realm Online was the first MMORPG to begin to use a rudimentary form of this technique and Anarchy Online would develop it further, using instances as a key element of gameplay. Since then, instancing has become increasingly common. The "raids", as mentioned above, often involve instance dungeons. Examples of games which feature instances are World of Warcraft, The Lord of the Rings Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Aion, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars, Rift, RuneScape, Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and DC Universe Online. Player-created content Increased amounts of "player-created content" is another trend. Use of licenses The use of intellectual property licensing common in other video game genres has also appeared in MMORPGs. 2007 saw the release of The Lord of the Rings Online, based on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Other licensed MMORPGs include The Matrix Online, based on the Matrix trilogy of films, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, based on Games Workshop's table top game, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars The Old Republic, Champions Online and Age of Conan. Additionally, several licenses from television have been optioned for MMORPGs, for example Star Trek Online and Stargate Worlds (which was later canceled). Console-based MMORPGs The first console-based MMORPG was Phantasy Star Online for the Sega Dreamcast. The first console-based open-world MMORPG was Final Fantasy XI for the PlayStation 2. EverQuest Online Adventures, also on the PlayStation 2, was the first console MMORPG in North America. Although console-based MMORPGs are considered more difficult to produce, the platform is gaining more attention. Browser-based MMORPGs With the popularization of Facebook and microtransactions has come a new wave of Flash and HTML5 based MMORPGs that use the free to play model. They require no download outside of a browser and usually have heavily integrated social media sharing features. Smartphone-based MMORPGs Smartphones with their GPS capabilities (amongst others) enable augmented reality in games such as Ingress and Pokémon Go. The games are enhanced by location and distance based tracking, bench marking goals or facilitating trade between players. In society and culture Psychological effects Since the interactions between MMORPG players are real, even if the environments are virtual, psychologists and sociologists are able to use MMORPGs as tools for academic research. Sherry Turkle has found that many people have expanded their emotional range by exploring the many different roles (including gender identities) that MMORPGs allow a person to explore. Nick Yee has surveyed more than 35,000 MMORPG players over the past several years, focusing on psychological and sociological aspects of these games. Recent findings included that 15% of players become a guild-leader at one time or another, but most generally find the job tough and thankless; and that players spend a considerable amount of time (often a third of their total time investment) doing things that are external to gameplay but part of the metagame. Many players report that the emotions they feel while playing an MMORPG are very strong, to the extent that 8.7% of male and 23.2% of female players in a statistical study have had an online wedding. Other researchers have found that the enjoyment of a game is directly related to the social organization of a game, ranging from brief encounters between players to highly organized play in structured groups. In a study by Zaheer Hussain and Mark D. Griffiths, it was found that just over one in five gamers (21%) said they preferred socializing online to offline. Significantly more male gamers than female gamers said that they found it easier to converse online than offline. It was also found | genre, and since the genre develops so rapidly, it is difficult to definitively state that the genre is heading in one direction or another. Still, there are a few obvious developments. One of these developments is the raid group quest, or "raid", which is an adventure designed for large groups of players (often twenty or more). Instance dungeons Instance dungeons, sometimes shortened to "instances", are game areas that are "copied" for individual players or groups, which keeps those in the instance separated from the rest of the game world. This reduces competition, and also reducing the amount of data that needs to be sent to and from the server, reducing lag. The Realm Online was the first MMORPG to begin to use a rudimentary form of this technique and Anarchy Online would develop it further, using instances as a key element of gameplay. Since then, instancing has become increasingly common. The "raids", as mentioned above, often involve instance dungeons. Examples of games which feature instances are World of Warcraft, The Lord of the Rings Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Aion, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars, Rift, RuneScape, Star Trek Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and DC Universe Online. Player-created content Increased amounts of "player-created content" is another trend. Use of licenses The use of intellectual property licensing common in other video game genres has also appeared in MMORPGs. 2007 saw the release of The Lord of the Rings Online, based on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. Other licensed MMORPGs include The Matrix Online, based on the Matrix trilogy of films, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, based on Games Workshop's table top game, Star Wars Galaxies, Star Wars The Old Republic, Champions Online and Age of Conan. Additionally, several licenses from television have been optioned for MMORPGs, for example Star Trek Online and Stargate Worlds (which was later canceled). Console-based MMORPGs The first console-based MMORPG was Phantasy Star Online for the Sega Dreamcast. The first console-based open-world MMORPG was Final Fantasy XI for the PlayStation 2. EverQuest Online Adventures, also on the PlayStation 2, was the first console MMORPG in North America. Although console-based MMORPGs are considered more difficult to produce, the platform is gaining more attention. Browser-based MMORPGs With the popularization of Facebook and microtransactions has come a new wave of Flash and HTML5 based MMORPGs that use the free to play model. They require no download outside of a browser and usually have heavily integrated social media sharing features. Smartphone-based MMORPGs Smartphones with their GPS capabilities (amongst others) enable augmented reality in games such as Ingress and Pokémon Go. The games are enhanced by location and distance based tracking, bench marking goals or facilitating trade between players. In society and culture Psychological effects Since the interactions between MMORPG players are real, even if the environments are virtual, psychologists and sociologists are able to use MMORPGs as tools for academic research. Sherry Turkle has found that many people have expanded their emotional range by exploring the many different roles (including gender identities) that MMORPGs allow a person to explore. Nick Yee has surveyed more than 35,000 MMORPG players over the past several years, focusing on psychological and sociological aspects of these games. Recent findings included that 15% of players become a guild-leader at one time or another, but most generally find the job tough and thankless; and that players spend a considerable amount of time (often a third of their total time investment) doing things that are external to gameplay but part of the metagame. Many players report that the emotions they feel while playing an MMORPG are very strong, to the extent that 8.7% of male and 23.2% of female players in a statistical study have had an online wedding. Other researchers have found that the enjoyment of a game is directly related to the social organization of a game, ranging from brief encounters between players to highly organized play in structured groups. In a study by Zaheer Hussain and Mark D. Griffiths, it was found that just over one in five gamers (21%) said they preferred socializing online to offline. Significantly more male gamers than female gamers said that they found it easier to converse online than offline. It was also found that 57% of gamers had created a character of the opposite gender, and it is suggested that the online female persona has a number of positive social attributes. A German fMRT-study conducted by researchers of the Central Institute of Mental Health points towards impairments in social, emotional and physical aspects of the self-concept and a higher degree in avatar identification in addicted MMORPG players, compared to non-addicted and naive (nonexperienced) people. These findings generally support Davis' cognitive behavioral model of Internet addiction, which postulates that dysfunctional self-related cognitions represent central factors contributing towards the development and maintenance of MMORPG addiction. The high degree of avatar identification found by Leménager et al. in the addicted group of this study indicates that MMORPG playing may represent an attempt to compensate for impairments in self-concept. Psychotherapeutic interventions should therefore focus on the development of coping strategies for real-life situations in which addicted players tend to experience themselves as incompetent and inferior. Richard Bartle, author of Designing Virtual Worlds, classified multiplayer RPG-players into four primary psychological groups. His classifications were then expanded upon by Erwin Andreasen, who developed the concept into the thirty-question Bartle Test that helps players determine which category they are associated with. With over 650,000 test responses as of 2011, this is perhaps the largest ongoing survey of multiplayer game players. Based on Bartle and Yee's research, Jon Radoff has published an updated model of player motivation that focuses on immersion, competition, cooperation and achievement. These elements may be found not only in MMORPGs, but many other types of games and within the emerging field of gamification. There has been numerous discussions and evaluations by various scholarly institutions regarding the long term effects of video game overuse. Many news agencies have criticized video games as promoting violent tendencies in its player base and encouraging anti-social behaviors. Ultimately this would culminate in the World Health Organization classifying the overuse of video games as "Technological Addiction" in May 2019. Disease research In World of Warcraft, a temporary design glitch attracted the attention of psychologists and epidemiologists across North America, when the "Corrupted Blood" disease of a monster began to spread unintentionally—and uncontrollably—into the wider game world. The Centers for Disease Control intended to use the incident as a research model to chart both the progression of a disease, and the potential human response to large-scale epidemic infection. However, due to Blizzard Entertainments failure to keep statistical records of the event, the 2005 Corrupted Blood Outbreak would ultimately fail to produce any results. Nevertheless, the CDC has continued to express interest in the use of MMORPGs for disease research. Education It has been suggested by the Springer University in Germany that MMORPGs encourage and provide opportunities to study and improve in economic theory by providing a controlled environment for the natural development of economic practices between players including professions, trade, and services. Therapeutic applications The Division of Autism and developmental disabilities has published a significant report detailing the value of MMORPGs for the treatment of individuals with Autism Spectrum disorder. The report suggests that individuals with autism spectrum disorder could benefit from MMORPGs by being provided a space to freely develop social skills and communication skills without the stress of face-to-face contact. This in turn opens new pathways for social therapy for individuals with developmental disabilities. Economics Many MMORPGs feature living economies. Virtual items and currency have to be gained through play and have definite value for players. Such a virtual economy can be analyzed (using data logged by the game) and has value in economic research. More significantly, these "virtual" economies can affect the economies of the real world. One of the early researchers of MMORPGs was Edward Castronova, who demonstrated that a supply-and-demand market exists for virtual items and that it crosses over with the real world. This crossover has some requirements of the game: The ability for players to sell an item to each other for in-game (virtual) currency. Bartering for items between players for items of similar value. The purchase of in-game items for real-world currency. Exchanges of real-world currencies for virtual currencies. The invention of user-created meta-currencies such as Dragon kill points to distribute in-game rewards. The idea of attaching real-world value to "virtual" items has had a profound effect on players and the game industry, and even the courts. The virtual currency selling pioneer IGE received a lawsuit from a World of Warcraft player for interfering in the economics and intended use of the game by selling WoW gold. Castronova's first study in 2002 found that a highly liquid (if illegal) currency market existed, with the value of Everquest'''s in-game currency exceeding that of the Japanese yen. Some people even make a living by working these virtual economies; these people are often referred to as gold farmers, and may be employed in game sweatshops. Game publishers usually prohibit the exchange of real-world money for virtual goods, but others actively promote the idea of linking (and directly profiting from) an exchange. In Second Life and Entropia Universe, the virtual economy and the real-world economy are directly linked. This means that real money can be deposited |
is useful only at a very elementary level and in some multiplication algorithms, such as the long multiplication. Therefore, in some sources, the term "multiplicand" is regarded as a synonym for "factor". In algebra, a number that is the multiplier of a variable or expression (e.g., the 3 in 3xy2) is called a coefficient. The result of a multiplication is called a product. When one factor is an integer, the product is a multiple of the other or of the product of the others. Thus is a multiple of , as is . A product of integers is a multiple of each factor; for example, 15 is the product of 3 and 5 and is both a multiple of 3 and a multiple of 5. Computation Many common methods for multiplying numbers using pencil and paper require a multiplication table of memorized or consulted products of small numbers (typically any two numbers from 0 to 9). However, one method, the peasant multiplication algorithm, does not. The example below illustrates "long multiplication" (the "standard algorithm", "grade-school multiplication"): 23958233 × 5830 ——————————————— 00000000 ( = 23,958,233 × 0) 71874699 ( = 23,958,233 × 30) 191665864 ( = 23,958,233 × 800) + 119791165 ( = 23,958,233 × 5,000) ——————————————— 139676498390 ( = 139,676,498,390 ) Multiplying numbers to more than a couple of decimal places by hand is tedious and error-prone. Common logarithms were invented to simplify such calculations, since adding logarithms is equivalent to multiplying. The slide rule allowed numbers to be quickly multiplied to about three places of accuracy. Beginning in the early 20th century, mechanical calculators, such as the Marchant, automated multiplication of up to 10-digit numbers. Modern electronic computers and calculators have greatly reduced the need for multiplication by hand. Historical algorithms Methods of multiplication were documented in the writings of ancient Egyptian, , and Chinese civilizations. The Ishango bone, dated to about 18,000 to 20,000 BC, may hint at a knowledge of multiplication in the Upper Paleolithic era in Central Africa, but this is speculative. Egyptians The Egyptian method of multiplication of integers and fractions, which is documented in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, was by successive additions and doubling. For instance, to find the product of 13 and 21 one had to double 21 three times, obtaining , , . The full product could then be found by adding the appropriate terms found in the doubling sequence: 13 × 21 = (1 + 4 + 8) × 21 = (1 × 21) + (4 × 21) + (8 × 21) = 21 + 84 + 168 = 273. Babylonians The Babylonians used a sexagesimal positional number system, analogous to the modern-day decimal system. Thus, Babylonian multiplication was very similar to modern decimal multiplication. Because of the relative difficulty of remembering different products, Babylonian mathematicians employed multiplication tables. These tables consisted of a list of the first twenty multiples of a certain principal number n: n, 2n, ..., 20n; followed by the multiples of 10n: 30n 40n, and 50n. Then to compute any sexagesimal product, say 53n, one only needed to add 50n and 3n computed from the table. Chinese In the mathematical text Zhoubi Suanjing, dated prior to 300 BC, and the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, multiplication calculations were written out in words, although the early Chinese mathematicians employed Rod calculus involving place value addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The Chinese were already using a decimal multiplication table by the end of the Warring States period. Modern methods The modern method of multiplication based on the Hindu–Arabic numeral system was first described by Brahmagupta. Brahmagupta gave rules for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Henry Burchard Fine, then a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, wrote the following: The Indians are the inventors not only of the positional decimal system itself, but of most of the processes involved in elementary reckoning with the system. Addition and subtraction they performed quite as they are performed nowadays; multiplication they effected in many ways, ours among them, but division they did cumbrously. These place value decimal arithmetic algorithms were introduced to Arab countries by Al Khwarizmi in the early 9th century and popularized in the Western world by Fibonacci in the 13th century. Grid method Grid method multiplication, or the box method, is used in primary schools in England and Wales and in some areas of the United States to help teach an understanding of how multiple digit multiplication works. An example of multiplying 34 by 13 would be to lay the numbers out in a grid as follows: {| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" ! scope="col" width="40pt" | ! scope="col" width="120pt" | 30 ! scope="col" width="40pt" | 4 |- ! scope="row" | 10 |300 |40 |- ! scope="row" | 3 |90 |12 |} and then add the entries. Computer algorithms The classical method of multiplying two -digit numbers requires digit multiplications. Multiplication algorithms have been designed that reduce the computation time considerably when multiplying large numbers. Methods based on the discrete Fourier transform reduce the computational complexity to . In 2016, the factor was replaced by a function that increases much slower, though still not constant. In March 2019, David Harvey and Joris van der Hoeven submitted a paper presenting an integer multiplication algorithm with a complexity of The algorithm, also based on the fast Fourier transform, is conjectured to be asymptotically optimal. The algorithm is not practically useful, as it only becomes faster for multiplying extremely large numbers (having more than bits). Products of measurements One can only meaningfully add or subtract quantities of the same type, but quantities of different types can be multiplied or divided without problems. For example, four bags with three marbles each can be thought of as: [4 bags] × [3 marbles per bag] = 12 marbles. When two measurements are multiplied together, the product is of a type depending on the types of measurements. The general theory is given by dimensional analysis. This analysis is routinely applied in physics, but it also has applications in finance and other applied fields. A common example in physics is the fact that multiplying speed by time gives distance. For example: 50 kilometers per hour × 3 hours = 150 kilometers. In this case, the hour units cancel out, leaving the product with only kilometer units. Other examples of multiplication involving units include: 2.5 meters × 4.5 meters = 11.25 square meters 11 meters/seconds × 9 seconds = 99 meters 4.5 residents per house × 20 houses = 90 residents Product of a sequence Capital pi notation The product of a sequence of factors can be written with the product symbol, which derives from the capital letter (pi) in the Greek alphabet (much like the same way the capital letter (sigma) is used in the context of summation). Unicode position contains a glyph for denoting such a product, distinct from , the letter. The meaning of this notation is given by: that is The subscript gives the | = 139,676,498,390 ) Multiplying numbers to more than a couple of decimal places by hand is tedious and error-prone. Common logarithms were invented to simplify such calculations, since adding logarithms is equivalent to multiplying. The slide rule allowed numbers to be quickly multiplied to about three places of accuracy. Beginning in the early 20th century, mechanical calculators, such as the Marchant, automated multiplication of up to 10-digit numbers. Modern electronic computers and calculators have greatly reduced the need for multiplication by hand. Historical algorithms Methods of multiplication were documented in the writings of ancient Egyptian, , and Chinese civilizations. The Ishango bone, dated to about 18,000 to 20,000 BC, may hint at a knowledge of multiplication in the Upper Paleolithic era in Central Africa, but this is speculative. Egyptians The Egyptian method of multiplication of integers and fractions, which is documented in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus, was by successive additions and doubling. For instance, to find the product of 13 and 21 one had to double 21 three times, obtaining , , . The full product could then be found by adding the appropriate terms found in the doubling sequence: 13 × 21 = (1 + 4 + 8) × 21 = (1 × 21) + (4 × 21) + (8 × 21) = 21 + 84 + 168 = 273. Babylonians The Babylonians used a sexagesimal positional number system, analogous to the modern-day decimal system. Thus, Babylonian multiplication was very similar to modern decimal multiplication. Because of the relative difficulty of remembering different products, Babylonian mathematicians employed multiplication tables. These tables consisted of a list of the first twenty multiples of a certain principal number n: n, 2n, ..., 20n; followed by the multiples of 10n: 30n 40n, and 50n. Then to compute any sexagesimal product, say 53n, one only needed to add 50n and 3n computed from the table. Chinese In the mathematical text Zhoubi Suanjing, dated prior to 300 BC, and the Nine Chapters on the Mathematical Art, multiplication calculations were written out in words, although the early Chinese mathematicians employed Rod calculus involving place value addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. The Chinese were already using a decimal multiplication table by the end of the Warring States period. Modern methods The modern method of multiplication based on the Hindu–Arabic numeral system was first described by Brahmagupta. Brahmagupta gave rules for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Henry Burchard Fine, then a professor of mathematics at Princeton University, wrote the following: The Indians are the inventors not only of the positional decimal system itself, but of most of the processes involved in elementary reckoning with the system. Addition and subtraction they performed quite as they are performed nowadays; multiplication they effected in many ways, ours among them, but division they did cumbrously. These place value decimal arithmetic algorithms were introduced to Arab countries by Al Khwarizmi in the early 9th century and popularized in the Western world by Fibonacci in the 13th century. Grid method Grid method multiplication, or the box method, is used in primary schools in England and Wales and in some areas of the United States to help teach an understanding of how multiple digit multiplication works. An example of multiplying 34 by 13 would be to lay the numbers out in a grid as follows: {| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;" ! scope="col" width="40pt" | ! scope="col" width="120pt" | 30 ! scope="col" width="40pt" | 4 |- ! scope="row" | 10 |300 |40 |- ! scope="row" | 3 |90 |12 |} and then add the entries. Computer algorithms The classical method of multiplying two -digit numbers requires digit multiplications. Multiplication algorithms have been designed that reduce the computation time considerably when multiplying large numbers. Methods based on the discrete Fourier transform reduce the computational complexity to . In 2016, the factor was replaced by a function that increases much slower, though still not constant. In March 2019, David Harvey and Joris van der Hoeven submitted a paper presenting an integer multiplication algorithm with a complexity of The algorithm, also based on the fast Fourier transform, is conjectured to be asymptotically optimal. The algorithm is not practically useful, as it only becomes faster for multiplying extremely large numbers (having more than bits). Products of measurements One can only meaningfully add or subtract quantities of the same type, but quantities of different types can be multiplied or divided without problems. For example, four bags with three marbles each can be thought of as: [4 bags] × [3 marbles per bag] = 12 marbles. When two measurements are multiplied together, the product is of a type depending on the types of measurements. The general theory is given by dimensional analysis. This analysis is routinely applied in physics, but it also has applications in finance and other applied fields. A common example in physics is the fact that multiplying speed by time gives distance. For example: 50 kilometers per hour × 3 hours = 150 kilometers. In this case, the hour units cancel out, leaving the product with only kilometer units. Other examples of multiplication involving units include: 2.5 meters × 4.5 meters = 11.25 square meters 11 meters/seconds × 9 seconds = 99 meters 4.5 residents per house × 20 houses = 90 residents Product of a sequence Capital |
heat the wooden floor and the sprouted grains. The temperature is usually around . A "maltings" is typically a long, single-story building with a floor that slopes slightly from one end of the building to the other. Floor maltings began to be phased out in the 1940s in favor of "pneumatic plants", where large industrial fans are used to blow air through the germinating grain beds and to pass hot air through the malt being kilned. Like floor maltings, these pneumatic plants use batch processes, but of considerably greater size, typically 100-ton batches compared with 20-ton batches floor maltings. , the largest malting operation in the world was Malteurop, which operates in 14 countries. Production Barley is the most commonly malted grain, in part because of its high content of enzymes, though wheat, rye, oats, rice, and corn are also used. Also very important is the retention of the grain's husk, even after threshing, unlike the bare seeds of threshed wheat or rye. This protects the growing acrospire (developing plant embryo) from damage during malting, which can easily lead to mold growth; it also allows the mash of converted grain to create a filter bed during lautering (see brewing). Malts Diastatic and nondiastatic As all grains sprout, natural enzymes within the grain break down the starch of which the grain is composed into simpler sugars, which taste sweet and are easier for yeast to use as food. Malt with active enzymes is called "diastatic malt". Malt with inactive enzymes is called "nondiastatic malt". The enzymes are deactivated by heating the malt. Base and specialty Malt is often divided into two categories by brewers - base malts and specialty malts. Base malts have enough diastatic power to convert their own starch and usually, that of some amount of starch from unmalted grain, called adjuncts. Specialty malts have little diastatic power, but provide flavor, color, or "body" (viscosity) to the finished beer. Specialty caramel or crystal malts have been subjected to heat treatment to convert their starches to sugars nonenzymatically. Within these categories is a variety of types distinguished largely by the kilning temperature (see mash ingredients). Two-row and six-row In addition, malts are distinguished by the two major cultivar types of barley used for malting, two-row, and six-row. Malt extract Malt extract, also known as extract of malt, is a sweet, treacle-like substance used as a dietary supplement. It was popular in the first half of the 20th century as a nutritional enhancer for the children of the British urban working class, whose diet was often deficient in vitamins and minerals. Children were given cod liver oil for the same reason, but it proved so unpalatable that it was combined with extract of malt to produce "Malt and Cod-Liver Oil." The 1907 British Pharmaceutical Codex'''s instructions for making a nutritional extract of malt do not include a mashout at the end of extraction and include the use of lower mash temperatures than is typical with modern beer-brewing practices. The Codex indicates that diastatic activity is to be preserved by the use of temperatures not exceeding . Malt extract production Malt extract is frequently used in the brewing of beer. Its production begins by germinating barley grain in a process known as malting, immersing barley in water to encourage the grain to sprout, then drying it to halt the progress when the sprouting begins. The drying step stops the sprouting, but the enzymes remain active due to the low temperatures used in base malt production. In one before-and-after comparison, malting decreased barley's extractable starch content by about 7% on a dry matter basis and turned that portion into various other carbohydrates. In the next step, brewers use a process called mashing to extract the sugars. Brewers warm cracked malt in temperature-modulated water, activating the enzymes, which cleave more of the malt's remaining starch into various sugars, the largest percentage of | also contains small amounts of other sugars, such as sucrose and fructose, which are not products of starch modification, but which are already in the grain. Further conversion to fermentable sugars is achieved during the mashing process. Malted grain is used to make beer, whisky, malted milk, malt vinegar, confections such as Maltesers and Whoppers, flavored drinks such as Horlicks, Ovaltine, and Milo, and some baked goods, such as malt loaf, bagels, and Rich Tea biscuits. Malted grain that has been ground into a coarse meal is known as "sweet meal". Various cereals are malted, though barley is the most common. A high-protein form of malted barley is often a label-listed ingredient in blended flours typically used in the manufacture of yeast bread and other baked goods. The term "malt" refers to several products of the process: the grains to which this process has been applied, for example, malted barley; the sugar, heavy in maltose, derived from such grains, such as the baker's malt used in various cereals; or a product based on malted milk, similar to a malted milkshake (i.e., "malts"). History and traditional usage Malted grains have probably been used as an ingredient of beer since ancient times, for example in Egypt (Ancient Egyptian cuisine), Sumer, and China. In Persian countries, a sweet paste made entirely from germinated wheat is called samanū () in Iran, samanak () in Afghanistan, (); () or sümölök (), which is prepared for Nowruz (Persian new year celebration) in a large pot (like a kazan). A plate or bowl of samanu is a traditional component of the Haft sin table symbolising affluence. Traditionally, women have a special party to prepare it during the night, and cook it from late in the evening until the daylight, singing related songs. In Tajikistan and Afghanistan, they sing: Samanak dar Jūsh u mā Kafcha zanēm – Dīgarān dar Khwāb u mā Dafcha zanēm. (Meaning: "Samanak is boiling and we are stirring it, others are asleep and we are playing daf"). In modern times, making samanu can be a family gathering. It originally comes from the Great Persian Empire. Mämmi, or Easter Porridge, is a traditional Finnish Lenten food. Cooked from rye malt and flour, mämmi has a great resemblance (in the recipe, color, and taste) to samanū. Today, this product is available in shops from February until Easter. A (nonrepresentative) survey in 2013 showed that almost no one cooks mämmi at home in modern-day Finland. Malting Malting is the process of converting barley or other cereal grains into malt for use in brewing, distilling, or foods, and takes place in a maltings, sometimes called a malthouse, or a malting floor. The cereal is spread out on the malting floor in a layer of depth. Drying The malting process starts with drying the grains to a moisture content below 14% and then storing for around six weeks to overcome seed dormancy. Steeping When ready, the grain is immersed or steeped in water two or three times for two or three days to allow the grain to absorb moisture and to start to sprout. Germination When the grain has a moisture content of around 46%, it is transferred to the malting or germination floor, where it is constantly turned over for about four to six days while it is air-dried. Pre-toasting The grain at this point, called "green malt", is then dried and toasted in an oven (or kiln) to the desired color and specification. Malts range in color from very pale through crystal and amber to chocolate or black malts. Smoking The sprouted grain is then further dried and smoked by spreading it on a perforated wooden floor. Smoke coming from an oasting fireplace (via smoke channels) is then used to heat the wooden floor and the sprouted grains. The temperature is usually around . A "maltings" is typically a long, single-story building with a floor that slopes slightly from one end of the building to the other. Floor maltings began to be phased out in the 1940s in favor of "pneumatic plants", where large industrial fans are used to blow air through the germinating grain beds and to pass hot air through the malt being kilned. Like floor maltings, these pneumatic plants use batch processes, but of considerably greater size, typically 100-ton batches compared with 20-ton batches floor maltings. , the largest malting operation in the world was Malteurop, which operates in 14 countries. Production Barley is the most commonly malted grain, in part because of its high content of enzymes, |
via a thin layer of mortar. This is why they do not perform well in earthquakes, when entire buildings are shaken horizontally. Many collapses during earthquakes occur in buildings that have load-bearing masonry walls. Besides, heavier buildings having masonry suffer more damage. Veneer masonry A masonry veneer wall consists of masonry units, usually clay-based bricks, installed on one or both sides of a structurally independent wall usually constructed of wood or masonry. In this context, the brick masonry is primarily decorative, not structural. The brick veneer is generally connected to the structural wall by brick ties (metal strips that are attached to the structural wall, as well as the mortar joints of the brick veneer). There is typically an air gap between the brick veneer and the structural wall. As clay-based brick is usually not completely waterproof, the structural wall will often have a water-resistant surface (usually tar paper) and weep holes can be left at the base of the brick veneer to drain moisture that accumulates inside the air gap. Concrete blocks, real and cultured stones, and veneer adobe are sometimes used in a very similar veneer fashion. Most insulated buildings that utilize concrete block, brick, adobe, stone, veneers or some combination thereof feature interior insulation in the form of fiberglass batts between wooden wall studs or in the form of rigid insulation boards covered with plaster or drywall. In most climates this insulation is much more effective on the exterior of the wall, allowing the building interior to take advantage of the aforementioned thermal mass of the masonry. This technique does, however, require some sort of weather-resistant exterior surface over the insulation and, consequently, is generally more expensive. Dry set masonry The strength of a masonry wall is not entirely dependent on the bond between the building material and the mortar; the friction between the interlocking blocks of masonry is often strong enough to provide a great deal of strength on its own. The blocks sometimes have grooves or other surface features added to enhance this interlocking, and some dry set masonry structures forgo mortar altogether. Brick Solid brickwork is made of two or more wythes of bricks with the units running horizontally (called stretcher bricks) bound together with bricks running transverse to the wall (called "header" bricks). Each row of bricks is known as a course. The pattern of headers and stretchers employed gives rise to different 'bonds' such as the common bond (with every sixth course composed of headers), the English bond, and the Flemish bond (with alternating stretcher and header bricks present on every course). Bonds can differ in strength and in insulating ability. Vertically staggered bonds tend to be somewhat stronger and less prone to major cracking than a non-staggered bond. Uniformity and rusticity The wide selection of brick styles and types generally available in industrialized nations allow much variety in the appearance of the final product. In buildings built during the 1950s-1970s, a high degree of uniformity of brick and accuracy in masonry was typical. In the period since then this style was thought to be too sterile, so attempts were made to emulate older, rougher work. Some brick | One problem with masonry walls is that they rely mainly on their weight to keep them in place; each block or brick is only loosely connected to the next via a thin layer of mortar. This is why they do not perform well in earthquakes, when entire buildings are shaken horizontally. Many collapses during earthquakes occur in buildings that have load-bearing masonry walls. Besides, heavier buildings having masonry suffer more damage. Veneer masonry A masonry veneer wall consists of masonry units, usually clay-based bricks, installed on one or both sides of a structurally independent wall usually constructed of wood or masonry. In this context, the brick masonry is primarily decorative, not structural. The brick veneer is generally connected to the structural wall by brick ties (metal strips that are attached to the structural wall, as well as the mortar joints of the brick veneer). There is typically an air gap between the brick veneer and the structural wall. As clay-based brick is usually not completely waterproof, the structural wall will often have a water-resistant surface (usually tar paper) and weep holes can be left at the base of the brick veneer to drain moisture that accumulates inside the air gap. Concrete blocks, real and cultured stones, and veneer adobe are sometimes used in a very similar veneer fashion. Most insulated buildings that utilize concrete block, brick, adobe, stone, veneers or some combination thereof feature interior insulation in the form of fiberglass batts between wooden wall studs or in the form of rigid insulation boards covered with plaster or drywall. In most climates this insulation is much more effective on the exterior of the wall, allowing the building interior to take advantage of the aforementioned thermal mass of the masonry. This technique does, however, require some sort of weather-resistant exterior surface over the insulation and, consequently, is generally more expensive. Dry set masonry The strength of a masonry wall is not entirely dependent on the bond between the building material and the mortar; the friction between the interlocking blocks of masonry is often strong enough to provide a great deal of strength on its own. The blocks sometimes have grooves or other surface features added to enhance this interlocking, and some dry set masonry structures forgo mortar altogether. Brick Solid brickwork is made of two or more wythes of bricks with the units running horizontally (called stretcher bricks) bound together with bricks running transverse to the wall (called "header" bricks). Each row of bricks is known as a course. The pattern of headers and stretchers employed gives rise to different 'bonds' such as the common bond (with every sixth course composed of headers), the English bond, and the Flemish bond (with alternating stretcher and header bricks present on every course). Bonds can differ in strength and in insulating ability. Vertically staggered bonds tend to be somewhat stronger and less prone to major cracking than a non-staggered bond. Uniformity and rusticity The wide selection of brick styles and types generally available in industrialized nations allow much variety in the appearance of the final product. In buildings built during the 1950s-1970s, a high degree of uniformity of brick and accuracy in masonry was typical. In the period since then this style was thought to be too sterile, so attempts were made to emulate older, rougher work. Some brick surfaces are made to look particularly rustic by including burnt bricks, which have a darker color or an irregular shape. Others may use antique salvage bricks, or new bricks may be artificially aged by applying various surface treatments, such as tumbling. The attempts at rusticity of the late 20th century have been carried forward by masons specializing in a free, artistic style, where the courses are intentionally not straight, instead weaving to form more organic impressions. Serpentine masonry A crinkle-crankle wall is a brick wall that follows a serpentine path, rather than a straight line. This type of wall is more resistant to toppling than a straight wall; so much so that it may be made of a single wythe of unreinforced brick and so despite its longer length may be more economical than a straight wall. Concrete block Blocks of cinder concrete (cinder blocks or breezeblocks), ordinary concrete (concrete blocks), or hollow tile are generically known as Concrete Masonry Units (CMUs). They usually are much larger than ordinary bricks and so are much faster to lay for a wall of a given size. Furthermore, cinder and concrete blocks typically have much lower water absorption rates than brick. They often are used as the structural core for veneered brick masonry or are used alone for the walls of factories, garages, and other industrial-style buildings where such appearance is acceptable or desirable. Such blocks often receive a stucco surface for decoration. Surface-bonding cement, which contains synthetic fibers for reinforcement, is sometimes used in this application and can impart extra strength to a block wall. Surface-bonding cement is often pre-colored and can be stained or painted thus resulting in a finished stucco-like surface. The primary structural advantage of concrete blocks in comparison to smaller clay-based bricks is that a CMU wall can be reinforced by filling the block voids with concrete with or without steel rebar. Generally, certain voids are designated for filling and reinforcement, particularly at corners, wall-ends, and openings while other voids are left empty. This increases wall strength and stability more economically than filling and reinforcing all voids. Typically, structures made of CMUs will have the top course of blocks in the walls filled with concrete and tied together with steel reinforcement to form a bond beam. Bond beams are often a requirement of modern building codes and controls. Another type of steel reinforcement referred |
Mortar methods, discretization methods for partial differential equations Mortarboard, a type of headwear worn as part of academic dress Mortar Board, a national honor society for college seniors | a tool pair used to crush or grind Mortar, Bihar, a village in India Mortar (organization), a nonprofit in Cincinnati, Ohio The Manby mortar, an invention for rescuing |
given eyebrows, which were removed in the more recent cartoons. In 1940, Mickey appeared in his first feature-length film, Fantasia. His screen role as The Sorcerer's Apprentice, set to the symphonic poem of the same name by Paul Dukas, is perhaps the most famous segment of the film and one of Mickey's most iconic roles. The apprentice (Mickey), not willing to do his chores, puts on the sorcerer's magic hat after the sorcerer goes to bed and casts a spell on a broom, which causes the broom to come to life and perform the most tiring chore—filling up a deep well using two buckets of water. When the well eventually overflows, Mickey finds himself unable to control the broom, leading to a near-flood. After the segment ends, Mickey is seen in silhouette shaking hands with Leopold Stokowski, who conducts all the music heard in Fantasia. Mickey has often been pictured in the red robe and blue sorcerer's hat in merchandising. It was also featured into the climax of Fantasmic!, an attraction at the Disney theme parks. After 1940, Mickey's popularity would decline until his 1955 re-emergence as a daily children's television personality. Despite this, the character continued to appear regularly in animated shorts until 1943 (winning his only competitive Academy Award—with canine companion Pluto—for a short subject, Lend a Paw) and again from 1946 to 1952. In these later cartoons, Mickey was often just a supporting character in his own shorts, where Pluto would be the main character. The last regular installment of the Mickey Mouse film series came in 1953 with The Simple Things in which Mickey and Pluto go fishing and are pestered by a flock of seagulls. Television and later films In the 1950s, Mickey became more known for his appearances on television, particularly with The Mickey Mouse Club. Many of his theatrical cartoon shorts were rereleased on television series such as Ink & Paint Club, various forms of the Walt Disney anthology television series, and on home video. Mickey returned to theatrical animation in 1983 with Mickey's Christmas Carol, an adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in which Mickey played Bob Cratchit. This was followed up in 1990 with The Prince and the Pauper. Throughout the decades, Mickey Mouse competed with Warner Bros.' Bugs Bunny for animated popularity. But in 1988, the two rivals finally shared screen time in the Robert Zemeckis Disney/Amblin film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Disney and Warner signed an agreement stating that each character had the same amount of screen time in the scene. Similar to his animated inclusion into a live-action film in Roger Rabbit, Mickey made a featured cameo appearance in the 1990 television special The Muppets at Walt Disney World where he met Kermit the Frog. The two are established in the story as having been old friends, although they have not made any other appearance together outside of this. His most recent theatrical cartoon short was 2013's Get a Horse! which was preceded by 1995's Runaway Brain, while from 1999 to 2004, he appeared in direct-to-video features like Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas, Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers and the computer-animated Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas. Many television series have centered on Mickey, such as the ABC shows Mickey Mouse Works (1999–2000), Disney's House of Mouse (2001–2003), Disney Channel's Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2006–2016), Mickey Mouse Mixed-Up Adventures (2017–) and Mickey Mouse Funhouse (2021–). Prior to all these, Mickey was also featured as an unseen character in the Bonkers episode "You Oughta Be In Toons". In 2013, Disney Channel started airing new 3-minute Mickey Mouse shorts, with animator Paul Rudish at the helm, incorporating elements of Mickey's late twenties-early thirties look with a contemporary twist. The creative team behind the 2017 DuckTales reboot had hoped to have Mickey Mouse in the series, but this idea was rejected by Disney executives. However, this did not stop them from including a watermelon shaped like Mickey Mouse that Donald Duck made and used like a ventriloquist dummy (to the point where he had perfectly replicated his voice (supplied by Chris Diamantopoulos)) while he was stranded on a deserted island during the season two finale. On November 10, 2020, the series was revived as The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse and premiered on Disney+ In August 2018, ABC television announced a two-hour prime time special, Mickey's 90th Spectacular, in honor of Mickey's 90th birthday. The program featured never-before-seen short videos and several other celebrities who wanted to share their memories about Mickey Mouse and performed some of the Disney songs to impress Mickey. The show took place at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and was produced and directed by Don Mischer on November 4, 2018. On November 18, 2018, a 90th anniversary event for the character was celebrated around the world. In December 2019, both Mickey and Minnie served as special co-hosts of Wheel of Fortune for two weeks while Vanna White served as the main host during Pat Sajak's absence. Comics Mickey first appeared in comics after he had appeared in 15 commercially successful animated shorts and was easily recognized by the public. Walt Disney was approached by King Features Syndicate with the offer to license Mickey and his supporting characters for use in a comic strip. Disney accepted and Mickey Mouse made its first appearance on January 13, 1930. The comical plot was credited to Disney himself, art to Ub Iwerks and inking to Win Smith. The first week or so of the strip featured a loose adaptation of "Plane Crazy". Minnie soon became the first addition to the cast. The strips first released between January 13, 1930, and March 31, 1930, has been occasionally reprinted in comic book form under the collective title "Lost on a Desert Island". Animation historian Jim Korkis notes "After the eighteenth strip, Iwerks left and his inker, Win Smith, continued drawing the gag-a-day format." In early 1930, after Iwerks' departure, Disney was at first content to continue scripting the Mickey Mouse comic strip, assigning the art to Win Smith. However, Disney's focus had always been in animation and Smith was soon assigned with the scripting as well. Smith was apparently discontent at the prospect of having to script, draw, and ink a series by himself as evidenced by his sudden resignation. Disney then searched for a replacement among the remaining staff of the Studio. He selected Floyd Gottfredson, a recently hired employee. At the time Gottfredson was reportedly eager to work in animation and somewhat reluctant to accept his new assignment. Disney had to assure him the assignment was only temporary and that he would eventually return to animation. Gottfredson accepted and ended up holding this "temporary" assignment from May 5, 1930, to November 15, 1975. Walt Disney's last script for the strip appeared May 17, 1930. Gottfredson's first task was to finish the storyline Disney had started on April 1, 1930. The storyline was completed on September 20, 1930, and later reprinted in comic book form as Mickey Mouse in Death Valley. This early adventure expanded the cast of the strip which to this point only included Mickey and Minnie. Among the characters who had their first comic strip appearances in this story were Clarabelle Cow, Horace Horsecollar, and Black Pete as well as the debuts of corrupted lawyer Sylvester Shyster and Minnie's uncle Mortimer Mouse. The Death Valley narrative was followed by Mr. Slicker and the Egg Robbers, first printed between September 22 and December 26, 1930, which introduced Marcus Mouse and his wife as Minnie's parents. Starting with these two early comic strip stories, Mickey's versions in animation and comics are considered to have diverged from each other. While Disney and his cartoon shorts would continue to focus on comedy, the comic strip effectively combined comedy and adventure. This adventurous version of Mickey would continue to appear in comic strips and later comic books throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Floyd Gottfredson left his mark with stories such as Mickey Mouse Joins the Foreign Legion (1936) and The Gleam (1942). He also created the Phantom Blot, Eega Beeva, Morty and Ferdie, Captain Churchmouse, and Butch. Besides Gottfredson artists for the strip over the years included Roman Arambula, Rick Hoover, Manuel Gonzales, Carson Van Osten, Jim Engel, Bill Wright, Ted Thwailes and Daan Jippes; writers included Ted Osborne, Merrill De Maris, Bill Walsh, Dick Shaw, Roy Williams, Del Connell, and Floyd Norman. The next artist to leave his mark on the character was Paul Murry in Dell Comics. His first Mickey tale appeared in 1950 but Mickey did not become a specialty until Murry's first serial for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories in 1953 ("The Last Resort"). In the same period, Romano Scarpa in Italy for the magazine Topolino began to revitalize Mickey in stories that brought back the Phantom Blot and Eega Beeva along with new creations such as the Atomo Bleep-Bleep. While the stories at Western Publishing during the Silver Age emphasized Mickey as a detective in the style of Sherlock Holmes, in the modern era several editors and creators have consciously undertaken to depict a more vigorous Mickey in the mold of the classic Gottfredson adventures. This renaissance has been spearheaded by Byron Erickson, David Gerstein, Noel Van Horn, Michael T. Gilbert and César Ferioli. In Europe, Mickey Mouse became the main attraction of a number of comics magazines, the most famous being Topolino in Italy from 1932 onward, Le Journal de Mickey in France from 1934 onward, Don Miki in Spain and the Greek Miky Maous. Mickey was the main character for the series MM Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine, published in Italy from 1999 to 2001. In 2006, he appeared in the Italian fantasy comic saga Wizards of Mickey. In 1958, Mickey Mouse was introduced to the Arab world through another comic book called “Sameer”. He became very popular in Egypt and got a comic book with his name. Mickey's comics in Egypt are licensed by Disney and were published since 1959 by “Dar Al-Hilal” and they were successful, however Dar Al-Hilal stopped the publication in 2003 because of problems with Disney. The comics were re-released by "Nahdat Masr" in 2004 and the first issues were sold out in less than 8 hours. Portrayal Design Throughout the earlier years, Mickey's design bore heavy resemblance to Oswald, save for the ears, nose, and tail. Ub Iwerks designed Mickey's body out of circles in order to make the character simple to animate. Disney employees John Hench and Marc Davis believed that this design was part of Mickey's success as it made him more dynamic and appealing to audiences. Mickey's circular design is most noticeable in his ears. In animation in the 1940s, Mickey's ears were animated in a more realistic perspective. Later, they were drawn to always appear circular no matter which way Mickey was facing. This made Mickey easily recognizable to audiences and made his ears an unofficial personal trademark. The circular rule later created a dilemma for toy creators who had to recreate a three-dimensional Mickey. In 1938, animator Fred Moore redesigned Mickey's body away from its circular design to a pear-shaped design. Colleague Ward Kimball praised Moore for being the first animator to break from Mickey's "rubber hose, round circle" design. Although Moore himself was nervous at first about changing Mickey, Walt Disney liked the new design and told Moore "that's the way I want Mickey to be drawn from now on." Each of Mickey's hands has only three fingers and a thumb. Disney said that this was both an artistic and financial decision, explaining, "Artistically five digits are too many for a mouse. His hand would look like a bunch of bananas. Financially, not having an extra finger in each of 45,000 drawings that make up a six and one-half minute short has saved the Studio millions." In the film The Opry House (1929), Mickey was first given white gloves as a way of contrasting his naturally black hands against his black body. The use of white gloves would prove to be an influential design for cartoon characters, particularly with later Disney characters, but also with non-Disney characters such as Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, Mario, and Sonic The Hedgehog. Mickey's eyes, as drawn in Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho, were large and white with black outlines. In Steamboat Willie, the bottom portion of the black outlines was removed, although the upper edges still contrasted with his head. Mickey's eyes were later re-imagined as only consisting of the small black dots which were originally his pupils, while what were the upper edges of his eyes became a hairline. This is evident only when Mickey blinks. Fred Moore later redesigned the eyes to be small white eyes with pupils and gave his face a Caucasian skin tone instead of plain white. This new Mickey first appeared in 1938 on the cover of a party program, and in animation the following year with the release of The Pointer. Mickey is sometimes given eyebrows as seen in The Simple Things (1953) and in the comic strip, although he does not have eyebrows in his subsequent appearances. Originally characters had black hands, but Frank Thomas said this was changed for visibility reasons. According to Disney's Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, written by former Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, "The characters were in black and white with no shades of grey to soften the contrast or delineate a form. Mickey's body was black, his arms and his hands- all black. There was no way to stage an action except in silhouette. How else could there be any clarity? A hand in front of a chest would simply disappear." Multiple sources state that Mickey's characteristics, particularly the black body combined with the large white eyes, white mouth, and the white gloves, evolved from blackface caricatures used in minstrel shows. Besides Mickey's gloves and shoes, he typically wears only a pair of shorts with two large buttons in the front. Before Mickey was seen regularly in color animation, Mickey's shorts were either red or a dull blue-green. With the advent of Mickey's color films, the shorts were always red. When Mickey is not wearing his red shorts, he is often still wearing red clothing such as a red bandmaster coat (The Band Concert, The Mickey Mouse Club), red overalls (Clock Cleaners, Boat Builders), a red cloak (Fantasia, Fun and Fancy Free), a red coat (Squatter's Rights, Mickey's Christmas Carol), or a red shirt (Mickey Down Under, The Simple Things). Voice actors A large part of Mickey's screen persona is his famously shy, falsetto voice. From 1928 onward, Mickey was voiced by Walt Disney himself, a task in which Disney took great personal pride. Composer Carl W. Stalling was the first person to provide lines for Mickey in the 1929 shorts The Karnival Kid and Wild Waves, and J. Donald Wilson and Joe Twerp provided the voice in some 1938 broadcasts of The Mickey Mouse Theater of the Air, although Disney remained Mickey's official voice during this period. However, by 1946, Disney was becoming too busy with running the studio to do regular voice work which meant he could not do Mickey's voice on a regular basis anymore. It is also speculated that his cigarette habit had damaged his voice over the years. After recording the Mickey and the Beanstalk section of Fun and Fancy Free, Mickey's voice was handed over to veteran Disney musician and actor Jimmy MacDonald. Walt would reprise Mickey's voice occasionally until his passing in 1966, such as in the introductions to the original 1955–1959 run of The Mickey Mouse Club TV series, the "Fourth Anniversary Show" episode of the Walt Disney's Disneyland TV series that aired on September 11, 1957 and the Disneyland USA at Radio City Music Hall show from 1962. MacDonald voiced Mickey in most of the remaining theatrical shorts and for various television and publicity projects up until his retirement in 1976. However, other actors would occasionally play the role during this era. Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, provided the voice in three of Mickey's theatrical shorts, The Dognapper, R'coon Dawg, and Pluto's Party. Stan Freberg voiced Mickey in the Freberg-produced record Mickey Mouse's Birthday Party. Alan Young voiced Mickey in the Disneyland record album An Adaptation of Dickens' Christmas Carol, Performed by The Walt Disney Players in 1974. The 1983 short film Mickey's Christmas Carol marked the theatrical debut of Wayne Allwine as Mickey Mouse, who was the official voice of Mickey from 1977 until his death in 2009, although MacDonald returned to voice Mickey for an appearance at the 50th Academy Awards in 1978. Allwine once recounted something MacDonald had told him about voicing Mickey: "The main piece of advice that Jim gave me about Mickey helped me keep things in perspective. He said, 'Just remember kid, you're only filling in for the boss.' And that's the way he treated doing Mickey for years and years. From Walt, and now from Jimmy." In 1991, Allwine married Russi Taylor, the voice of Minnie Mouse from 1986 until her death in 2019. Les Perkins did the voice of Mickey in two TV specials, "Down and Out with Donald Duck" and "DTV Valentine", in the mid-1980s. Peter Renaday voiced Mickey in the 1980s Disney albums Yankee Doodle Mickey and Mickey Mouse Splashdance.Character Records by Steve Burns – StartedByAMouse.com Features Section He also provided his voice for The Talking Mickey Mouse toy in 1986. Quinton Flynn briefly filled in for Allwine as the voice of Mickey in a few episodes of the first season of Mickey Mouse Works whenever Allwine was unavailable to record. Bret Iwan, a former Hallmark greeting card artist, is one of the current voices of Mickey. Iwan was originally cast as an understudy for Allwine due to the latter's declining health, but Allwine died before Iwan could get a chance to meet him and Iwan became the new official voice of the character at the time. Iwan's early recordings in 2009 included work for the Disney Cruise Line, Mickey toys, the Disney theme parks and the Disney on Ice: Celebrations! ice show. He directly replaced Allwine as Mickey for the Kingdom Hearts video game series and the TV series Mickey Mouse Clubhouse. His first video game voice-over of Mickey Mouse can be heard in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. Iwan also became the first voice actor to portray Mickey during Disney's rebranding of the character, providing the vocal effects of Mickey in Epic Mickey as well as his voice in Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two and the remake of Castle of Illusion. Since then Mickey Mouse has become voiced more than one voice actor in major Disney projects. Film, TV and stage actor Chris Diamantopoulos voices Mickey in the award-winning Mickey Mouse 2013 animated series developed by Paul Rudish, and the 2017 DuckTales reboot (in the form of a watermelon that Donald uses as a ventriloquist dummy), as the producers were looking for a voice closer to Walt Disney's portrayal of the character in order to match the vintage look of that series. Diamantopoulos also speaks and sings for Mickey Mouse in the Walt Disney World attraction Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway. Songs featuring Diamantopoulos as Mickey Mouse from that attraction, as well as soundtrack songs from the recent Disney+ series The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse streaming on various platforms. Merchandising Since his early years, Mickey Mouse has been licensed by Disney to appear on many different kinds of merchandise. Mickey was produced as plush toys and figurines, and Mickey's image has graced almost everything from T-shirts to lunchboxes. Largely responsible for early Disney merchandising was Kay Kamen, Disney's head of merchandise and licensing from 1932 until his death in 1949, who was called a "stickler for quality." Kamen was recognized by The Walt Disney Company as having a significant part in Mickey's rise to stardom and was named a Disney Legend in 1998. At the time of his 80th-anniversary celebration in 2008, Time declared Mickey Mouse one of the world's most recognized characters, even when compared against Santa Claus. Disney officials have stated that 98% of children aged 3–11 around the world are at least aware of the character. Disney parks As the official Walt Disney mascot, Mickey has played a central role in the Disney parks since the opening of Disneyland in 1955. As with other characters, Mickey is often portrayed by a non-speaking costumed actor. In this form, he has participated in ceremonies and countless parades, and poses for photographs with guests. As of the presidency of Barack Obama (who jokingly referred to him as "a world leader who has bigger ears than me") Mickey has met every U.S. president since Harry Truman, with the exception of Lyndon B. Johnson. Mickey also features in several specific attractions at the Disney parks. Mickey's Toontown (Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland) is a themed land which is a recreation of Mickey's neighborhood. Buildings are built in a cartoon style and guests can visit Mickey or Minnie's houses, Donald Duck's boat, or Goofy's garage. This is a common place to meet the characters. Mickey's PhilharMagic (Magic Kingdom, Tokyo Disneyland, Hong Kong Disneyland) is a 4D film which features Mickey in the familiar role of symphony conductor. At Main Street Cinema several of Mickey's short films are shown on a rotating basis; the sixth film is always Steamboat Willie. Mickey plays a central role in Fantasmic! (Disneyland Resort, Disney's Hollywood Studios) a live nighttime show which famously features Mickey in his role as the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Mickey was also a central character in the now-defunct Mickey Mouse Revue (Magic Kingdom, Tokyo Disneyland) which was an indoor show featuring animatronic characters. Mickey's face currently graces the Mickey's Fun Wheel at Disney California Adventure Park, where a figure of him also stands on top of Silly Symphony Swings. Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway at Disney's Hollywood Studios is a trackless dark ride themed to Mickey Mouse. In addition to Mickey's overt presence in the parks, numerous images of him are also subtly included in sometimes unexpected places. This phenomenon is known as "Hidden Mickeys", involving hidden images in Disney films, theme parks, and merchandise. Video games Like many popular characters, Mickey has starred in many video games, including Mickey Mousecapade on the Nintendo Entertainment System, Mickey Mania: The Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse, Mickey's Ultimate Challenge, and Disney's Magical Quest on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse on the Mega Drive/Genesis, Mickey Mouse: Magic Wands! on the Game Boy, and many others. In the 2000s, the Disney's Magical Quest series were ported to the Game Boy Advance, while Mickey made his sixth generation era debut in Disney's Magical Mirror Starring Mickey Mouse, a Nintendo GameCube title aimed at younger audiences. Mickey plays a major role in the Kingdom Hearts series, as the king of Disney Castle and aided to the protagonist, Sora and his friends. King Mickey wields the Keyblade, a weapon in the form of a key that has the power to open any lock and combat darkness. Epic Mickey, featuring a darker version of the Disney universe, was released in 2010 for the Wii. The game is part of an effort by The Walt Disney Company to re-brand the Mickey Mouse character by moving away from his current squeaky clean image and reintroducing the mischievous side of his personality. Watches and clock Mickey was most famously featured on wristwatches and alarm clocks, typically utilizing his hands as the actual hands on the face of the clock. The first Mickey Mouse watches were manufactured in 1933 by the Ingersoll Watch Company. The seconds were indicated by a turning disk below Mickey. The first Mickey watch was sold at the Century of Progress in Chicago, 1933 for $3.75 (). Mickey Mouse watches have been sold by other companies and designers throughout the years, including Timex, Elgin, Helbros, Bradley, Lorus, and Gérald Genta. The fictional character Robert Langdon from Dan Brown's novels was said to wear a Mickey Mouse watch as a reminder "to stay young at heart." Other products In 1989, Milton Bradley released the electronic talking game titled Mickey Says, with three modes featuring Mickey Mouse as its host. Mickey also appeared in other toys and games, including the Worlds of Wonder released The Talking Mickey Mouse. Fisher-Price has produced a line of talking animatronic Mickey dolls including "Dance Star Mickey" (2010) and "Rock Star Mickey" (2011). In total, approximately 40% of Disney's revenues for consumer products are derived from Mickey Mouse merchandise, with revenues peaking in 1997. Social impact Use in politics In the United States, protest votes are often made in order to indicate dissatisfaction with the slate of candidates presented on a particular ballot or to highlight the inadequacies of a particular voting procedure. Since most states' electoral systems do not provide for blank balloting or a choice of "None of the Above", most protest votes take the form of a clearly non-serious candidate's name entered as a write-in vote. Mickey Mouse is often selected for this purpose. As an election supervisor in Georgia observed, "If Mickey Mouse doesn’t get votes in our election, it’s a bad election." The earliest known mention of Mickey Mouse as a write-in candidate dates back to the 1932 New York City mayoral elections. Mickey Mouse's name has also been known to appear fraudulently on voter registration lists, such as in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. Pejorative use of Mickey's name "Mickey Mouse" is a slang expression meaning small-time, amateurish or trivial. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, it also means poor quality or counterfeit. In Poland the phrase "mały Miki", which translates to "small Mickey", means something very simple and trivial - usually used in the comparison between two things. However, in parts | the sound synchronized throughout the film. For Willie, Disney had the sound recorded with a click track that kept the musicians on the beat. This precise timing is apparent during the "Turkey in the Straw" sequence when Mickey's actions exactly match the accompanying instruments. Animation historians have long debated who had served as the composer for the film's original music. This role has been variously attributed to Wilfred Jackson, Carl Stalling and Bert Lewis, but identification remains uncertain. Walt Disney himself was voice actor for both Mickey and Minnie and would remain the source of Mickey's voice through 1946 for theatrical cartoons. Jimmy MacDonald took over the role in 1946, but Walt provided Mickey's voice again from 1955 to 1959 for The Mickey Mouse Club television series on ABC. Audiences at the time of Steamboat Willie'''s release were reportedly impressed by the use of sound for comedic purposes. Sound films or "talkies" were still considered innovative. The first feature-length movie with dialogue sequences, The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson, was released on October 6, 1927. Within a year of its success, most United States movie theaters had installed sound film equipment. Walt Disney apparently intended to take advantage of this new trend and, arguably, managed to succeed. Most other cartoon studios were still producing silent products and so were unable to effectively act as competition to Disney. As a result, Mickey would soon become the most prominent animated character of the time. Walt Disney soon worked on adding sound to both Plane Crazy and The Gallopin' Gaucho (which had originally been silent releases) and their new release added to Mickey's success and popularity. A fourth Mickey short, The Barn Dance, was also put into production; however, Mickey does not actually speak until The Karnival Kid in 1929 (see below). After Steamboat Willie was released, Mickey became a close competitor to Felix the Cat, and his popularity would grow as he was continuously featured in sound cartoons. By 1929, Felix would lose popularity among theater audiences, and Pat Sullivan decided to produce all future Felix cartoons in sound as a result. Unfortunately, audiences did not respond well to Felix's transition to sound and by 1930, Felix had faded from the screen. Black and white films (1929–1935) In Mickey's early films he was often characterized not as a hero, but as an ineffective young suitor to Minnie Mouse. The Barn Dance (March 14, 1929) is the first time in which Mickey is turned down by Minnie in favor of Pete. The Opry House (March 28, 1929) was the first time in which Mickey wore his white gloves. Mickey wears them in almost all of his subsequent appearances and many other characters followed suit. The three lines on the back of Mickey's gloves represent darts in the gloves' fabric extending from between the digits of the hand, typical of glove design of the era.When the Cat's Away (April 18, 1929), essentially a remake of the Alice Comedy, "Alice Rattled by Rats", was an unusual appearance for Mickey. Although Mickey and Minnie still maintained their anthropomorphic characteristics, they were depicted as the size of regular mice and living with a community of many other mice as pests in a home. Mickey and Minnie would later appear the size of regular humans in their own setting. In appearances with real humans, Mickey has been shown to be about two to three feet high. The next Mickey short was also unusual. The Barnyard Battle (April 25, 1929) was the only film to depict Mickey as a soldier and also the first to place him in combat. The Karnival Kid (1929) was the first time Mickey spoke. Before this he had only whistled, laughed, and grunted. His first words were "Hot dogs! Hot dogs!" said while trying to sell hot dogs at a carnival. Mickey's Follies (1929) introduced the song "Minnie's Yoo-Hoo" which would become the theme song for Mickey Mouse films for the next several years. The same song sequence was also later reused with different background animation as its own special short shown only at the commencement of 1930s theater-based Mickey Mouse Clubs.Polsson, Ken (June 2, 2010). Chronology of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse (1930–1931) Ken Polsson personal page. Mickey's dog Pluto first appeared as Mickey's pet in The Moose Hunt (1931) after previously appearing as Minnie's dog "Rover" in The Picnic (1930).The Cactus Kid (April 11, 1930) was the last film to be animated by Ub Iwerks at Disney. Shortly before the release of the film, Iwerks left to start his own studio, bankrolled by Disney's then-distributor Pat Powers. Powers and Disney had a falling out over money due Disney from the distribution deal. It was in response to losing the right to distribute Disney's cartoons that Powers made the deal with Iwerks, who had long harbored a desire to head his own studio. The departure is considered a turning point in Mickey's career, as well as that of Walt Disney. Walt lost the man who served as his closest colleague and confidant since 1919. Mickey lost the man responsible for his original design and for the direction or animation of several of the shorts released till this point. Advertising for the early Mickey Mouse cartoons credited them as "A Walt Disney Comic, drawn by Ub Iwerks". Later Disney Company reissues of the early cartoons tend to credit Walt Disney alone. Disney and his remaining staff continued the production of the Mickey series, and he was able to eventually find a number of animators to replace Iwerks. As the Great Depression progressed and Felix the Cat faded from the movie screen, Mickey's popularity would rise, and by 1932 The Mickey Mouse Club would have one million members. At the 5th Academy Awards in 1932, Mickey received his first Academy Award nomination, received for Mickey's Orphans (1931). Walt Disney also received an honorary Academy Award for the creation of Mickey Mouse. Despite being eclipsed by the Silly Symphony short the Three Little Pigs in 1933, Mickey still maintained great popularity among theater audiences too, until 1935, when polls showed that Popeye was more popular than Mickey.Koszarski, Richard (1976). Hollywood directors, 1914–1940, Volume 1. Oxford University Press. (Quotes DeMille. 1935). By 1934, Mickey merchandise had earned $600,000 a year. In 1935, Disney began to phase out the Mickey Mouse Clubs, due to administration problems. About this time, story artists at Disney were finding it increasingly difficult to write material for Mickey. As he had developed into a role model for children, they were limited in the types of gags they could present. This led to Mickey taking more of a secondary role in some of his next films, allowing for more emphasis on other characters. In Orphan's Benefit (1934), Mickey first appeared with Donald Duck who had been introduced earlier that year in the Silly Symphony series. The tempestuous duck would provide Disney with seemingly endless story ideas and would remain a recurring character in Mickey's cartoons. Color films (1935–1953) Mickey first appeared animated in color in Parade of the Award Nominees in 1932; however, the film strip was created for the 5th Academy Awards ceremony and was not released to the public. Mickey's official first color film came in 1935 with The Band Concert. The Technicolor film process was used in the film production. Here Mickey conducted the William Tell Overture, but the band is swept up by a tornado. It is said that conductor Arturo Toscanini so loved this short that, upon first seeing it, he asked the projectionist to run it again. In 1994, The Band Concert was voted the third-greatest cartoon of all time in a poll of animation professionals. By colorizing and partially redesigning Mickey, Walt would put Mickey back on top once again, and Mickey would reach popularity he never reached before as audiences now gave him more appeal. Also in 1935, Walt would receive a special award from the League of Nations for creating Mickey. However, by 1938, the more manic Donald Duck would surpass the passive Mickey, resulting in a redesign of the mouse between 1938 and 1940 that put Mickey at the peak of his popularity. The second half of the 1930s saw the character Goofy reintroduced as a series regular. Together, Mickey, Donald Duck, and Goofy would go on several adventures together. Several of the films by the comic trio are some of Mickey's most critically acclaimed films, including Mickey's Fire Brigade (1935), Moose Hunters (1937), Clock Cleaners (1937), Lonesome Ghosts (1937), Boat Builders (1938), and Mickey's Trailer (1938). Also during this era, Mickey would star in Brave Little Tailor (1938), an adaptation of The Valiant Little Tailor, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Mickey was redesigned by animator Fred Moore which was first seen in The Pointer (1939). Instead of having solid black eyes, Mickey was given white eyes with pupils, a Caucasian skin colored face, and a pear-shaped body. In the 1940s, he changed once more in The Little Whirlwind, where he used his trademark pants for the last time in decades, lost his tail, got more realistic ears that changed with perspective and a different body anatomy. But this change would only last for a short period of time before returning to the one in "The Pointer", with the exception of his pants. In his final theatrical cartoons in the 1950s, he was given eyebrows, which were removed in the more recent cartoons. In 1940, Mickey appeared in his first feature-length film, Fantasia. His screen role as The Sorcerer's Apprentice, set to the symphonic poem of the same name by Paul Dukas, is perhaps the most famous segment of the film and one of Mickey's most iconic roles. The apprentice (Mickey), not willing to do his chores, puts on the sorcerer's magic hat after the sorcerer goes to bed and casts a spell on a broom, which causes the broom to come to life and perform the most tiring chore—filling up a deep well using two buckets of water. When the well eventually overflows, Mickey finds himself unable to control the broom, leading to a near-flood. After the segment ends, Mickey is seen in silhouette shaking hands with Leopold Stokowski, who conducts all the music heard in Fantasia. Mickey has often been pictured in the red robe and blue sorcerer's hat in merchandising. It was also featured into the climax of Fantasmic!, an attraction at the Disney theme parks. After 1940, Mickey's popularity would decline until his 1955 re-emergence as a daily children's television personality. Despite this, the character continued to appear regularly in animated shorts until 1943 (winning his only competitive Academy Award—with canine companion Pluto—for a short subject, Lend a Paw) and again from 1946 to 1952. In these later cartoons, Mickey was often just a supporting character in his own shorts, where Pluto would be the main character. The last regular installment of the Mickey Mouse film series came in 1953 with The Simple Things in which Mickey and Pluto go fishing and are pestered by a flock of seagulls. Television and later films In the 1950s, Mickey became more known for his appearances on television, particularly with The Mickey Mouse Club. Many of his theatrical cartoon shorts were rereleased on television series such as Ink & Paint Club, various forms of the Walt Disney anthology television series, and on home video. Mickey returned to theatrical animation in 1983 with Mickey's Christmas Carol, an adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol in which Mickey played Bob Cratchit. This was followed up in 1990 with The Prince and the Pauper. Throughout the decades, Mickey Mouse competed with Warner Bros.' Bugs Bunny for animated popularity. But in 1988, the two rivals finally shared screen time in the Robert Zemeckis Disney/Amblin film Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Disney and Warner signed an agreement stating that each character had the same amount of screen time in the scene. Similar to his animated inclusion into a live-action film in Roger Rabbit, Mickey made a featured cameo appearance in the 1990 television special The Muppets at Walt Disney World where he met Kermit the Frog. The two are established in the story as having been old friends, although they have not made any other appearance together outside of this. His most recent theatrical cartoon short was 2013's Get a Horse! which was preceded by 1995's Runaway Brain, while from 1999 to 2004, he appeared in direct-to-video features like Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas, Mickey, Donald, Goofy: The Three Musketeers and the computer-animated Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas. Many television series have centered on Mickey, such as the ABC shows Mickey Mouse Works (1999–2000), Disney's House of Mouse (2001–2003), Disney Channel's Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (2006–2016), Mickey Mouse Mixed-Up Adventures (2017–) and Mickey Mouse Funhouse (2021–). Prior to all these, Mickey was also featured as an unseen character in the Bonkers episode "You Oughta Be In Toons". In 2013, Disney Channel started airing new 3-minute Mickey Mouse shorts, with animator Paul Rudish at the helm, incorporating elements of Mickey's late twenties-early thirties look with a contemporary twist. The creative team behind the 2017 DuckTales reboot had hoped to have Mickey Mouse in the series, but this idea was rejected by Disney executives. However, this did not stop them from including a watermelon shaped like Mickey Mouse that Donald Duck made and used like a ventriloquist dummy (to the point where he had perfectly replicated his voice (supplied by Chris Diamantopoulos)) while he was stranded on a deserted island during the season two finale. On November 10, 2020, the series was revived as The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse and premiered on Disney+ In August 2018, ABC television announced a two-hour prime time special, Mickey's 90th Spectacular, in honor of Mickey's 90th birthday. The program featured never-before-seen short videos and several other celebrities who wanted to share their memories about Mickey Mouse and performed some of the Disney songs to impress Mickey. The show took place at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles and was produced and directed by Don Mischer on November 4, 2018. On November 18, 2018, a 90th anniversary event for the character was celebrated around the world. In December 2019, both Mickey and Minnie served as special co-hosts of Wheel of Fortune for two weeks while Vanna White served as the main host during Pat Sajak's absence. Comics Mickey first appeared in comics after he had appeared in 15 commercially successful animated shorts and was easily recognized by the public. Walt Disney was approached by King Features Syndicate with the offer to license Mickey and his supporting characters for use in a comic strip. Disney accepted and Mickey Mouse made its first appearance on January 13, 1930. The comical plot was credited to Disney himself, art to Ub Iwerks and inking to Win Smith. The first week or so of the strip featured a loose adaptation of "Plane Crazy". Minnie soon became the first addition to the cast. The strips first released between January 13, 1930, and March 31, 1930, has been occasionally reprinted in comic book form under the collective title "Lost on a Desert Island". Animation historian Jim Korkis notes "After the eighteenth strip, Iwerks left and his inker, Win Smith, continued drawing the gag-a-day format." In early 1930, after Iwerks' departure, Disney was at first content to continue scripting the Mickey Mouse comic strip, assigning the art to Win Smith. However, Disney's focus had always been in animation and Smith was soon assigned with the scripting as well. Smith was apparently discontent at the prospect of having to script, draw, and ink a series by himself as evidenced by his sudden resignation. Disney then searched for a replacement among the remaining staff of the Studio. He selected Floyd Gottfredson, a recently hired employee. At the time Gottfredson was reportedly eager to work in animation and somewhat reluctant to accept his new assignment. Disney had to assure him the assignment was only temporary and that he would eventually return to animation. Gottfredson accepted and ended up holding this "temporary" assignment from May 5, 1930, to November 15, 1975. Walt Disney's last script for the strip appeared May 17, 1930. Gottfredson's first task was to finish the storyline Disney had started on April 1, 1930. The storyline was completed on September 20, 1930, and later reprinted in comic book form as Mickey Mouse in Death Valley. This early adventure expanded the cast of the strip which to this point only included Mickey and Minnie. Among the characters who had their first comic strip appearances in this story were Clarabelle Cow, Horace Horsecollar, and Black Pete as well as the debuts of corrupted lawyer Sylvester Shyster and Minnie's uncle Mortimer Mouse. The Death Valley narrative was followed by Mr. Slicker and the Egg Robbers, first printed between September 22 and December 26, 1930, which introduced Marcus Mouse and his wife as Minnie's parents. Starting with these two early comic strip stories, Mickey's versions in animation and comics are considered to have diverged from each other. While Disney and his cartoon shorts would continue to focus on comedy, the comic strip effectively combined comedy and adventure. This adventurous version of Mickey would continue to appear in comic strips and later comic books throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Floyd Gottfredson left his mark with stories such as Mickey Mouse Joins the Foreign Legion (1936) and The Gleam (1942). He also created the Phantom Blot, Eega Beeva, Morty and Ferdie, Captain Churchmouse, and Butch. Besides Gottfredson artists for the strip over the years included Roman Arambula, Rick Hoover, Manuel Gonzales, Carson Van Osten, Jim Engel, Bill Wright, Ted Thwailes and Daan Jippes; writers included Ted Osborne, Merrill De Maris, Bill Walsh, Dick Shaw, Roy Williams, Del Connell, and Floyd Norman. The next artist to leave his mark on the character was Paul Murry in Dell Comics. His first Mickey tale appeared in 1950 but Mickey did not become a specialty until Murry's first serial for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories in 1953 ("The Last Resort"). In the same period, Romano Scarpa in Italy for the magazine Topolino began to revitalize Mickey in stories that brought back the Phantom Blot and Eega Beeva along with new creations such as the Atomo Bleep-Bleep. While the stories at Western Publishing during the Silver Age emphasized Mickey as a detective in the style of Sherlock Holmes, in the modern era several editors and creators have consciously undertaken to depict a more vigorous Mickey in the mold of the classic Gottfredson adventures. This renaissance has been spearheaded by Byron Erickson, David Gerstein, Noel Van Horn, Michael T. Gilbert and César Ferioli. In Europe, Mickey Mouse became the main attraction of a number of comics magazines, the most famous being Topolino in Italy from 1932 onward, Le Journal de Mickey in France from 1934 onward, Don Miki in Spain and the Greek Miky Maous. Mickey was the main character for the series MM Mickey Mouse Mystery Magazine, published in Italy from 1999 to 2001. In 2006, he appeared in the Italian fantasy comic saga Wizards of Mickey. In 1958, Mickey |
On 24 May 1952, en route from the Spiritual Center to Meher Mount in Ojai, California, the car in which he was a passenger was struck head-on near Prague, Oklahoma. He and his companions were thrown from the vehicle and suffered many injuries. Baba's leg was severely broken and he sustained facial injuries including a broken nose. The injured were treated at Duke Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, after which they returned to Myrtle Beach to recuperate. While recuperating at Youpon Dunes, a home owned by Elizabeth Patterson, in Myrtle Beach, he worked on the charter for a group of Sufis, which he named Sufism Reoriented'''. Meher Baba began dictating his major book, God Speaks, The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, using an alphabet board in Dehradun, August 1953. In September 1954, Meher Baba gave a men-only sahavas at Meherabad that later became known as the Three Incredible Weeks. During this time Baba issued a declaration, "Meher Baba's Call", wherein he once again affirmed his Avatarhood "irrespective of the doubts and convictions" of others. At the end of this sahavas, Meher Baba gave the completed manuscript of his book God Speaks to two members of Sufism Reoriented, Ludwig H. Dimpfl and Don E. Stevens, for editing and publication in America. The book was subsequently published by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year. On 30 September 1954 Meher Baba gave his Final Declaration message, in which he made enigmatic predictions. In October 1954, Meher Baba discarded his alphabet board and began using a unique set of hand gestures to communicate, which he used for the remainder of his life. On 2 December 1956, outside Satara, India, the car in which Baba was being driven went out of control and a second serious automobile accident occurred. Baba suffered a fractured pelvis and other severe injuries. Nilu, one of Baba's mandali, was killed. This collision seriously incapacitated Baba. Despite his physicians' predictions to the contrary, Baba began to walk again after great effort, but from that point on he was in constant pain and was severely limited in his ability to move. During his trip to the West in 1958, he often needed to be carried from venue to venue. In 1956, during his fifth visit to the US, Baba stayed at New York's Hotel Delmonico before traveling to the Meher Center at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In July he traveled to Washington, D.C., and received friends and disciples at the home of Ivy Duce, wife of James Terry Duce, the vice-president of the Arabian American Oil Co. He then traveled to Meher Mount at Ojai, California before continuing on to Australia. His final visits to the United States and Australia were made in 1958. 1960s – Later years and message on drugs In 1962, Baba held one of his last public functions, a mass meeting called the East-West Gathering, held in India. At these meetings, at which his Western followers were invited to meet his Indian disciples, Baba gave darshan to many thousands, despite the physical strain this caused him.Awakener Magazine, Volume 9, Number 1–2, 1963, p. 1 Despite deteriorating health, he continued what he called his "Universal Work", which included fasting and seclusion, until his death on 31 January 1969. His samadhi (shrine/tomb) in Meherabad, India, has become a place of international pilgrimage. In the mid-1960s Baba became concerned with the drug culture in the West and began correspondences with several Western academics, including Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, in which he discouraged the use of hallucinogenic drugs for spiritual purposes. In 1966 Baba's responses to questions on drugs were published in a pamphlet titled God in a Pill? Meher Baba stated that drug use was spiritually damaging and that if enlightenment were possible through drugs then "God is not worthy of being God". Meher Baba instructed his young Western disciples to spread this message; in doing so, they increased awareness of Meher Baba's teachings. In an interview with Frederick Chapman, a Harvard graduate and Fulbright scholar who met Baba during a year of study in India, Baba described LSD as "harmful physically, mentally, and spiritually" and warned that "[its continued use] leads to madness or death". An anti-drug campaign was initiated by Baba lovers in the United States, Europe and Australia. The campaign was mostly futile, but won Baba new followers, and some of Baba's views found their way into academic debate on the merits and dangers of hallucinogens. From the East-West Gathering of 1962 onward, Baba's health deteriorated. Despite the physical toll it took on his body, he continued to undergo periods of seclusion and fasting. In late July 1968, Baba completed a particularly taxing period of seclusion and stated that by then his work was "completed 100% to my satisfaction". He was by then using a wheelchair. Within a few months, his condition had worsened and he was bedridden, wracked by muscle spasms that had no clear medical origin. Despite the care of several physicians, the spasms worsened. Death and aftermath On 31 January 1969, Meher Baba died at his home in Meherabad. He conveyed by his last gestures, "Do not forget that I am God." In time, his devotees called the anniversary of his death Amartithi (deathless day). Meher Baba's body was placed at his samadhi at Meherabad, covered with roses and cooled by ice. His body was kept available to the public for one week before its final burial. Prior to his death, Meher Baba had made extensive preparations for a public darshan program to be held in Poona. His mandali decided to proceed with the arrangements despite the absence of the host. Several thousand attended this "Last Darshan," including many hundreds from the United States, Europe, and Australia. Silence From 10 July 1925, until his death in 1969, Meher Baba was silent. He communicated first by using an alphabet board and later by unique hand gestures which were interpreted and spoken out by one of his mandali, usually by his disciple Eruch Jessawala. Meher Baba said that his silence was not undertaken as a spiritual exercise but solely in connection with his universal work. Man's inability to live God's words makes the Avatar's teaching a mockery. Instead of practicing the compassion he taught, man has waged wars in his name. Instead of living the humility, purity, and truth of his words, man has given way to hatred, greed, and violence. Because man has been deaf to the principles and precepts laid down by God in the past, in this present Avataric form, I observe silence. Meher Baba often signaled the moment "that he would 'break' his silence by speaking the 'Word' in every heart, thereby giving a spiritual push forward to all living things". When I break My Silence, the impact of My Love will be universal and all life in creation will know, feel and receive of it. It will help every individual to break himself free from his own bondage in his own way. I am the Divine Beloved who loves you more than you can ever love yourself. The breaking of My Silence will help you to help yourself in knowing your real Self. According to him, the breaking of his silence would be a defining event in the spiritual evolution of the world. When I speak that Word, I shall lay the foundation for that which is to take place during the next seven hundred years. On many occasions Meher Baba promised to break his silence with an audible word before he died, often stating a specific time and place when this would occur, but according to all contemporary accounts, Meher Baba remained silent until his death. His failure to break his silence disappointed some of his followers, while others regarded these broken promises as a test of their faith. A number of his followers speculate that "the Word" will yet be "spoken" or that Meher Baba broke his silence in a spiritual rather than a physical way. Baba, for many years, asked his followers to undertake austerities on 10 July, the anniversary of the day his silence began, such as keeping silence, fasting, and praying. In his final Silence Day request to his followers in 1968, he asked only that they keep silent. Many followers continue to celebrate Silence Day by keeping silence in his honor. Teachings Meher Baba's teachings can roughly be divided into two main categories: his metaphysics on the nature of the soul and the Universe, and practical advice for the spiritual aspirant. The two are interrelated. His metaphysics is mostly found in his principal book on the subject, God Speaks. It contains detailed statements on his cosmology and the purpose of life as well as the progression of the soul, while his elucidations on the practical spiritual life are mostly contained in Discourses, although it also covers many metaphysical areas mirroring or amplifying God Speaks. God Speaks In God Speaks, Meher Baba describes the journey of the soul from its original state of unconscious divinity to the ultimate attainment of conscious divinity. The whole journey is a journey of imagination, where the original indivisible state of God imagines becoming countless individualized souls which he likens to bubbles within an ocean of infinite size. Each soul, powered by the desire to become conscious, starts its journey in the most rudimentary form of consciousness. This limitation brings the need of a more developed form to advance it towards an increasingly conscious state. Consciousness grows in relation to the impressions each form is capable of gathering. According to Baba, each soul pursues conscious divinity by evolving, that is, experiencing itself in a succession of imagined forms through seven "kingdoms" of stone/metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal, and human. The soul identifies itself with each successive form, becoming thus tied to illusion. During this evolution of forms, the power of thought increases, until in human form thought becomes infinite. Although in human form, the soul is capable of conscious divinity, all the impressions that it has gathered during evolution are illusory ones that create a barrier against the soul knowing itself. For this barrier to be overcome, further births in human form are needed in a process known as reincarnation. The soul will reach a stage where its previously gathered impressions grow thin or weak enough that it enters a final stage called involution. This stage also requires a series of human births, during which the soul begins an inner journey, by which it realizes its true identity as God. Baba breaks this inner journey of Realization into seven stages he called "planes." The process culminates, at the seventh plane, with God-realization, at which the goal of life for the soul is reached. Discourses The Discourses are a collection of explanations and elucidations that Meher Baba has given on many topics that concern the advancement of the spiritual aspirant. Some of the most important topics treated are: sanskaras (mental impressions), Maya (the principle of illusion), the nature of the ego, reincarnation, karma, violence and non-violence, meditation, love, discipleship, and God-realization. His explanations often include stories from the lore of India and the Sufi culture. One such story, the wise man and the ghost, shows the power that superstitious beliefs can have on a person, while another, Majnun and Layla, show how selfless love, even in human relations, can lead one to discipleship. Thus Meher Baba offers many suggestions that keep one moving towards God-realization. These suggestions include putting theory into practice, the internal renunciation of desires, offering selfless service to humanity or the master, spontaneity, while avoiding actions that bind one to illusion. But rather than lay out moral rules, Baba offers an understanding as to why some actions bind the individual whereas some others help towards his emancipation. Many chapters offer a better understanding of the mechanisms by which consciousness gets caught up between the opposites of experience, such as pleasure and pain, good and evil, and point to a way of transcending them. Perfect Masters and the Avatar Baba related that there are 56 incarnate God-realized souls on Earth at any given time. Of these souls there are always five who constitute the five Perfect Masters of their era. When one of the five Perfect Masters dies, according to Baba, another God-realized soul among the 56 would replace him or her at once. The Avatar, according to Baba, is a special Perfect Master, the first soul to achieve God-realization. This soul, the original Perfect Master, or Ancient One, never ceases to incarnate. Baba indicated that this particular soul personifies the state of God called | those "intoxicated with God". According to Baba, these individuals are disabled by their enchanting experience of the higher spiritual planes. Although outwardly masts may appear irrational or insane, Baba claimed that their spiritual status was elevated, and that by meeting with them he helped them to move forward spiritually while enlisting their aid in his spiritual work. One of the best known of these masts, known as Mohammed Mast, lived at Meher Baba's encampment at Meherabad until his death in 2003. During his journey in 1946, he went to Sehwan Sharif to meet a well known sufi saint and a successor of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, Murshid Nadir Ali Shah, whom Baba called an advanced pilgrim. In 1949 Baba began an enigmatic period that he called the New Life. Following a series of questions on their readiness to obey even the most difficult of his requests, Baba selected 20 companions to join him in a life of complete "hopelessness and helplessness". He made provisions for those dependent on him, after which he and his companions otherwise gave up nearly all property and financial responsibilities. They traveled about India incognito while begging for food and carrying out Baba's instructions in accordance with a strict set of "conditions of the New Life". These included absolute acceptance of any circumstance and consistent good cheer in the face of any difficulty. Companions who failed to comply were sent away. Concerning the New Life, Meher Baba wrote: This New Life is endless, and even after my physical death it will be kept alive by those who live the life of complete renunciation of falsehood, lies, hatred, anger, greed and lust; and who, to accomplish all this, do no lustful actions, do no harm to anyone, do no backbiting, do not seek material possessions or power, who accept no homage, neither covet honor nor shun disgrace, and fear no one and nothing; by those who rely wholly and solely on God, and who love God purely for the sake of loving; who believe in the lovers of God and in the reality of Manifestation, and yet do not expect any spiritual or material reward; who do not let go the hand of Truth, and who, without being upset by calamities, bravely and wholeheartedly face all hardships with one hundred percent cheerfulness, and give no importance to caste, creed and religious ceremonies. This New Life will live by itself eternally, even if there is no one to live it. Meher Baba ended the New Life in February 1952 and once again began a round of public appearances throughout India and the West. 1950s – God Speaks and automobile accidents After being injured as a passenger in two serious automobile accidents, one near Prague, Oklahoma in the United States in 1952 and one in India in 1956, Meher Baba's ability to walk became limited.Purdom (1964) p. 376 In the 1950s, Baba established two centers outside of India, namely the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in the United States and Avatar's Abode near Brisbane, Australia. He inaugurated the Meher Spiritual Center in April 1952. On 24 May 1952, en route from the Spiritual Center to Meher Mount in Ojai, California, the car in which he was a passenger was struck head-on near Prague, Oklahoma. He and his companions were thrown from the vehicle and suffered many injuries. Baba's leg was severely broken and he sustained facial injuries including a broken nose. The injured were treated at Duke Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, after which they returned to Myrtle Beach to recuperate. While recuperating at Youpon Dunes, a home owned by Elizabeth Patterson, in Myrtle Beach, he worked on the charter for a group of Sufis, which he named Sufism Reoriented'''. Meher Baba began dictating his major book, God Speaks, The Theme of Creation and Its Purpose, using an alphabet board in Dehradun, August 1953. In September 1954, Meher Baba gave a men-only sahavas at Meherabad that later became known as the Three Incredible Weeks. During this time Baba issued a declaration, "Meher Baba's Call", wherein he once again affirmed his Avatarhood "irrespective of the doubts and convictions" of others. At the end of this sahavas, Meher Baba gave the completed manuscript of his book God Speaks to two members of Sufism Reoriented, Ludwig H. Dimpfl and Don E. Stevens, for editing and publication in America. The book was subsequently published by Dodd, Mead and Company the following year. On 30 September 1954 Meher Baba gave his Final Declaration message, in which he made enigmatic predictions. In October 1954, Meher Baba discarded his alphabet board and began using a unique set of hand gestures to communicate, which he used for the remainder of his life. On 2 December 1956, outside Satara, India, the car in which Baba was being driven went out of control and a second serious automobile accident occurred. Baba suffered a fractured pelvis and other severe injuries. Nilu, one of Baba's mandali, was killed. This collision seriously incapacitated Baba. Despite his physicians' predictions to the contrary, Baba began to walk again after great effort, but from that point on he was in constant pain and was severely limited in his ability to move. During his trip to the West in 1958, he often needed to be carried from venue to venue. In 1956, during his fifth visit to the US, Baba stayed at New York's Hotel Delmonico before traveling to the Meher Center at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. In July he traveled to Washington, D.C., and received friends and disciples at the home of Ivy Duce, wife of James Terry Duce, the vice-president of the Arabian American Oil Co. He then traveled to Meher Mount at Ojai, California before continuing on to Australia. His final visits to the United States and Australia were made in 1958. 1960s – Later years and message on drugs In 1962, Baba held one of his last public functions, a mass meeting called the East-West Gathering, held in India. At these meetings, at which his Western followers were invited to meet his Indian disciples, Baba gave darshan to many thousands, despite the physical strain this caused him.Awakener Magazine, Volume 9, Number 1–2, 1963, p. 1 Despite deteriorating health, he continued what he called his "Universal Work", which included fasting and seclusion, until his death on 31 January 1969. His samadhi (shrine/tomb) in Meherabad, India, has become a place of international pilgrimage. In the mid-1960s Baba became concerned with the drug culture in the West and began correspondences with several Western academics, including Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, in which he discouraged the use of hallucinogenic drugs for spiritual purposes. In 1966 Baba's responses to questions on drugs were published in a pamphlet titled God in a Pill? Meher Baba stated that drug use was spiritually damaging and that if enlightenment were possible through drugs then "God is not worthy of being God". Meher Baba instructed his young Western disciples to spread this message; in doing so, they increased awareness of Meher Baba's teachings. In an interview with Frederick Chapman, a Harvard graduate and Fulbright scholar who met Baba during a year of study in India, Baba described LSD as "harmful physically, mentally, and spiritually" and warned that "[its continued use] leads to madness or death". An anti-drug campaign was initiated by Baba lovers in the United States, Europe and Australia. The campaign was mostly futile, but won Baba new followers, and some of Baba's views found their way into academic debate on the merits and dangers of hallucinogens. From the East-West Gathering of 1962 onward, Baba's health deteriorated. |
problem in uses such as heating, or in some forms of radar where the receiver can be synchronized with an imprecise magnetron frequency. Where precise frequencies are needed, other devices, such as the klystron are used. The magnetron is a self-oscillating device requiring no external elements other than a power supply. A well-defined threshold anode voltage must be applied before oscillation will build up; this voltage is a function of the dimensions of the resonant cavity, and the applied magnetic field. In pulsed applications there is a delay of several cycles before the oscillator achieves full peak power, and the build-up of anode voltage must be coordinated with the build-up of oscillator output. Where there are an even number of cavities, two concentric rings can connect alternate cavity walls to prevent inefficient modes of oscillation. This is called pi-strapping because the two straps lock the phase difference between adjacent cavities at π radians (180°). The modern magnetron is a fairly efficient device. In a microwave oven, for instance, a 1.1-kilowatt input will generally create about 700 watts of microwave power, an efficiency of around 65%. (The high-voltage and the properties of the cathode determine the power of a magnetron.) Large S band magnetrons can produce up to 2.5 megawatts peak power with an average power of 3.75 kW. Some large magnetrons are water cooled. The magnetron remains in widespread use in roles which require high power, but where precise control over frequency and phase is unimportant. Applications Radar In a radar set, the magnetron's waveguide is connected to an antenna. The magnetron is operated with very short pulses of applied voltage, resulting in a short pulse of high-power microwave energy being radiated. As in all primary radar systems, the radiation reflected from a target is analyzed to produce a radar map on a screen. Several characteristics of the magnetron's output make radar use of the device somewhat problematic. The first of these factors is the magnetron's inherent instability in its transmitter frequency. This instability results not only in frequency shifts from one pulse to the next, but also a frequency shift within an individual transmitted pulse. The second factor is that the energy of the transmitted pulse is spread over a relatively wide frequency spectrum, which requires the receiver to have a correspondingly wide bandwidth. This wide bandwidth allows ambient electrical noise to be accepted into the receiver, thus obscuring somewhat the weak radar echoes, thereby reducing overall receiver signal-to-noise ratio and thus performance. The third factor, depending on application, is the radiation hazard caused by the use of high-power electromagnetic radiation. In some applications, for example, a marine radar mounted on a recreational vessel, a radar with a magnetron output of 2 to 4 kilowatts is often found mounted very near an area occupied by crew or passengers. In practical use these factors have been overcome, or merely accepted, and there are today thousands of magnetron aviation and marine radar units in service. Recent advances in aviation weather-avoidance radar and in marine radar have successfully replaced the magnetron with microwave semiconductor oscillators, which have a narrower output frequency range. These allow a narrower receiver bandwidth to be used, and the higher signal-to-noise ratio in turn allows a lower transmitter power, reducing exposure to EMR. Heating In microwave ovens, the waveguide leads to a radio-frequency-transparent port into the cooking chamber. As the fixed dimensions of the chamber and its physical closeness to the magnetron would normally create standing wave patterns in the chamber, the pattern is randomized by a motorized fan-like mode stirrer'' in the waveguide (more often in commercial ovens), or by a turntable that rotates the food (most common in consumer ovens). An early example of this application was when British scientists in 1954 used a microwave oven to resurrect cryogenically frozen hamsters. Lighting In microwave-excited lighting systems, such as a sulfur lamp, a magnetron provides the microwave field that is passed through a waveguide to the lighting cavity containing the light-emitting substance (e.g., sulfur, metal halides, etc.). Although efficient, these lamps are much more complex than other methods of lighting and therefore not commonly used. More modern variants use HEMTs or GaN-on-SiC power semiconductor devices to generate the microwaves, which are substantially less complex and can be adjusted to maximize light output using a PID controller. History In 1910 Hans Gerdien (1877–1951) of the Siemens Corporation invented a magnetron. In 1912, Swiss physicist Heinrich Greinacher was looking for new ways to calculate the electron mass. He settled on a system consisting of a diode with a cylindrical anode surrounding a rod-shaped cathode, placed in the middle of a magnet. The attempt to measure the electron mass failed because he was unable to achieve a good vacuum in the tube. However, as part of this work, Greinacher developed mathematical models of the motion of the electrons in the crossed magnetic and electric fields. In the US, Albert Hull put this work to use in an attempt to bypass Western Electric's patents on the triode. Western Electric had gained control of this design by buying Lee De Forest's patents on the control of current flow using electric fields via the "grid". Hull intended to use a variable magnetic field, instead of an electrostatic one, to control the flow of the electrons from the cathode to the anode. Working at General Electric's Research Laboratories in Schenectady, New York, Hull built tubes that provided switching through the control of the ratio of the magnetic and electric field strengths. He released several papers and patents on the concept in 1921. Hull's magnetron was not originally intended to generate VHF (very-high-frequency) electromagnetic waves. However, in 1924, Czech physicist August Žáček (1886–1961) and German physicist Erich Habann (1892–1968) independently discovered that the magnetron could generate waves of 100 megahertz to 1 gigahertz. Žáček, a professor at Prague's Charles University, published first; however, he published in a journal with a small circulation and thus attracted little attention. Habann, a student at the University of Jena, investigated the magnetron for his doctoral dissertation of 1924. Throughout the 1920s, Hull and other researchers around the world worked to develop the magnetron. Most of these early magnetrons were glass vacuum tubes with multiple anodes. However, the two-pole magnetron, also known as a split-anode magnetron, had relatively low efficiency. While radar was being developed during World War II, there arose an urgent need for a high-power microwave generator that worked at shorter wavelengths, around 10 cm (3 GHz), rather than the 50 to 150 cm (200 MHz) that was available from tube-based generators of the time. It was known that a multi-cavity resonant magnetron had been developed and patented in 1935 by Hans Hollmann in Berlin. However, the German military considered the frequency drift of Hollman's device to be undesirable, and based their radar systems on the klystron instead. But klystrons could not at that time achieve the high power output that magnetrons eventually reached. This was one reason that German night fighter radars, which never strayed beyond the low-UHF band to start with for front-line aircraft, were not a match for their British counterparts. Likewise, in the UK, Albert Beaumont Wood proposed in 1937 a system with "six or eight small holes" drilled in a metal block, differing from the later production designs only in the aspects of vacuum sealing. However, his idea was rejected by the Navy, who said their valve department was far too busy to consider it. In 1940, at the University of Birmingham in the UK, John Randall and Harry Boot produced a working prototype of a cavity magnetron that produced about 400 W. Within a week this had improved to 1 kW, and within the next few months, with the addition of water cooling and many detail changes, this had improved to 10 and then 25 kW. To deal with its drifting frequency, they sampled the output signal and synchronized their receiver to whatever frequency was actually being generated. In 1941, the problem of frequency instability was solved by James Sayers coupling ("strapping") alternate cavities within the magnetron, which reduced the instability by a factor of 5–6. (For an overview of early magnetron designs, including that of Boot and Randall, see .) According to Andy Manning from the RAF Air Defence Radar Museum, Randall and Boot's discovery was "a massive, massive breakthrough" and "deemed by many, even now, to be the most important invention that came out of the Second World War", while professor of military history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, David Zimmerman, states: Because France had just fallen to the Nazis and Britain had no money to develop the magnetron on a massive scale, Winston Churchill agreed that Sir Henry Tizard should offer the magnetron to the Americans in exchange for their financial and industrial help. An early 10 kW version, built in England by the General Electric Company Research Laboratories, Wembley, London (not to be confused with the similarly named American company General Electric), was taken on the Tizard Mission in September 1940. As the discussion turned to radar, the US Navy representatives began to detail the problems with their short-wavelength systems, complaining that their klystrons could only produce 10 W. With a flourish, "Taffy" Bowen pulled out a magnetron and explained it produced 1000 times that. Bell Telephone Laboratories took the example and quickly began making copies, and before the end of 1940, the Radiation Laboratory had been set up on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop various types of radar using the magnetron. By early 1941, portable centimetric airborne radars were being tested in American and British aircraft. In late 1941, the Telecommunications Research Establishment in the United Kingdom used the magnetron to develop a revolutionary airborne, ground-mapping radar codenamed H2S. The H2S radar was in part developed by Alan Blumlein and Bernard Lovell. The cavity magnetron was widely used during World War II in microwave radar equipment and is often credited with giving Allied radar a considerable performance advantage over German and Japanese radars, thus directly influencing the outcome of the war. It was later described by American historian James Phinney Baxter III as | and anode can be regulated by varying the voltage on this third electrode. This allows the resulting electron tube (called a "triode" because it now has three electrodes) to function as an amplifier because small variations in the electric charge applied to the control grid will result in identical variations in the much larger current of electrons flowing between the cathode and anode. Hull or single-anode magnetron The idea of using a grid for control was patented by Lee de Forest, resulting in considerable research into alternate tube designs that would avoid his patents. One concept used a magnetic field instead of an electrical charge to control current flow, leading to the development of the magnetron tube. In this design, the tube was made with two electrodes, typically with the cathode in the form of a metal rod in the center, and the anode as a cylinder around it. The tube was placed between the poles of a horseshoe magnet arranged such that the magnetic field was aligned parallel to the axis of the electrodes. With no magnetic field present, the tube operates as a diode, with electrons flowing directly from the cathode to the anode. In the presence of the magnetic field, the electrons will experience a force at right angles to their direction of motion, according to the left-hand rule. In this case, the electrons follow a curved path between the cathode and anode. The curvature of the path can be controlled by varying either the magnetic field, using an electromagnet, or by changing the electrical potential between the electrodes. At very high magnetic field settings the electrons are forced back onto the cathode, preventing current flow. At the opposite extreme, with no field, the electrons are free to flow straight from the cathode to the anode. There is a point between the two extremes, the critical value or Hull cut-off magnetic field (and cut-off voltage), where the electrons just reach the anode. At fields around this point, the device operates similar to a triode. However, magnetic control, due to hysteresis and other effects, results in a slower and less faithful response to control current than electrostatic control using a control grid in a conventional triode (not to mention greater weight and complexity), so magnetrons saw limited use in conventional electronic designs. It was noticed that when the magnetron was operating at the critical value, it would emit energy in the radio frequency spectrum. This occurs because a few of the electrons, instead of reaching the anode, continue to circle in the space between the cathode and the anode. Due to an effect now known as cyclotron radiation, these electrons radiate radio frequency energy. The effect is not very efficient. Eventually the electrons hit one of the electrodes, so the number in the circulating state at any given time is a small percentage of the overall current. It was also noticed that the frequency of the radiation depends on the size of the tube, and even early examples were built that produced signals in the microwave region. Early conventional tube systems were limited to the high frequency bands, and although very high frequency systems became widely available in the late 1930s, the ultra high frequency and microwave regions were well beyond the ability of conventional circuits. The magnetron was one of the few devices able to generate signals in the microwave band and it was the only one that was able to produce high power at centimeter wavelengths. Split-anode magnetron The original magnetron was very difficult to keep operating at the critical value, and even then the number of electrons in the circling state at any time was fairly low. This meant that it produced very low-power signals. Nevertheless, as one of the few devices known to create microwaves, interest in the device and potential improvements was widespread. The first major improvement was the split-anode magnetron, also known as a negative-resistance magnetron. As the name implies, this design used an anode that was split in two—one at each end of the tube—creating two half-cylinders. When both were charged to the same voltage the system worked like the original model. But by slightly altering the voltage of the two plates, the electrons' trajectory could be modified so that they would naturally travel towards the lower voltage side. The plates were connected to an oscillator that reversed the relative voltage of the two plates at a given frequency. At any given instant, the electron will naturally be pushed towards the lower-voltage side of the tube. The electron will then oscillate back and forth as the voltage changes. At the same time, a strong magnetic field is applied, stronger than the critical value in the original design. This would normally cause the electron to circle back to the cathode, but due to the oscillating electrical field, the electron instead follows a looping path that continues toward the anodes. Since all of the electrons in the flow experienced this looping motion, the amount of RF energy being radiated was greatly improved. And as the motion occurred at any field level beyond the critical value, it was no longer necessary to carefully tune the fields and voltages, and the overall stability of the device was greatly improved. Unfortunately, the higher field also meant that electrons often circled back to the cathode, depositing their energy on it and causing it to heat up. As this normally causes more electrons to be released, it could sometimes lead to a runaway effect, damaging the device. Cavity magnetron The great advance in magnetron design was the resonant cavity magnetron or electron-resonance magnetron, which works on entirely different principles. In this design the oscillation is created by the physical shape of the anode, rather than external circuits or fields. Mechanically, the cavity magnetron consists of a large, solid cylinder of metal with a hole drilled through the centre of the circular face. A wire acting as the cathode is run down the center of this hole, and the metal block itself forms the anode. Around this hole, known as the "interaction space", are a number of similar holes ("resonators") drilled parallel to the interaction space, connected to the interaction space by a short channel. The resulting block looks something like the cylinder on a revolver, with a somewhat larger central hole. Early models were cut using Colt pistol jigs. Remembering that in an AC circuit the electrons travel along the surface, not the core, of the conductor, the parallel sides of the slot acts as a capacitor while the round holes form an inductor: an LC circuit made of solid copper, with the resonant frequency defined entirely by its dimensions. The magnetic field is set to a value well below the critical, so the electrons follow arcing paths towards the anode. When they strike the anode, they cause it to become negatively charged in that region. As this process is random, some areas will become more or less charged than the areas around them. The anode is constructed of a highly conductive material, almost always copper, so these differences in voltage cause currents to appear to even them out. Since the current has to flow around the outside of the cavity, this process takes time. During that time additional electrons will avoid the hot spots and be deposited further along the anode, as the additional current flowing around it arrives too. This causes an oscillating current to form as the current tries to equalize one spot, then another. The oscillating currents flowing around the cavities, and their effect on the electron flow within the tube, cause large amounts of microwave radiofrequency energy to be generated in the cavities. The cavities |
divisions of the countryside, reassigned as local jurisdictions known as manors or seigneuries; each manor being subject to a lord (French seigneur), usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a higher lord (see Feudalism). The lord held a manorial court, governed by public law and local custom. Not all territorial seigneurs were secular; bishops and abbots also held lands that entailed similar obligations. By extension, the word manor is sometimes used in England to mean any home area or territory in which authority is held, often in a police or criminal context. In the generic plan of a medieval manor from Shepherd's Historical Atlas, the strips of individually worked land in the open field system are immediately apparent. In this plan, the manor house is set slightly apart from the village, but equally often the village grew up around the forecourt of the manor, formerly walled, while the manor lands stretched away outside, as still may be seen at Petworth House. As concerns for privacy increased in the 18th century, manor houses were often located a farther distance from the village. For example, when a grand new house was required by the new owner of Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire, in the 1830s, the site of the existing manor house at the edge of its village was abandoned for a new one, isolated in its park, with the village out of view. In an agrarian society, the conditions of land tenure underlie all social or economic factors. There were two legal systems of pre-manorial landholding. One, the most common, was the system of holding land "allodially" in full outright ownership. The other was a use of precaria or benefices, in which land was held conditionally (the root of the English word "precarious"). To these two systems, the Carolingian monarchs added a third, the aprisio, which linked manorialism with feudalism. The aprisio made its first appearance in Charlemagne's province of Septimania in the south of France, when Charlemagne had to settle the Visigothic refugees who had fled with his retreating forces after the failure of his Zaragoza expedition of 778. He solved this problem by allotting "desert" tracts of uncultivated land belonging to the royal fisc under direct control of the emperor. These holdings aprisio entailed specific conditions. The earliest specific aprisio grant that has been identified was at Fontjoncouse, near Narbonne (see Lewis, links). In former Roman settlements, a system of villas, dating from Late Antiquity, was inherited by the medieval world. The seigneur The possessor of a seigneurie bears the title of "Lord". He can be an individual, in the vast majority of cases a national of the nobility or of the Bourgeoisie, but also a judicial person most often an ecclesiastical institution such as an abbey, a cathedral or canonical chapter or a military order. The power of the lord was exercised through various intermediaries, the most important of which was the bailiff. The sovereign can also be a lord; the seigneuries he owns form the royal domain. The title of lord is also granted, especially in modern times, to individuals holding noble fiefdoms which are not for all that seigneuries. These "lords" are sometimes called sieurs, equivalent terms in medieval times. The land lordship The lord is the direct or prominent owner of the land assets of his lordship. The notion of absolute ownership over a common good cannot be applied, because there are also others than the main user who have rights over these goods. We distinguish in the land lordship two sets the reserves which is the set of goods of which the lord reserves the direct exploitation and tenant-in-chief, property whose exploitation is entrusted to a tenant against payment of a royalty, most often called cens and services such as Corvée. The distribution between reserve and tenure varies depending on the period and region. Common features Manors each consisted of up to three classes of land: Demesne, the part directly controlled by the lord and used for the benefit of his household and dependents; Dependent (serf or villein) holdings carrying the obligation | examining the origins of the monastic cloister, Walter Horn found that "as a manorial entity the Carolingian monastery ... differed little from the fabric of a feudal estate, save that the corporate community of men for whose sustenance this organisation was maintained consisted of monks who served God in chant and spent much of their time in reading and writing." Manorialism died slowly and piecemeal, along with its most vivid feature in the landscape, the open field system. It outlasted serfdom in the sense that it continued with freehold labourers. As an economic system, it outlasted feudalism, according to Andrew Jones, because "it could maintain a warrior, but it could equally well maintain a capitalist landlord. It could be self-sufficient, yield produce for the market, or it could yield a money rent." The last feudal dues in France were abolished at the French Revolution. In parts of eastern Germany, the Rittergut manors of Junkers remained until World War II. In Quebec, the last feudal rents were paid in 1970 under the modified provisions of the Seigniorial Dues Abolition Act of 1935. Historical and geographical distribution The term is most often used with reference to medieval Western Europe. Antecedents of the system can be traced to the rural economy of the later Roman Empire (Dominate). With a declining birthrate and population, labour was the key factor of production. Successive administrations tried to stabilise the imperial economy by freezing the social structure into place: sons were to succeed their fathers in their trade, councilors were forbidden to resign, and coloni, the cultivators of land, were not to move from the land they were attached to. The workers of the land were on their way to becoming serfs. Several factors conspired to merge the status of former slaves and former free farmers into a dependent class of such coloni: it was possible to be described as servus et colonus, "both slave and colonus". The Laws of Constantine I around 325 both reinforced the semi-servile status of the coloni and limited their rights to sue in the courts; the Codex Theodosianus promulgated under Theodosius II extended these restrictions. The legal status of adscripti, "bound to the soil", contrasted with barbarian foederati, who were permitted to settle within the imperial boundaries, remaining subject to their own traditional law. As the Germanic kingdoms succeeded Roman authority in the West in the fifth century, Roman landlords were often simply replaced by Germanic ones, with little change to the underlying situation or displacement of populations. The process of rural self-sufficiency was given an abrupt boost in the eighth century, when normal trade in the Mediterranean Sea was disrupted. The thesis put forward by Belgian historian Henri Pirenne supposes that the Arab conquests forced the medieval economy into even greater ruralisation and gave rise to the classic feudal pattern of varying degrees of servile peasantry underpinning a hierarchy of localised power centers. Description The word derives from traditional inherited divisions of the countryside, reassigned as local jurisdictions known as manors or seigneuries; each manor being subject to a lord (French seigneur), usually holding his position in return for undertakings offered to a higher lord (see Feudalism). The lord held a manorial court, governed by public law and local custom. Not all territorial seigneurs were secular; bishops and abbots also held lands that entailed similar obligations. By extension, the word manor is sometimes used in England to mean any home area or territory in which authority is held, often in a police or criminal context. In the generic plan of a medieval manor from Shepherd's Historical Atlas, the strips of individually worked land in the open field system are immediately apparent. In this plan, the manor house is set slightly apart from the village, but equally often the village grew up around the forecourt of the manor, formerly walled, while the manor lands stretched away outside, as still may be seen at Petworth House. As concerns for privacy increased in the 18th century, manor houses were often located a farther distance from the village. For example, when a grand new house was required by the new owner of Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire, in the 1830s, the site of the existing manor house at the edge of its village was abandoned for a new one, isolated in its park, with the village out of view. In an agrarian society, the conditions of land tenure underlie all social or economic factors. There were two legal systems of pre-manorial landholding. One, the most common, was the system of holding land "allodially" in full outright ownership. The other was a use of precaria or benefices, in which land was held conditionally (the root of the English word "precarious"). To these two systems, the Carolingian monarchs added a third, the aprisio, which linked manorialism with feudalism. The aprisio made its first appearance in Charlemagne's province of Septimania in the south of France, when Charlemagne had to settle the Visigothic refugees who had fled with his retreating forces after the failure of his Zaragoza expedition of 778. He solved this problem by allotting "desert" tracts of uncultivated land belonging to the royal fisc under direct control of the emperor. These holdings aprisio entailed specific conditions. The earliest specific aprisio grant that has been identified was at Fontjoncouse, near Narbonne (see Lewis, links). In former Roman settlements, a system of villas, dating from Late Antiquity, was inherited by the medieval world. The seigneur The possessor of a seigneurie bears the title of "Lord". He can be an individual, in the vast majority of cases a national of the nobility or of the Bourgeoisie, but also a judicial person most often an ecclesiastical institution such as an abbey, a cathedral or canonical chapter or a military order. The power of the lord was exercised through various intermediaries, the most important of which was the bailiff. The sovereign can also be a lord; the seigneuries he owns form the royal domain. The title of lord is also granted, especially in modern times, to individuals holding noble fiefdoms which are not for all that seigneuries. These "lords" are sometimes called sieurs, equivalent terms in medieval times. The land lordship The lord is the direct or prominent owner of the land assets of his lordship. The notion of absolute ownership over a common good cannot be applied, because there are also others than the main user who have rights over these goods. We distinguish in the land lordship two sets the reserves which is the set of goods of which the lord reserves the direct exploitation and tenant-in-chief, property whose exploitation is entrusted to a tenant against payment of a royalty, most often called cens and services such as Corvée. The distribution between reserve and tenure varies depending on the period and region. Common features Manors each consisted of up to three classes of land: Demesne, the part directly controlled by the lord and used for the benefit of his household and dependents; Dependent (serf or villein) holdings carrying the obligation that the peasant household supply the lord with specified labour services or a part of its output (or cash in lieu thereof), subject to the custom attached to the holding; and Free peasant land, without such obligation but otherwise subject to manorial jurisdiction and |
actually lost the war until she was 10 years of age: "I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was ten years old, it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn't believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant. I still find it hard to believe, so strong are childhood impressions." Her mother would swat her with a hairbrush or a slipper as a form of discipline. May Belle Mitchell was "hissing blood-curdling threats" to her daughter to make her behave the evening she took her to a women's suffrage rally led by Carrie Chapman Catt. Her daughter sat on a platform wearing a Votes-for-Women banner, blowing kisses to the gentlemen, while her mother gave an impassioned speech. She was nineteen years old when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, which gave women the right to vote. May Belle Mitchell was president of the Atlanta Woman's Suffrage League (1915), co-founder of Georgia's division of the League of Women Voters, chairwoman of press publicity for the Georgia Mothers' Congress and Parent Teacher Association, a member of the Pioneer Society, the Atlanta Woman's Club, and several Catholic and literary societies. Mitchell's father was not in favor of corporal punishment in school. During his tenure as president of the educational board (1911–1912), corporal punishment in the public schools was abolished. Reportedly, Eugene Mitchell received a whipping on the first day he attended school and the mental impression of the thrashing lasted far longer than the physical marks. Jackson Hill was an old, affluent part of the city. At the bottom of Jackson Hill was an area of African American homes and businesses called "Darktown". The mayhem of the Atlanta Race Riot occurred over four days in September 1906 when Mitchell was five years old. Local white newspapers printed unfounded rumors that several white women had been assaulted by black men, prompting an angry mob of 10,000 to assemble in the streets, pulling black people from street cars, beating, killing dozens over the next three days. Eugene Mitchell went to bed early the night the rioting began, but was awakened by the sounds of gunshots. The following morning, as he later wrote, to his wife, he learned "16 negroes had been killed and a multitude had been injured" and that rioters "killed or tried to kill every Negro they saw." As the rioting continued, rumors ran wild that black people would burn Jackson Hill. At his daughter's suggestion, Eugene Mitchell, who did not own a gun, stood guard with a sword. Though the rumors proved untrue and no attack arrived, Mitchell recalled twenty years later the terror she felt during the riot. Mitchell grew up in a Southern culture where the fear of black on white rape incited mob violence, and in this world, white Georgians lived in fear of the "black beast rapist". A few years after the riot, the Mitchell family decided to move away from Jackson Hill. In 1912, they moved to the east side of Peachtree Street just north of Seventeenth Street in Atlanta. Past the nearest neighbor's house was forest and beyond it the Chattahoochee River. Mitchell's former Jackson Hill home was destroyed in the Great Atlanta Fire of 1917. Mitchell's father was of a Protestant background, while her mother was a devout Catholic; Mitchell was raised in a Catholic household. As a young woman, she spent time visiting the Sisters of Mercy convent affiliated with St. Joseph's Infirmary in downtown Atlanta. Her religious upbringing influenced her decision to make the O'Hara family in her novel Catholics in a Protestant-majority state. One of Mitchell's mother's cousins entered the Sisters of Mercy at St. Vincent's Convent in Savannah in 1883, becoming Sister Mary Melanie. Mitchell likely based the characters Melanie Hamilton and Careen O'Hara off of this relation. The South of Gone with the Wind While "the South" exists as a geographical region of the United States, it is also said to exist as "a place of the imagination" of writers. An image of "the South" was fixed in Mitchell's imagination when at six years old her mother took her on a buggy tour through ruined plantations and "Sherman's sentinels", the brick and stone chimneys that remained after William Tecumseh Sherman's "March and torch" through Georgia. Mitchell would later recall what her mother had said to her: She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn't have some weapon to meet the new world. From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell's defensive weapon would become her writing. Mitchell said she heard Civil War stories from her relatives when she was growing up: On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk. On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen ("Mamie") Fitzgerald and Sarah ("Sis") Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents' plantation home in Jonesboro. Mamie had been twenty-one years old and Sis was thirteen when the Civil War began. An avid reader An avid reader, young Margaret read "boys' stories" by G.A. Henty, the Tom Swift series, and the Rover Boys series by Edward Stratemeyer. Her mother read Mary Johnston's novels to her before she could read. They both wept reading Johnston's The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912). Between the "scream of shells, the mighty onrush of charges, the grim and grisly aftermath of war", Cease Firing is a romance novel involving the courtship of a Confederate soldier and a Louisiana plantation belle with Civil War illustrations by N. C. Wyeth. She also read the plays of William Shakespeare, and novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. Mitchell's two favorite children's books were by author Edith Nesbit: Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). She kept both on her bookshelf even as an adult and gave them as gifts. Another author whom Mitchell read as a teenager and who had a major impact in her understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction was Thomas Dixon. Dixon's popular trilogy of novels The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden (1902), The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) and The Traitor: A Story of the Rise and Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907) all depicted in vivid terms a white South victimized during the Reconstruction by Northern carpetbaggers and freed slaves, with an especial emphasis upon Reconstruction as a nightmarish time when black men ran amok, raping white women with impunity. As a teenager, Mitchell liked Dixon's books so much that she organized the local children to put on dramatizations of his books. The picture the white supremacist Dixon drew of Reconstruction is now rejected as inaccurate, but at the time, the memory of the past was such it was widely believed by white Americans. In a letter to Dixon dated August 10, 1936, Mitchell wrote: "I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much." Young storyteller An imaginative and precocious writer, Margaret Mitchell began with stories about animals, then progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She fashioned book covers for her stories, bound the tablet paper pages together and added her own artwork. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing enterprise: "Urchin Publishing Co." Later her stories were written in notebooks. Mary Belle Mitchell kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes and several boxes of her stories were stored in the house by the time Margaret went off to college. "Margaret" is a character riding a galloping pony in The Little Pioneers, and plays "Cowboys and Indians" in When We Were Shipwrecked. Romantic love and honor emerged as themes of abiding interest for Mitchell in The Knight and the Lady (ca. 1909), in which a "good knight" and a "bad knight" duel for the hand of the lady. In The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden (ca. 1913), a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must withstand the pain inflicted upon him to uphold his honor and win the girl. The same themes were treated with increasing artistry in Lost Laysen, the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916, and, with much greater sophistication, in Mitchell's last known novel, Gone with the Wind, which she began in 1926. In her pre-teens, Mitchell also wrote stories set in foreign locations, such as The Greaser (1913), a cowboy story set in Mexico. In 1913 she wrote two stories with Civil War settings; one includes her notation that "237 pages are in this book". School life While the Great War carried on in Europe (1914–1918), Margaret Mitchell attended Atlanta's Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), a "fashionable" private girls' school with an enrollment of over 300 students. She was very active in the Drama Club. Mitchell played the male characters: Nick Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Launcelot Gobbo in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, among others. She wrote a play about snobbish college girls that she acted in as well. She also joined the Literary Club and had two stories published in the yearbook: Little Sister and Sergeant Terry. Ten-year-old "Peggy" is the heroine in Little Sister. She hears her older sister being raped and shoots the rapist: Coldly, dispassionately she viewed him, the chill steel of the gun giving her confidence. She must not miss now—she would not miss—and she did not. Mitchell received encouragement from her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, who recognized her writing talent. A demanding teacher, Paisley told her she had ability if she worked hard and would not be careless in constructing sentences. A sentence, she said, must be "complete, concise and coherent". Mitchell read the books of Thomas Dixon, Jr., and in 1916, when the silent film, The Birth of a Nation, was showing in Atlanta, she dramatized Dixon's The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). As both playwright and actress, she took the role of Steve Hoyle. For the production, she made a Ku Klux Klan costume from a white crepe dress and wore a boy's wig. (Note: Dixon rewrote The Traitor as The Black Hood (1924) and Steve Hoyle was renamed George Wilkes.) During her years at Washington Seminary, Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was away studying at Harvard College (1915–1917), and he left in May 1917 to enlist in the army, about a month after the U.S. declared war on Germany. He set sail for France in April 1918, participated in engagements in the Lagny and Marbache sectors, then returned to Georgia in October as a training instructor. While Margaret and her mother were in New York in September 1918 preparing for Margaret to attend college, Stephens wired his father that he was safe after his ship had been torpedoed en route to New York from France. Stephens Mitchell thought college was the "ruination of girls". However, May Belle Mitchell placed a high value on education for women and she wanted her daughter's future accomplishments to come from using her mind. She saw education as Margaret's weapon and "the key to survival". The classical college education she desired for her daughter was one that was on par with men's colleges, and this type of education was available only at northern schools. Her mother chose Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for Margaret because she considered it to be the best women's college in the United States. Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry, who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon from May 10 until the time he set sail for France on July 17. Henry was "slightly effeminate", "ineffectual", and "rather effete-looking" with "homosexual tendencies", according to biographer Anne Edwards. Before departing for France, he gave Mitchell an engagement ring. On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17. As Henry waited in the Verdun trenches, shortly before being wounded, he composed a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook, found later among his effects. The last stanza of Lieutenant Clifford W. Henry's poem follows: If "out of luck" at duty's call In glorious action I should fall At God's behest, May those I hold most dear and best Know I have stood the acid test Should I "go West." Henry repeatedly advanced in front of the platoon he commanded, drawing machine-gun fire so that the German nests could be located and wiped out by his men. Although wounded in the leg in this effort, his death was the result of shrapnel wounds from an air bomb dropped by a German plane. He was awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme for his acts of heroism. From the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross and an Oak Leaf Cluster in lieu of a second Distinguished Service Cross. Clifford Henry was the great love of Margaret Mitchell's life, according to her brother. In a letter to a friend (A. Edee, March 26, 1920), Mitchell wrote of Clifford that she had a "memory of a love that had in it no trace of physical passion". Mitchell had vague aspirations of a career in psychiatry, but her future was derailed by an event that killed over fifty million people worldwide, the 1918 flu pandemic. On January 25, 1919, her mother, May | twenty-one years old and Sis was thirteen when the Civil War began. An avid reader An avid reader, young Margaret read "boys' stories" by G.A. Henty, the Tom Swift series, and the Rover Boys series by Edward Stratemeyer. Her mother read Mary Johnston's novels to her before she could read. They both wept reading Johnston's The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912). Between the "scream of shells, the mighty onrush of charges, the grim and grisly aftermath of war", Cease Firing is a romance novel involving the courtship of a Confederate soldier and a Louisiana plantation belle with Civil War illustrations by N. C. Wyeth. She also read the plays of William Shakespeare, and novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. Mitchell's two favorite children's books were by author Edith Nesbit: Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). She kept both on her bookshelf even as an adult and gave them as gifts. Another author whom Mitchell read as a teenager and who had a major impact in her understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction was Thomas Dixon. Dixon's popular trilogy of novels The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden (1902), The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905) and The Traitor: A Story of the Rise and Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907) all depicted in vivid terms a white South victimized during the Reconstruction by Northern carpetbaggers and freed slaves, with an especial emphasis upon Reconstruction as a nightmarish time when black men ran amok, raping white women with impunity. As a teenager, Mitchell liked Dixon's books so much that she organized the local children to put on dramatizations of his books. The picture the white supremacist Dixon drew of Reconstruction is now rejected as inaccurate, but at the time, the memory of the past was such it was widely believed by white Americans. In a letter to Dixon dated August 10, 1936, Mitchell wrote: "I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much." Young storyteller An imaginative and precocious writer, Margaret Mitchell began with stories about animals, then progressed to fairy tales and adventure stories. She fashioned book covers for her stories, bound the tablet paper pages together and added her own artwork. At age eleven she gave a name to her publishing enterprise: "Urchin Publishing Co." Later her stories were written in notebooks. Mary Belle Mitchell kept her daughter's stories in white enamel bread boxes and several boxes of her stories were stored in the house by the time Margaret went off to college. "Margaret" is a character riding a galloping pony in The Little Pioneers, and plays "Cowboys and Indians" in When We Were Shipwrecked. Romantic love and honor emerged as themes of abiding interest for Mitchell in The Knight and the Lady (ca. 1909), in which a "good knight" and a "bad knight" duel for the hand of the lady. In The Arrow Brave and the Deer Maiden (ca. 1913), a half-white Indian brave, Jack, must withstand the pain inflicted upon him to uphold his honor and win the girl. The same themes were treated with increasing artistry in Lost Laysen, the novella Mitchell wrote as a teenager in 1916, and, with much greater sophistication, in Mitchell's last known novel, Gone with the Wind, which she began in 1926. In her pre-teens, Mitchell also wrote stories set in foreign locations, such as The Greaser (1913), a cowboy story set in Mexico. In 1913 she wrote two stories with Civil War settings; one includes her notation that "237 pages are in this book". School life While the Great War carried on in Europe (1914–1918), Margaret Mitchell attended Atlanta's Washington Seminary (now The Westminster Schools), a "fashionable" private girls' school with an enrollment of over 300 students. She was very active in the Drama Club. Mitchell played the male characters: Nick Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Launcelot Gobbo in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, among others. She wrote a play about snobbish college girls that she acted in as well. She also joined the Literary Club and had two stories published in the yearbook: Little Sister and Sergeant Terry. Ten-year-old "Peggy" is the heroine in Little Sister. She hears her older sister being raped and shoots the rapist: Coldly, dispassionately she viewed him, the chill steel of the gun giving her confidence. She must not miss now—she would not miss—and she did not. Mitchell received encouragement from her English teacher, Mrs. Paisley, who recognized her writing talent. A demanding teacher, Paisley told her she had ability if she worked hard and would not be careless in constructing sentences. A sentence, she said, must be "complete, concise and coherent". Mitchell read the books of Thomas Dixon, Jr., and in 1916, when the silent film, The Birth of a Nation, was showing in Atlanta, she dramatized Dixon's The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). As both playwright and actress, she took the role of Steve Hoyle. For the production, she made a Ku Klux Klan costume from a white crepe dress and wore a boy's wig. (Note: Dixon rewrote The Traitor as The Black Hood (1924) and Steve Hoyle was renamed George Wilkes.) During her years at Washington Seminary, Mitchell's brother, Stephens, was away studying at Harvard College (1915–1917), and he left in May 1917 to enlist in the army, about a month after the U.S. declared war on Germany. He set sail for France in April 1918, participated in engagements in the Lagny and Marbache sectors, then returned to Georgia in October as a training instructor. While Margaret and her mother were in New York in September 1918 preparing for Margaret to attend college, Stephens wired his father that he was safe after his ship had been torpedoed en route to New York from France. Stephens Mitchell thought college was the "ruination of girls". However, May Belle Mitchell placed a high value on education for women and she wanted her daughter's future accomplishments to come from using her mind. She saw education as Margaret's weapon and "the key to survival". The classical college education she desired for her daughter was one that was on par with men's colleges, and this type of education was available only at northern schools. Her mother chose Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts for Margaret because she considered it to be the best women's college in the United States. Upon graduating from Washington Seminary in June 1918, Mitchell fell in love with a Harvard graduate, a young army lieutenant, Clifford West Henry, who was chief bayonet instructor at Camp Gordon from May 10 until the time he set sail for France on July 17. Henry was "slightly effeminate", "ineffectual", and "rather effete-looking" with "homosexual tendencies", according to biographer Anne Edwards. Before departing for France, he gave Mitchell an engagement ring. On September 14, while she was enrolled at Smith College, Henry was mortally wounded in action in France and died on October 17. As Henry waited in the Verdun trenches, shortly before being wounded, he composed a poem on a leaf torn from his field notebook, found later among his effects. The last stanza of Lieutenant Clifford W. Henry's poem follows: If "out of luck" at duty's call In glorious action I should fall At God's behest, May those I hold most dear and best Know I have stood the acid test Should I "go West." Henry repeatedly advanced in front of the platoon he commanded, drawing machine-gun fire so that the German nests could be located and wiped out by his men. Although wounded in the leg in this effort, his death was the result of shrapnel wounds from an air bomb dropped by a German plane. He was awarded the French Croix de guerre avec palme for his acts of heroism. From the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces, he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross and an Oak Leaf Cluster in lieu of a second Distinguished Service Cross. Clifford Henry was the great love of Margaret Mitchell's life, according to her brother. In a letter to a friend (A. Edee, March 26, 1920), Mitchell wrote of Clifford that she had a "memory of a love that had in it no trace of physical passion". Mitchell had vague aspirations of a career in psychiatry, but her future was derailed by an event that killed over fifty million people worldwide, the 1918 flu pandemic. On January 25, 1919, her mother, May Belle Mitchell, succumbed to pneumonia from the "Spanish flu". Mitchell arrived home from college a day after her mother had died. Knowing her death was imminent, May Belle Mitchell wrote her daughter a brief letter and advised her: Give of yourself with both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life. An average student at Smith College, Mitchell did not excel in any area of academics. She held a low estimation of her writing abilities. Even though her English professor had praised her work, she felt the praise was undue. After finishing her freshman year at Smith, Mitchell returned to Atlanta to take over the household for her father and never returned to college. In October 1919, while regaining her strength after an appendectomy, she confided to a friend that giving up college and her dreams of a "journalistic career" to keep house and take her mother's place in society meant "giving up all the worthwhile things that counted for—nothing!" Marriage Margaret began using the name "Peggy" at Washington Seminary, and the abbreviated form "Peg" at Smith College when she found an icon for herself in the mythological winged horse, "Pegasus", that inspires poets. Peggy made her Atlanta society debut in the 1920 winter season. In the "gin and jazz style" of the times, she did her "flapping" in the 1920s. At a 1921 Atlanta debutante charity ball, she performed an Apache dance. The dance included a kiss with her male partner that shocked Atlanta high society and led to her being blacklisted from the Junior League. The Apache and the Tango were scandalous dances for their elements of eroticism, the latter popularized in a 1921 silent film, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that made its lead actor, Rudolph Valentino, a sex symbol for his ability to Tango. Mitchell was, in her own words, an "unscrupulous flirt". She found herself engaged to five men, but maintained that she neither lied to or misled any of them. A local gossip columnist, who wrote under the name Polly Peachtree, described Mitchell's love life in a 1922 column: ...she has in her brief life, perhaps, had more men really, truly 'dead in love' with her, more honest-to-goodness suitors than almost any other girl in Atlanta. In April 1922, Mitchell was seeing two men almost daily: one was Berrien ("Red") |
through a larval stage, then enter an inactive state called pupa (called a "chrysalis" in butterfly species), and finally emerge as adults. Evolution The earliest insect forms showed direct development (ametabolism), and the evolution of metamorphosis in insects is thought to have fuelled their dramatic radiation (1,2). Some early ametabolous "true insects" are still present today, such as bristletails and silverfish. Hemimetabolous insects include cockroaches, grasshoppers, dragonflies, and true bugs. Phylogenetically, all insects in the Pterygota undergo a marked change in form, texture and physical appearance from immature stage to adult. These insects either have hemimetabolous development, and undergo an incomplete or partial metamorphosis, or holometabolous development, which undergo a complete metamorphosis, including a pupal or resting stage between the larval and adult forms. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to explain the evolution of holometaboly from hemimetaboly, mostly centering on whether or not the intermediate stages of hemimetabolous forms are homologous in origin to the pupal stage of holometabolous forms. More recently, scientific attention has turned to characterizing the mechanistic basis of metamorphosis in terms of its hormonal control, by characterizing spatial and temporal patterns of hormone expression relative to metamorphosis in a wide range of insects. Temperature-Dependent Metamorphosis According to a 2009 study, temperature plays an important role in insect development as each individual species are found to have specific thermal windows that allow them to progress through their developmental stages. These windows are not significantly affected by ecological traits, rather, the windows are phylogenetically adapted to the ecological circumstances insects are living in. Recent research According to research from 2008, adult Manduca sexta is able to retain behavior learned as a caterpillar. Another caterpillar, the ornate moth caterpillar, is able to carry toxins that it acquires from its diet through metamorphosis and into adulthood, where the toxins still serve for protection against predators. Many observations published in 2002, and supported in 2013 indicate that programmed cell death plays a considerable role during physiological processes of multicellular organisms, particularly during embryogenesis, and metamorphosis. Additional research in 2019 found that both autophagy and apoptosis, the two ways programmed cell death occur, are processes undergone during insect metamorphosis. Below is the sequence of steps in the metamorphosis of the butterfly (illustrated): 1 – The larva of a butterfly 2 – The pupa is now spewing the thread to form chrysalis 3 – The chrysalis is fully formed 4 – Adult butterfly coming out of the chrysalis Chordata Amphioxus In cephalochordata, metamorphosis is iodothyronine-induced and it could be an ancestral feature of all chordates. Fish Some fish, both bony fish (Osteichthyes) and jawless fish (Agnatha), undergo metamorphosis. Fish metamorphosis is typically under strong control by the thyroid hormone. Examples among the non-bony fish include the lamprey. Among the bony fish, mechanisms are varied. The salmon is diadromous, meaning that it changes from a freshwater to a saltwater lifestyle. Many species of flatfish begin their life bilaterally symmetrical, with an eye on either side of the body; but one eye moves to join the other side of the fish – which becomes the upper side – in the adult form. The European eel has a number of metamorphoses, from the larval stage to the leptocephalus stage, then a quick metamorphosis to glass eel at the edge of the continental shelf (eight days for the Japanese eel), two months at | embryo to larva (fry) and then to the juvenile stage during absorption of the yolk sac, because after that phase the individual needs to be able to feed for itself. Amphibians In typical amphibian development, eggs are laid in water and larvae are adapted to an aquatic lifestyle. Frogs, toads, and newts all hatch from the eggs as larvae with external gills but it will take some time for the amphibians to interact outside with pulmonary respiration. Afterwards, newt larvae start a predatory lifestyle, while tadpoles mostly scrape food off surfaces with their horny tooth ridges. Metamorphosis in amphibians is regulated by thyroxin concentration in the blood, which stimulates metamorphosis, and prolactin, which counteracts its effect. Specific events are dependent on threshold values for different tissues. Because most embryonic development is outside the parental body, development is subject to many adaptations due to specific ecological circumstances. For this reason tadpoles can have horny ridges for teeth, whiskers, and fins. They also make use of the lateral line organ. After metamorphosis, these organs become redundant and will be resorbed by controlled cell death, called apoptosis. The amount of adaptation to specific ecological circumstances is remarkable, with many discoveries still being made. Frogs and toads With frogs and toads, the external gills of the newly hatched tadpole are covered with a gill sac after a few days, and lungs are quickly formed. Front legs are formed under the gill sac, and hindlegs are visible a few days later. Following that there is usually a longer stage during which the tadpole lives off a vegetarian diet. Tadpoles use a relatively long, spiral‐shaped gut to digest that diet. Recent studies suggest tadpoles don't have a balanced homeostatic feedback control system until the beginning stages of metamorphosis. At this point, their long gut shortens and begins favoring the diet of insects. Rapid changes in the body can then be observed as the lifestyle of the frog changes completely. The spiral‐shaped mouth with horny tooth ridges is resorbed together with the spiral gut. The animal develops a big jaw, and its gills disappear along with its gill sac. Eyes and legs grow quickly, a tongue is formed, and all this is accompanied by associated changes in the neural networks (development of stereoscopic vision, loss of the lateral line system, etc.) All this can happen in about a day, so it is truly a metamorphosis. It is not until a few days later that the tail is reabsorbed, due to the higher thyroxin concentrations required for tail resorption. Salamanders Salamander development is highly diverse; some species go through a dramatic reorganization when transitioning from aquatic larvae to terrestrial adults, while others, such as the axolotl, display pedomorphosis and never develop into terrestrial adults. Within the genus Ambystoma, species have evolved to be pedomorphic several times, and pedomorphosis and complete development can both occur in some species. Newts In newts, metamorphosis occurs due to the change in habitat, not a change in diet, because newt larvae already feed as predators and continue doing so as adults. Newts' gills are never covered by a gill sac and will be resorbed only just before the animal leaves the water. Adults can move faster on land than in water. Just as in tadpoles, their lungs are functional early, but newts use them less frequently than tadpoles. Newts often have an aquatic phase in spring and summer, and a land phase in winter. For adaptation to a water phase, prolactin is the required hormone, and for adaptation to the land phase, thyroxin. External gills do not return in subsequent aquatic phases because these are completely absorbed upon leaving the water for the first time. Caecilians |
than inhibiting its breakdown in the liver as general MAOIs do. Additionally, MAO-B remains free and continues to metabolize tyramine in the stomach, although this is less significant than the liver action. Thus, RIMAs are unlikely to elicit tyramine-mediated hypertensive crisis; moreover, dietary modifications are not usually necessary when taking a reversible inhibitor of MAO-A (i.e., moclobemide) or low doses of selective MAO-B inhibitors (e.g., selegiline 6 mg/24 hours transdermal patch). Drug interactions The most significant risk associated with the use of MAOIs is the potential for drug interactions with over-the-counter, prescription, or illegally obtained medications, and some dietary supplements (e.g., St. John's wort, tryptophan). It is vital that a doctor supervise such combinations to avoid adverse reactions. For this reason, many users carry an MAOI-card, which lets emergency medical personnel know what drugs to avoid (e.g. adrenaline [epinephrine] dosage should be reduced by 75%, and duration is extended.) Tryptophan supplements can be consumed with MAOIs, but can result in transient serotonin syndrome. MAOIs should not be combined with other psychoactive substances (antidepressants, painkillers, stimulants, including prescribed, OTC and illegally acquired drugs, etc.) except under expert care. Certain combinations can cause lethal reactions, common examples including SSRIs, tricyclics, MDMA, meperidine, tramadol, and dextromethorphan. Drugs that affect the release or reuptake of epinephrine, norepinephrine, or dopamine typically need to be administered at lower doses due to the resulting potentiated and prolonged effect. MAOIs also interact with tobacco-containing products (e.g. cigarettes) and may potentiate the effects of certain compounds in tobacco. This may be reflected in the difficulty of smoking cessation, as tobacco contains naturally occurring MAOI compounds in addition to the nicotine. While safer than general MAOIs, still possess significant and potentially serious drug interactions with many common drugs; in particular, they can cause serotonin syndrome or hypertensive crisis when combined with almost any antidepressant or stimulant, common migraine medications, certain herbs, or most cold medicines (including decongestants, antihistamines, and cough syrup). Ocular alpha-2 agonists such as brimonidine and apraclonidine are glaucoma medications which reduce intraocular pressure by decreasing aqueous production. These alpha-2 agonists should not be given with oral MAOIs due to the risk of hypertensive crisis. Withdrawal Antidepressants including MAOIs have some dependence-producing effects, the most notable one being a discontinuation syndrome, which may be severe especially if MAOIs are discontinued abruptly or too rapidly. The dependence-producing potential of MAOIs or antidepressants in general is not as significant as benzodiazepines, however. Discontinuation symptoms can be managed by a gradual reduction in dosage over a period of weeks, months or years to minimize or prevent withdrawal symptoms. MAOIs, as with most antidepressant medication, may not alter the course of the disorder in a significant, permanent way, so it is possible that discontinuation can return the patient to the pre-treatment state. This consideration complicates prescribing between a MAOI and a SSRI, because it is necessary to clear the system completely of one drug before starting another. One physician organization recommends the dose to be tapered down over a minimum of four weeks, followed by a two week washout period. The result is that a depressed patient will have to bear the depression without chemical help during the drug-free interval. This may be preferable to risking the effects of an interaction between the two drugs. Mechanism of action MAOIs act by inhibiting the activity of monoamine oxidase, thus preventing the breakdown of monoamine neurotransmitters and thereby increasing their availability. There are two isoforms of monoamine oxidase, MAO-A and MAO-B. MAO-A preferentially deaminates serotonin, melatonin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. MAO-B preferentially deaminates phenethylamine and certain other trace amines; in contrast, MAO-A preferentially deaminates other trace amines, like tyramine, whereas dopamine is equally deaminated by both types. Reversibility The early MAOIs covalently bound to the monoamine oxidase enzymes, thus inhibiting them irreversibly; the bound enzyme could not function and thus enzyme activity was blocked until the cell made new enzymes. The enzymes turn over approximately every two weeks. A few newer MAOIs, a notable one being moclobemide, are reversible, meaning that they are able to detach from the enzyme to facilitate usual catabolism of the substrate. The level of inhibition in this way is | excess NE; when MAO-A is inhibited, however, NE levels get too high, leading to dangerous increases in blood pressure. RIMAs are displaced from MAO-A in the presence of tyramine, rather than inhibiting its breakdown in the liver as general MAOIs do. Additionally, MAO-B remains free and continues to metabolize tyramine in the stomach, although this is less significant than the liver action. Thus, RIMAs are unlikely to elicit tyramine-mediated hypertensive crisis; moreover, dietary modifications are not usually necessary when taking a reversible inhibitor of MAO-A (i.e., moclobemide) or low doses of selective MAO-B inhibitors (e.g., selegiline 6 mg/24 hours transdermal patch). Drug interactions The most significant risk associated with the use of MAOIs is the potential for drug interactions with over-the-counter, prescription, or illegally obtained medications, and some dietary supplements (e.g., St. John's wort, tryptophan). It is vital that a doctor supervise such combinations to avoid adverse reactions. For this reason, many users carry an MAOI-card, which lets emergency medical personnel know what drugs to avoid (e.g. adrenaline [epinephrine] dosage should be reduced by 75%, and duration is extended.) Tryptophan supplements can be consumed with MAOIs, but can result in transient serotonin syndrome. MAOIs should not be combined with other psychoactive substances (antidepressants, painkillers, stimulants, including prescribed, OTC and illegally acquired drugs, etc.) except under expert care. Certain combinations can cause lethal reactions, common examples including SSRIs, tricyclics, MDMA, meperidine, tramadol, and dextromethorphan. Drugs that affect the release or reuptake of epinephrine, norepinephrine, or dopamine typically need to be administered at lower doses due to the resulting potentiated and prolonged effect. MAOIs also interact with tobacco-containing products (e.g. cigarettes) and may potentiate the effects of certain compounds in tobacco. This may be reflected in the difficulty of smoking cessation, as tobacco contains naturally occurring MAOI compounds in addition to the nicotine. While safer than general MAOIs, still possess significant and potentially serious drug interactions with many common drugs; in particular, they can cause serotonin syndrome or hypertensive crisis when combined with almost any antidepressant or stimulant, common migraine medications, certain herbs, or most cold medicines (including decongestants, antihistamines, and cough syrup). Ocular alpha-2 agonists such as brimonidine and apraclonidine are glaucoma medications which reduce intraocular pressure by decreasing aqueous production. These alpha-2 agonists should not be given with oral MAOIs due to the risk of hypertensive crisis. Withdrawal Antidepressants including MAOIs have some dependence-producing effects, the most notable one being a discontinuation syndrome, which may be severe especially if MAOIs are discontinued abruptly or too rapidly. The dependence-producing potential of MAOIs or antidepressants in general is not as significant as benzodiazepines, however. Discontinuation symptoms can be managed by a gradual reduction in dosage over a period of weeks, months or years to minimize or prevent withdrawal symptoms. MAOIs, as with most antidepressant medication, may not alter the course of the disorder in a significant, permanent way, so it is possible that discontinuation can return the patient to the pre-treatment state. This consideration complicates prescribing between a MAOI and a SSRI, because it is necessary to clear the system completely of one drug before starting another. One physician organization recommends the dose to be tapered down over a minimum of four weeks, followed by a two week washout period. The result is that a depressed patient will have to bear the depression without chemical help during the drug-free interval. This may be preferable to risking the effects of an interaction between the two drugs. Mechanism of action MAOIs act by inhibiting the activity of monoamine oxidase, thus preventing the breakdown of monoamine neurotransmitters and thereby increasing their availability. There are two isoforms of monoamine oxidase, MAO-A and MAO-B. MAO-A preferentially deaminates serotonin, melatonin, epinephrine, and norepinephrine. MAO-B preferentially deaminates phenethylamine and certain other trace amines; in contrast, MAO-A preferentially deaminates other trace amines, like tyramine, whereas dopamine is equally deaminated by both types. Reversibility The early MAOIs covalently bound to the monoamine oxidase enzymes, thus inhibiting them irreversibly; the bound enzyme could not function and thus enzyme activity was blocked until the cell made new enzymes. The enzymes turn over approximately every two weeks. A few newer MAOIs, a notable one being moclobemide, are reversible, meaning that they are able to detach from the enzyme to facilitate usual catabolism of the substrate. The level of inhibition in this way is governed by the concentrations of the substrate and the MAOI. Harmaline found in Peganum harmala, Banisteriopsis caapi, and Passiflora incarnata is a reversible inhibitor of monoamine oxidase A (RIMA). Selectivity In addition to reversibility, MAOIs differ by their selectivity of the MAO enzyme subtype. Some MAOIs inhibit both MAO-A and MAO-B equally, other MAOIs have been developed to target one over the other. MAO-A inhibition reduces the breakdown of primarily serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine; selective inhibition of MAO-A allows for tyramine to be metabolised via MAO-B. Agents that act on serotonin if taken with another serotonin-enhancing agent may result in a potentially fatal interaction called serotonin syndrome or with irreversible and unselective inhibitors (such as older MAOIs), of MAO a hypertensive crisis as a result of tyramine food interactions is particularly problematic with older MAOIs. Tyramine is broken down by MAO-A and MAO-B, therefore inhibiting this action may result in its excessive build-up, so diet must be monitored for tyramine intake. MAO-B inhibition reduces the breakdown mainly of dopamine and phenethylamine so there are no dietary restrictions associated with this. MAO-B would also metabolize tyramine, as the only differences between dopamine, phenethylamine, and tyramine are two phenylhydroxyl groups on carbons 3 and 4. The 4-OH would not be a steric hindrance to |
is an abbess, prioress or other nun or religious sister in charge of a Catholic (or otherwise Christian) religious order or congregation (a convent or house of women under vows). Mother Superior may also refer to: Music Mother Superior (band), a rock band from Los Angeles, California, 1993–2011 "Mother Superior", | prioress or other nun or religious sister in charge of a Catholic (or otherwise Christian) religious order or congregation (a convent or house of women under vows). Mother Superior may also refer to: Music Mother Superior (band), |
work laid the foundations for the systematic classification of grasses, mosses and fungi. He originated the still current genus names Polyporus P. Micheli and Tuber P. Micheli, both dated 1729 (though the descriptions were later amended as invalid by modern rules). Note that when referring to the scientific name of a genus, the author abbreviation can optionally be added afterwards. The founding nomenclaturist Carl Linnaeus included fungi in his "binomial" naming system of 1753, where each type of organism has a two-word name consisting of the "genus" and the "species" (whereas up to then organisms were often designated with Latin phrases containing many words). He originated the scientific names, still used today, of numerous well-known mushroom taxa, such as Boletus L. and Agaricus L. At that period fungi were considered to belong to the plant kingdom, and so they find their place in his magnum opus Species Plantarum, but he was much more interested in higher plants and for instance he grouped together as genus Agaricus all gilled mushrooms which have a stem. There are many thousands of such gilled species, which later were divided into dozens of diverse genera and in its modern usage the genus Agaricus only refers to mushrooms closely related to the common shop mushroom, Agaricus bisporus (J.E. Lange) Imbach. As an example, Linnaeus gave the name Agaricus deliciosus to the saffron milk-cap, but its current name is Lactarius deliciosus (L.) Gray. On the other hand the field mushroom Agaricus campestris L. has kept the same name ever since Linnaeus's publication. The English word "agaric" is still used for any gilled mushroom, which corresponds to Linnaeus's sense of the word. The term mycology and the complementary term mycologist were first used in 1836 by M.J. Berkeley. Mycology and drug discovery For centuries, certain mushrooms have been documented as a folk medicine in China, Japan, and Russia. Although the use of mushrooms in folk medicine is centered largely on the Asian continent, people in other parts of the world like the Middle East, Poland, and Belarus have been documented using mushrooms for medicinal purposes. Mushrooms produce large amounts of vitamin D when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light. Penicillin, ciclosporin, griseofulvin, cephalosporin and psilocybin are examples of drugs that have been isolated from molds or other fungi. See also Ethnomycology Fungal biochemical | species of the filamentous fungal genus Trichoderma are considered one of the most important biological control agents as an alternative to chemical-based products for effective crop diseases management. Field meetings to find interesting species of fungi are known as 'forays', after the first such meeting organized by the Woolhope Naturalists' Field Club in 1868 and entitled "A foray among the funguses"[sic]. Some fungi can cause disease in humans and other animals - The study of pathogenic fungi that infect animals is referred to as medical mycology. History It is believed that humans started collecting mushrooms as food in prehistoric times. Mushrooms were first written about in the works of Euripides (480-406 BC). The Greek philosopher Theophrastos of Eresos (371-288 BC) was perhaps the first to try to systematically classify plants; mushrooms were considered to be plants missing certain organs. It was later Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD), who wrote about truffles in his encyclopedia Naturalis historia. The word mycology comes from the Ancient Greek: μύκης (mukēs), meaning "fungus" and the suffix (-logia), meaning "study". The Middle Ages saw little advancement in the body of knowledge about fungi. However, the invention of the printing press allowed authors to dispel superstitions and misconceptions about the fungi that had been perpetuated by the classical authors. The start of the modern age of mycology begins with Pier Antonio Micheli's 1737 publication of Nova plantarum genera. Published in Florence, this seminal work laid the foundations for the systematic classification of grasses, mosses and fungi. He originated the still current genus names Polyporus P. Micheli and Tuber P. Micheli, both dated 1729 (though the descriptions were later amended as invalid by modern rules). Note that when referring to the scientific name of a genus, the author abbreviation can optionally be added afterwards. The founding nomenclaturist Carl Linnaeus included fungi in his "binomial" naming system of 1753, where each type of organism has a two-word name consisting of the "genus" and the "species" (whereas up to then organisms were often designated with Latin phrases containing many words). He originated the scientific names, still used today, of numerous well-known mushroom taxa, such as Boletus L. and Agaricus L. At that period fungi were considered to belong to the plant kingdom, and so they find their place in his magnum opus Species Plantarum, but he was much more interested in higher plants and for instance he grouped together as genus Agaricus all gilled mushrooms which have a stem. There are many thousands of such gilled species, which later were divided into dozens of diverse genera and in its modern usage the genus Agaricus only refers to mushrooms closely related to the common shop mushroom, Agaricus bisporus (J.E. Lange) Imbach. As an example, Linnaeus gave the name Agaricus deliciosus to the saffron milk-cap, but its current name is Lactarius deliciosus (L.) Gray. On the other hand the field mushroom Agaricus campestris L. has kept the same name ever since Linnaeus's publication. The English word "agaric" is still used for any gilled mushroom, which corresponds to Linnaeus's sense of the word. The term mycology and the complementary |
fear, inability to answer questions or providing false answers, self-laughing and self-crying and speaking meaninglessly, yet with no fever." In Middle-Ages Europe, the humoral, somatic paradigm for understanding sustained sadness lost primacy in front of the prevailing religious perspective. Sadness came to be a vice (λύπη in the Greek vice list by Evagrius Ponticus, tristitia vel acidia in the 7 vice list by Gregorius Magnus). When a patient could not be cured of the disease it was thought that the melancholia was a result of demonic possession. In his study of French and Burgundian courtly culture, Johan Huizinga noted that "at the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people's souls." In chronicles, poems, sermons, even in legal documents, an immense sadness, a note of despair and a fashionable sense of suffering and deliquescence at the approaching end of times, suffuses court poets and chroniclers alike: Huizinga quotes instances in the ballads of Eustache Deschamps, "monotonous and gloomy variations of the same dismal theme", and in Georges Chastellain's prologue to his Burgundian chronicle, and in the late fifteenth-century poetry of Jean Meschinot. Ideas of reflection and the workings of imagination are blended in the term merencolie, embodying for contemporaries "a tendency", observes Huizinga, "to identify all serious occupation of the mind with sadness". Painters were considered by Vasari and other writers to be especially prone to melancholy by the nature of their work, sometimes with good effects for their art in increased sensitivity and use of fantasy. Among those of his contemporaries so characterised by Vasari were Pontormo and Parmigianino, but he does not use the term of Michelangelo, who used it, perhaps not very seriously, of himself. A famous allegorical engraving by Albrecht Dürer is entitled Melencolia I. This engraving has been interpreted as portraying melancholia as the state of waiting for inspiration to strike, and not necessarily as a depressive affliction. Amongst other allegorical symbols, the picture includes a magic square and a truncated rhombohedron. The image in turn inspired a passage in The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson (B.V.), and, a few years later, a sonnet by Edward Dowden. The most extended treatment of melancholia comes from Robert Burton, whose The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) treats the subject from both a literary and a medical perspective. His concept of melancholia includes all mental illness, which he divides into different types. Burton wrote in the 17th century that music and dance were critical in treating mental illness. In the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, the causes of melancholia are stated to be similar to those that cause Mania: "grief, pains of the spirit, passions, as well as all the love and sexual appetites that go unsatisfied." English cultural movement During the later 16th and early 17th centuries, a curious cultural and literary cult of melancholia arose in England. In an influential 1964 essay in Apollo, art historian Roy Strong traced the origins of this fashionable melancholy to the thought of the popular Neoplatonist and humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who replaced the medieval notion of melancholia with something new: The Anatomy of Melancholy (The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it... Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) by Burton, was first published in 1621 and remains a defining literary monument to the fashion. Another major English author who made extensive expression upon being of an melancholic disposition is Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici (1643). Night-Thoughts (The Complaint: or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, & Immortality), a long poem in blank verse by Edward Young was published in nine parts (or "nights") between 1742 and 1745, and hugely popular in several languages. It had a considerable influence on early Romantics in England, France and Germany. William Blake was commissioned to illustrate a later edition. In the visual arts, this fashionable intellectual melancholy occurs frequently in portraiture of the era, with sitters posed in the form of "the lover, with his crossed arms and floppy hat over his eyes, and the scholar, sitting with his head resting on his hand"descriptions drawn from the frontispiece to the 1638 edition of Burton's Anatomy, which shows just such by-then stock characters. These portraits were often set out of doors where Nature provides "the most suitable background for spiritual contemplation" or in a gloomy interior. In music, the post-Elizabethan cult of melancholia is associated with John Dowland, whose motto was Semper Dowland, semper dolens ("Always Dowland, always mourning"). The melancholy man, known to contemporaries as a "malcontent", is epitomized by Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet, the "Melancholy Dane". A similar phenomenon, though not under the same name, occurred during the German Sturm und Drang movement, with such works as The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe or in Romanticism with works such as Ode on Melancholy by John Keats or in Symbolism with works such as Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin. In the 20th century, much of the counterculture | caused by an excess of black bile, hence the name, which means "black bile", from Ancient Greek μέλας (melas), "dark, black", and χολή (kholé), "bile"; a person whose constitution tended to have a preponderance of black bile had a melancholic disposition. In the complex elaboration of humorist theory, it was associated with the earth from the Four Elements, the season of autumn, the spleen as the originating organ and cold and dry as related qualities. In astrology it showed the influence of Saturn, hence the related adjective saturnine. Melancholia was described as a distinct disease with particular mental and physical symptoms in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Hippocrates, in his Aphorisms, characterized all "fears and despondencies, if they last a long time" as being symptomatic of melancholia. Other symptoms mentioned by Hippocrates include: poor appetite, abulia, sleeplessness, irritability, agitation. The Hippocratic clinical description of melancholia shows significant overlaps with contemporary nosography of depressive syndromes (6 symptoms out of the 9 included in DSM diagnostic criteria for a Major Depressive). In the common era, Galen added "fixed delusions" to the set of symptoms listed by Hippocrates. Galen also believed that melancholia caused cancer. Aretaeus of Cappadocia, in turn, believed that melancholia involved both a state of anguish, and a delusion. In the 10th century Persian physician Al-Akhawayni Bokhari described melancholia as a chronic illness caused by the impact of black bile on the brain. He described melancholia's initial clinical manifestations as "suffering from an unexplained fear, inability to answer questions or providing false answers, self-laughing and self-crying and speaking meaninglessly, yet with no fever." In Middle-Ages Europe, the humoral, somatic paradigm for understanding sustained sadness lost primacy in front of the prevailing religious perspective. Sadness came to be a vice (λύπη in the Greek vice list by Evagrius Ponticus, tristitia vel acidia in the 7 vice list by Gregorius Magnus). When a patient could not be cured of the disease it was thought that the melancholia was a result of demonic possession. In his study of French and Burgundian courtly culture, Johan Huizinga noted that "at the close of the Middle Ages, a sombre melancholy weighs on people's souls." In chronicles, poems, sermons, even in legal documents, an immense sadness, a note of despair and a fashionable sense of suffering and deliquescence at the approaching end of times, suffuses court poets and chroniclers alike: Huizinga quotes instances in the ballads of Eustache Deschamps, "monotonous and gloomy variations of the same dismal theme", and in Georges Chastellain's prologue to his Burgundian chronicle, and in the late fifteenth-century poetry of Jean Meschinot. Ideas of reflection and the workings of imagination are blended in the term merencolie, embodying for contemporaries "a tendency", observes Huizinga, "to identify all serious occupation of the mind with sadness". Painters were considered by Vasari and other writers to be especially prone to melancholy by the nature of their work, sometimes with good effects for their art in increased sensitivity and use of fantasy. Among those of his contemporaries so characterised by Vasari were Pontormo and Parmigianino, but he does not use the term of Michelangelo, who used it, perhaps not very seriously, of himself. A famous allegorical engraving by Albrecht Dürer is entitled Melencolia I. This engraving has been interpreted as portraying melancholia as the state of waiting for inspiration to strike, and not necessarily as a depressive affliction. Amongst other allegorical symbols, the picture includes a magic square and a truncated rhombohedron. The image in turn inspired a passage in The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson (B.V.), and, a few years later, a sonnet by Edward Dowden. The most extended treatment of melancholia comes from Robert Burton, whose The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) treats the subject from both a literary and a medical perspective. His concept of melancholia includes all mental illness, which he divides into different types. Burton wrote in the 17th century that music and dance were critical in treating mental illness. In the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert, the causes of melancholia are stated to be similar to those that cause Mania: "grief, pains of the spirit, passions, as well as all the love and sexual appetites that go unsatisfied." English cultural movement During the later 16th and early 17th centuries, a curious cultural and literary cult of melancholia arose in England. In an influential 1964 essay in Apollo, art historian Roy Strong traced the origins of this fashionable melancholy to the thought of the popular Neoplatonist and humanist Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who replaced the medieval notion of melancholia with something new: The Anatomy of Melancholy (The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it... Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) by Burton, was first published in 1621 and remains a defining literary monument to the fashion. Another major English author who made |
Taxonomy The taxonomy of the genus Mimosa has gone through several periods of splitting and lumping, ultimately accumulating over 3,000 names, many of which have either been synonymized under other species or transferred to other genera. In part due to these changing circumscriptions, the name "Mimosa" has also been applied to several other related species with similar pinnate or bipinnate leaves, but are now classified in other genera. The most common examples of this are Albizia julibrissin (Persian silk tree) and Acacia dealbata (wattle). Description Members of this genus are among the few plants capable of rapid movement; examples outside of Mimosa include the telegraph plant, Aldrovanda, some species of Drosera and the Venus flytrap. The leaves of the Mimosa pudica close quickly when touched. Some mimosas raise their leaves in the day and lower them at night, and experiments done by Jean-Jacques d'Ortous de Mairan on mimosas in 1729 provided the first evidence of biological clocks. Mimosa can be distinguished from the large related genera, Acacia and Albizia, since its flowers have ten or fewer stamens. Botanically, what appears to be a single globular flower is actually a cluster of many individual ones. Mimosa contains some level of heptanoic acid. Species There are about 400 species including: Mimosa aculeaticarpa Ortega Mimosa andina Benth. Mimosa arenosa (Willd.) Poir. Mimosa asperata L. Mimosa borealis Gray Mimosa caesalpiniaefolia Benth. Mimosa casta L. Mimosa cupica Gray Mimosa ceratonia L. Mimosa diplotricha C.Wright ex Sauvalle Mimosa disperma Barneby Mimosa distachya Cav. Mimosa dysocarpa Benth. Mimosa emoryana Benth. Mimosa grahamii | from the large related genera, Acacia and Albizia, since its flowers have ten or fewer stamens. Botanically, what appears to be a single globular flower is actually a cluster of many individual ones. Mimosa contains some level of heptanoic acid. Species There are about 400 species including: Mimosa aculeaticarpa Ortega Mimosa andina Benth. Mimosa arenosa (Willd.) Poir. Mimosa asperata L. Mimosa borealis Gray Mimosa caesalpiniaefolia Benth. Mimosa casta L. Mimosa cupica Gray Mimosa ceratonia L. Mimosa diplotricha C.Wright ex Sauvalle Mimosa disperma Barneby Mimosa distachya Cav. Mimosa dysocarpa Benth. Mimosa emoryana Benth. Mimosa grahamii Gray Mimosa hamata Willd. Mimosa hystricina (Small ex Britt. et Rose) B.L.Turner Mimosa invisa Martius ex Colla Mimosa latidens (Small) B.L. Turner Mimosa laxiflora Benth. Mimosa loxensis Barneby Mimosa malacophylla Gray Mimosa microphylla Dry. Mimosa nothacacia Barneby Mimosa nuttallii (DC.) B.L. Turner Mimosa ophthalmocentra Mart. ex Benth. |
Martini (surname), an Italian surname Martini (automobile company), a Swiss automobile company Automobiles Martini, a French manufacturer of racing cars Martini Racing, motor racing teams sponsored by Martini & Rossi Martini (quartet), the 2012 Sweet Adelines International champion quartet MARTINI, a molecular dynamics force field in chemistry Mārtiņi, a Latvian holiday | motor racing teams sponsored by Martini & Rossi Martini (quartet), the 2012 Sweet Adelines International champion quartet MARTINI, a molecular dynamics force field in chemistry Mārtiņi, a Latvian holiday |
half a liqueur glass of vermouth, half wine glassful of Scotch whiskey" and garnished with lemon. Byron describes two versions, one with French vermouth and the other with Italian. Another early record of the cocktail can be found in William Schmidt's The Flowing Bowl, published in 1891. In it, he details a drink containing 2 dashes of gum (gomme syrup), 2 dashes of bitters, 1 dash of absinthe, portion of whiskey, and portion of vermouth. The same cocktail appears listed as a "Tennessee Cocktail" in Shake 'em Up! by V. Elliott and P. Strong: "Two parts of whiskey, one part of Italian Vermouth, and a dash of bitters poured over ice and stirred vigorously." Traditions On the small North Frisian island of Föhr, the Manhattan cocktail is a standard drink at almost every cafe, restaurant, and "get together" of locals. The story goes that many of the people of Föhr emigrated to Manhattan during deep sea fishing trips, took a liking to the drink, and brought it back to Föhr with them. The drink is usually mixed 1 part vermouth to 2 parts whiskey, with a dash of bitters, served ice cold, in an ice cold glass, or with ice and a cherry garnish. Variations Traditional views insist that a Manhattan be made with American rye whiskey. However it can also be made with bourbon or Canadian whisky. The Manhattan is subject to considerable variation and innovation, and is often a way for the best bartenders to show off their creativity. Some shake the ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker instead of stirring it, creating a froth on the surface of the drink. Angostura is the classic bitters, but orange bitters or Peychaud's Bitters | The same cocktail appears listed as a "Tennessee Cocktail" in Shake 'em Up! by V. Elliott and P. Strong: "Two parts of whiskey, one part of Italian Vermouth, and a dash of bitters poured over ice and stirred vigorously." Traditions On the small North Frisian island of Föhr, the Manhattan cocktail is a standard drink at almost every cafe, restaurant, and "get together" of locals. The story goes that many of the people of Föhr emigrated to Manhattan during deep sea fishing trips, took a liking to the drink, and brought it back to Föhr with them. The drink is usually mixed 1 part vermouth to 2 parts whiskey, with a dash of bitters, served ice cold, in an ice cold glass, or with ice and a cherry garnish. Variations Traditional views insist that a Manhattan be made with American rye whiskey. However it can also be made with bourbon or Canadian whisky. The Manhattan is subject to considerable variation and innovation, and is often a way for the best bartenders to show off their creativity. Some shake the ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker instead of stirring it, creating a froth on the surface of the drink. Angostura is the classic bitters, but orange bitters or Peychaud's Bitters may be used. Some make their own bitters and syrups, substitute comparable digestifs in place of vermouth, specialize in local or rare whiskeys, or use other exotic ingredients. A lemon peel may be used as garnish. Some add juice from the cherry jar or Maraschino liqueur to the cocktail for additional sweetness and color. Originally, bitters were considered an integral part of any cocktail, as the ingredient that differentiated a cocktail from a sling. Over time, those definitions of cocktail and sling have become archaic, as sling has fallen out of general use (other than in certain drink names), and cocktail can mean any drink that resembles a martini, or simply any mixed drink. The following are other variations on the classic Manhattan: Black Manhattan – replaces vermouth with Averna. Blonde Manhattan – made with 2 oz moonshine, 1 oz sweet vermouth, 0.5 oz orange liqueur, and 3 dashes of orange bitters. Brandy Manhattan – made with brandy instead of whiskey, and is very popular in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Cuban Manhattan – a perfect Manhattan (see below) with dark rum as its principal ingredient. Dean Lyder – a twist on the perfect Manhattan, made with orange bitters and zest, giving it a 'big, bold character'. It is named for Courtney Lyder, dean of UCLA School of Nursing. Dry Manhattan – made with dry vermouth instead of sweet vermouth, usually also replacing the maraschino cherry with a twist in keeping with the overall principle of reducing the cocktail's sweetness. A Manhattan made with dry vermouth but retaining the cherry rather than twist is sometimes known as a "half-dry Manhattan", but |
whose surfaces pulsate in such a way as to increase and decrease in brightness over periods ranging from about 80 to more than 1,000 days. In the particular case of Mira, its increases in brightness take it up to about magnitude 3.5 on average, placing it among the brighter stars in the Cetus constellation. Individual cycles vary too; well-attested maxima go as high as magnitude 2.0 in brightness and as low as 4.9, a range almost 15 times in brightness, and there are historical suggestions that the real spread may be three times this or more. Minima range much less, and have historically been between 8.6 and 10.1, a factor of four times in luminosity. The total swing in brightness from absolute maximum to absolute minimum (two events which did not occur on the same cycle) is 1,700 times. Mira emits the vast majority of its radiation in the infrared, and its variability in that band is only about two magnitudes. The shape of its light curve is of an increase over about 100 days, and the return to minimum taking twice as long. Contemporary approximate maxima for Mira: Oct 21–31, 1999 Sep 21–30, 2000 Aug 21–31, 2001 Jul 21–31, 2002 Jun 21–30, 2003 May 21–31, 2004 Apr 11–20, 2005 Mar 11–20, 2006 Feb 1–10, 2007 Jan 21–31, 2008 Dec 21–31, 2008 Nov 21–30, 2009 Oct 21–31, 2010 Sep 21–30, 2011 Aug 27, 2012 Jul 26, 2013 May 12, 2014 Apr 9, 2015 Mar 6, 2016 Jan 31, 2017 Dec 29, 2017 Nov 26, 2018 Oct 24, 2019 Sep 20, 2020 Aug 18, 2021 Jul 16, 2022 Jun 13, 2023 From northern temperate latitudes, Mira is generally not visible between late March and June due to its proximity to the Sun. This means that at times several years can pass without it appearing as a naked-eye object. The pulsations of Mira variables cause the star to expand and contract, but also to change its temperature. The temperature is highest slightly after the visual maximum, and lowest slightly before minimum. The photosphere, measured at the Rosseland radius, is smallest just before visual maximum and close to the time of maximum temperature. The largest size is reached slightly before the time of lowest temperature. The bolometric luminosity is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature and the square of the radius, but the radius varies by over 20% and the temperature by less than 10%. In Mira, the highest luminosity occurs close to the time when the star is hottest and smallest. The visual magnitude is determined both by the luminosity and by the proportion of the radiation that occurs at visual wavelengths. Only a small proportion of the radiation is emitted at visual wavelengths and this proportion is very strongly influenced by the temperature (Planck's law). Combined with the overall luminosity changes, this creates the very big visual magnitude variation with the maximum occurring when the temperature is high. Infrared VLTI measurements of Mira at phases 0.13, 0.18, 0.26, 0.40 and 0.47, show that the radius varies from at phase 0.13 just after maximum to at phase 0.40 approaching minimum. The temperature at phase 0.13 is and at phase 0.26 about halfway from maximum to minimum. The luminosity is calculated to be at phase 0.13 and at phase 0.26. The pulsations of Mira have the effect of expanding its photosphere by around 50% compared to a non-pulsating star. In the case of Mira, if it was not pulsating it is modelled to have a radius of only around . Mass loss Ultraviolet studies of Mira by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) space telescope have revealed that it sheds a trail of material from the outer envelope, leaving a tail 13 light-years in length, formed over tens of thousands of years. It is thought that a hot bow wave of compressed plasma/gas is the cause of the tail; the bow wave is a result of the interaction of the stellar wind from Mira A with gas in interstellar space, through which Mira is moving at an extremely high speed of . The tail consists of material stripped from the head of the bow wave, which is also visible in ultraviolet observations. Mira's bow shock will eventually evolve into a planetary nebula, the form of which will be considerably affected by the motion | 6, 2016 Jan 31, 2017 Dec 29, 2017 Nov 26, 2018 Oct 24, 2019 Sep 20, 2020 Aug 18, 2021 Jul 16, 2022 Jun 13, 2023 From northern temperate latitudes, Mira is generally not visible between late March and June due to its proximity to the Sun. This means that at times several years can pass without it appearing as a naked-eye object. The pulsations of Mira variables cause the star to expand and contract, but also to change its temperature. The temperature is highest slightly after the visual maximum, and lowest slightly before minimum. The photosphere, measured at the Rosseland radius, is smallest just before visual maximum and close to the time of maximum temperature. The largest size is reached slightly before the time of lowest temperature. The bolometric luminosity is proportional to the fourth power of the temperature and the square of the radius, but the radius varies by over 20% and the temperature by less than 10%. In Mira, the highest luminosity occurs close to the time when the star is hottest and smallest. The visual magnitude is determined both by the luminosity and by the proportion of the radiation that occurs at visual wavelengths. Only a small proportion of the radiation is emitted at visual wavelengths and this proportion is very strongly influenced by the temperature (Planck's law). Combined with the overall luminosity changes, this creates the very big visual magnitude variation with the maximum occurring when the temperature is high. Infrared VLTI measurements of Mira at phases 0.13, 0.18, 0.26, 0.40 and 0.47, show that the radius varies from at phase 0.13 just after maximum to at phase 0.40 approaching minimum. The temperature at phase 0.13 is and at phase 0.26 about halfway from maximum to minimum. The luminosity is calculated to be at phase 0.13 and at phase 0.26. The pulsations of Mira have the effect of expanding its photosphere by around 50% compared to a non-pulsating star. In the case of Mira, if it was not pulsating it is modelled to have a radius of only around . Mass loss Ultraviolet studies of Mira by NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) space telescope have revealed that it sheds a trail of material from the outer envelope, leaving a tail 13 light-years in length, formed over tens of thousands of years. It is thought that a hot bow wave of compressed plasma/gas is the cause of the tail; the bow wave is a result of the interaction of the stellar wind from Mira A with gas in interstellar space, through which Mira is moving at an extremely high speed of . The tail consists of material stripped from the head of the bow wave, which is also visible in ultraviolet observations. Mira's bow shock will eventually evolve into a planetary nebula, the form of which will be considerably affected by the motion through the interstellar medium (ISM). Component B The 10.34-mag bright companion star, which is 118.7 arcseconds away from the main star , was resolved by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995, when it was 70 astronomical units from the primary; and results were announced in 1997. The HST ultraviolet images and later X-ray images by the Chandra space telescope show a spiral of gas rising off Mira in the direction of Mira B. The companion's orbital period around Mira is approximately 400 years. In 2007, observations showed a protoplanetary disc around the companion, Mira B. This disc is being accreted from material in the solar wind from Mira and could eventually form new planets. These observations also hinted that the companion was a main-sequence star of around 0.7 solar mass and spectral type K, instead of a white dwarf as originally thought. However, in 2010 further research indicated that Mira B is, in fact, a white dwarf. References Further reading Robert Burnham Jr., Burnham's Celestial Handbook, Vol. 1, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1978), 634. James Kaler, The Hundred Greatest Stars, (New York: Copernicus Books, 2002), 121. External links Speeding Bullet |
these early years, the ship was also renamed Jolly Indaco. MSC first chartered the ship, then known as MV Strong Virginian, in 1992. For the next five years, a 500-bed fleet hospital was prepositioned aboard the ship as she carried out a variety of missions for the Department of Defense. Some of its jobs during this time included delivering equipment and supplies to Africa as part of Operation Restore Hope, transporting a bio-safety lab from Inchon, Korea, to Jakarta, Indonesia, and ferrying harbor tugs used by the U.S. Navy from Diego Garcia to Guam and back. On March 14, 1997, the United States Department of Defense announced a new charter for the Strong Virginian. This contract, number N00033-97-C-3007, was a $23,592,099 time charter contract from the Military Sealift Command to operator Van Ommeren Shipping (USA), Inc., of Stamford, Connectucut. Under the contract, the Strong Virginian was to be used in the prepositioning of United States Army cargo in the Indian Ocean at the island of Diego Garcia. The contract included options which could have brought the cumulative value up to US$47,992,099 and was to expire by March 1999. This contract was competitively procured with 250 proposals solicited and four offers received. Virginian was chartered again in 1998 and, for the next four years, the ship was used to support the U.S. Army. Virginian delivered combat craft, tugboats and barges and other elements of the Army's port opening packages. These packages are used to give the military access to rarely used ports in areas vital | and back. On March 14, 1997, the United States Department of Defense announced a new charter for the Strong Virginian. This contract, number N00033-97-C-3007, was a $23,592,099 time charter contract from the Military Sealift Command to operator Van Ommeren Shipping (USA), Inc., of Stamford, Connectucut. Under the contract, the Strong Virginian was to be used in the prepositioning of United States Army cargo in the Indian Ocean at the island of Diego Garcia. The contract included options which could have brought the cumulative value up to US$47,992,099 and was to expire by March 1999. This contract was competitively procured with 250 proposals solicited and four offers received. Virginian was chartered again in 1998 and, for the next four years, the ship was used to support the U.S. Army. Virginian delivered combat craft, tugboats and barges and other elements of the Army's port opening packages. These packages are used to give the military access to rarely used ports in areas vital to U.S. military operations. On September 30, 2002, the ship was released from MSC service and returned to its owner. Sealift Incorporated bought the ship from Van Ommeren Shipping USA, Inc. taking delivery on June 10, 2003. At that point, Sealift renamed the ship the Virginian. Between November 2002 and |
of Grisons Anglesey, , an island and county of Wales Møn, an island of Denmark Monongahela River, US or "The Mon" Peoples and languages Mon people, an ethnic group from Burma Mon language, spoken in Burma and Thailand Mon–Khmer languages, a large language family of Mainland Southeast Asia Mongolian language (ISO 639 code), official language of Mongolia Alisa Mon, Russian singer Other uses Mon (emblem), Japanese family heraldic symbols Mon (architecture), gates at Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and castles in Japan Mon (boat), a traditional war canoe of the North Solomons Mon (currency), a currency used in Japan until 1870 The Gate | languages Mon people, an ethnic group from Burma Mon language, spoken in Burma and Thailand Mon–Khmer languages, a large language family of Mainland Southeast Asia Mongolian language (ISO 639 code), official language of Mongolia Alisa Mon, Russian singer Other uses Mon (emblem), Japanese family heraldic symbols Mon (architecture), gates at Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and castles in Japan Mon (boat), a traditional war canoe of the North Solomons Mon (currency), a currency used in Japan until 1870 The |
its drink. A survey by an international market research company found that in 2016 the mojito was the most popular cocktail in Britain and France. Variations Many hotels in Havana also add Angostura bitters to cut the sweetness of the Mojito; while icing sugar is often muddled with the mint leaves rather than cane sugar, and many establishments simply use sugar syrup to control sweetness. Many bars today in Havana use lemon juice rather than fresh lime. The "Rose Mojito," which is a Mojito variation containing the rose-flavored spirit, Lanique, was first created at the Albert's Schloss bar in Manchester, England. A Mojito without alcohol is called a "Virgin Mojito" or "Nojito". The Cojito adds coconut flavor, often through the use of coconut-flavored rum. The South Side is made with gin instead of rum; the South Side Fizz adds seltzer water. A dirty mojito calls for gold rum instead of white rum and to use raw sugar or demerara sugar. Demerara is a light brown, partially refined, sugar produced from the first crystallization during processing cane juice into sugar crystals. Adding this to a mojito gives it a caramel-like flavor. A dark rum mojito simply calls for a dark rum to be used instead of white. In Mexico, tequila brand Don Julio offers the "Mojito Blanco" by simply replacing rum with tequila. In Peru, there are mojito variations that are made by adding fruits like grapefruit, called "Mojito de toronja", or with passionfruit, called "Mojito de maracuyá". Many restaurants serve them, and these added ingredients enhance the cocktail and its original flavor. Some other fruits are found in other mojito recipes: pears, raspberries, and oranges. Purees of such fruits may also be used instead of the whole fruit itself. The strawberry mojito includes muddled | from the bottom for better presentation. Finally, the drink is topped with crushed ice and sparkling soda water. Mint leaves and lime wedges are used to garnish the glass. The mojito is one of the most famous rum-based highballs. There are several versions of the mojito. History Havana, Cuba, is the birthplace of the mojito, although its exact origin is the subject of debate. It was known that the local South American Indians had remedies for various tropical illnesses, so a small boarding party went ashore on Cuba and came back with ingredients for an effective medicine. The ingredients were aguardiente de caña (translated as "burning water", a crude form of rum made from sugar cane) mixed with local tropical ingredients: lime, sugarcane juice, and mint. Lime juice on its own would have significantly prevented scurvy and dysentery, and tafia/rum was soon added as it became widely available to the British (ca. 1650). Mint, lime and sugar were also helpful in hiding the harsh taste of this spirit. Another theory is that it was invented by Sir Francis Drake. The "El Draque" cocktail was prepared with brandy. While this drink was not called a mojito at this time, it was the original combination of these ingredients. Some historians contend that African slaves who worked in the Cuban sugar cane fields during the 19th century were instrumental in the cocktail's origin. Guarapo, the sugar cane juice often used in mojitos, was a popular drink among the slaves who named it. It never originally contained lime juice. There are several theories behind the origin of the name mojito: one such theory holds that name relates to mojo, a Cuban seasoning made from lime and used to flavor |
remained in exile near Rome until 2002, returning to Afghanistan after the end of the Taliban government. He was given the title Father of the Nation, which he held until his death in 2007. Family background and early life Zahir Shah was born on 15 October 1914, in a city quarter called Deh Afghanan in Kabul, Afghanistan. He was the son of Mohammad Nadir Shah (1883–1933) a senior member of the Mohammadzai Royal family and commander in chief of the Afghan Army for former king Amanullah Khan, and of Begum Mah Parwar Begum (d. 1941), a Pashtun tribe woman. Nadir Shah assumed the throne after the execution of the self-proclaimed ruler of Afghanistan Habibullah Kalakani on 1 November 1929. Mohammad Zahir's father, son of Sardar Mohammad Yusuf Khan, was born in Dehradun, British India, his family having been exiled after the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Nadir Shah was a descendant of Sardar Sultan Mohammad Khan Telai, half-brother of Emir Dost Mohammad Khan. His grandfather Mohammad Yahya Khan (father in law of Emir Yaqub Khan) was in charge of the negotiations with the British resulting in the Treaty of Gandamak. After the British invasion after the killing of Sir Louis Cavagnari during 1879, Yaqub Khan, Yahya Khan and his sons, Princes Mohammad Yusuf Khan and Mohammad Asef Khan, were seized by the British and transferred to the British Raj, where they remained forcibly until the two princes were invited back to Afghanistan by Emir Abdur Rahman Khan during the last year of his reign (1901). During the reign of Amir Habibullah they received the title of Companions of the King (Musahiban). Zahir Shah was educated in a special class for princes at Elementary Primary built in 1904 by United Kingdom Habibia High School, many subjects were taught in English, and for Secondary education he went to the Amaniya High School (built during the reign of King Amanullah by France, in which many subjects were taught in French. This school was renamed by Nadir Shah as Esteqlal High School after the fall of King Amanullah. For example, Prince Zahir Shah had to study in Infanterie Military School in winter (school year in Kabul, 21 March to November). Then he was sent to France for further training. He continued his education in France where his father had served as a diplomatic envoy, studying at the Pasteur Institute and the University of Montpellier. When he returned to Afghanistan he helped his father and uncles restore order and reassert government control during a period of lawlessness in the country. He was later enrolled at an Infantry School and appointed a privy counsellor. Zahir Shah served in the government positions of deputy war minister and minister of education. Last king of Afghanistan Zahir Khan was proclaimed king (shah) on 8 November 1933 at the age of 19, after the assassination of his father Mohammad Nadir Shah. After his ascension to the throne he was given the regnal title "He who puts his trust in God, follower of the firm religion of Islam". For the first almost thirty years he did not effectively rule, ceding power to his paternal uncles, Mohammad Hashim Khan and Shah Mahmoud Khan, both serving as prime ministers. This period fostered a growth in Afghanistan's relations with the international community as during 1934, Afghanistan joined the League of Nations while also receiving formal recognition from the United States. By the end of the 1930s, agreements on foreign assistance and trade had been reached with many countries, most notably with the 'Axis powers': Germany, Italy, and Japan. Zahir Shah provided aid, weapons and Afghan fighters to the Uighur and Kirghiz Muslim rebels who had established the First East Turkestan Republic. The aid was not capable of saving the First East Turkestan Republic, as the Afghan, Uighur and Kirghiz forces were defeated during 1934 by the Chinese Muslim 36th Division (National Revolutionary Army) commanded by General Ma Zhancang at the Battle of Kashgar and Battle of Yarkand. All the Afghan volunteers were killed by the Chinese Muslim troops, who then abolished the First East Turkestan Republic, and reestablished Chinese government control over the area. Despite close relations to the Axis powers, Zahir Shah and his governments refused to take sides during World War II and Afghanistan remained one of the few countries in the world to remain neutral. From 1944 to 1947, Afghanistan experienced a series of revolts by various tribes. After the end of the Second World War, Zahir Shah recognised the need for the modernisation of Afghanistan and recruited a number of foreign advisers to assist with the process. During this period Afghanistan's first modern university was founded. During his reign a number of potential advances and reforms were derailed as a result of factionalism and political infighting. He also requested financial aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan was one of few countries in the world to receive aid from both the Cold War enemies. In a 1969 interview, Zahir Shah said that he is "not a capitalist. But I also don’t want socialism. I don’t want socialism that would bring about the kind of situation [that exists] in Czechoslovakia. I don’t want us to become the servants of Russia or China or the servant of any other place." He was considered a relatively "mild" leader compared to previous Kings; Zahir Shah had never signed a warrant for execution of anyone for political reasons during his reign. He also used his power several times to reduce capital punishment given to some criminals convicted in court cases. At Zahir Shah's behest a new constitution was introduced in 1964 which made Afghanistan a modern democratic state by introducing free elections, a parliament, civil rights, women's rights and universal suffrage. At least five Afghani little Pul coins during his reign bore the Arabic title: المتوكل على الله محمد ظاهر شاه, "AlMutawakkil 'ala Allah Muhammad Zhahir Shah" which means "The leaner on God, Muhammad Zhahir Shah". The title "AlMutawakkil 'ala Allah", "The leaner on God" is taken from Quran 8:61. By the time he returned to Afghanistan in 2002, his rule was characterized by a lengthy span of peace. Exile In 1973, while Zahir Shah was abroad in Italy, his cousin Mohammad Daoud Khan staged a coup d'état and established an autocratic | age of 19, after the assassination of his father Mohammad Nadir Shah. After his ascension to the throne he was given the regnal title "He who puts his trust in God, follower of the firm religion of Islam". For the first almost thirty years he did not effectively rule, ceding power to his paternal uncles, Mohammad Hashim Khan and Shah Mahmoud Khan, both serving as prime ministers. This period fostered a growth in Afghanistan's relations with the international community as during 1934, Afghanistan joined the League of Nations while also receiving formal recognition from the United States. By the end of the 1930s, agreements on foreign assistance and trade had been reached with many countries, most notably with the 'Axis powers': Germany, Italy, and Japan. Zahir Shah provided aid, weapons and Afghan fighters to the Uighur and Kirghiz Muslim rebels who had established the First East Turkestan Republic. The aid was not capable of saving the First East Turkestan Republic, as the Afghan, Uighur and Kirghiz forces were defeated during 1934 by the Chinese Muslim 36th Division (National Revolutionary Army) commanded by General Ma Zhancang at the Battle of Kashgar and Battle of Yarkand. All the Afghan volunteers were killed by the Chinese Muslim troops, who then abolished the First East Turkestan Republic, and reestablished Chinese government control over the area. Despite close relations to the Axis powers, Zahir Shah and his governments refused to take sides during World War II and Afghanistan remained one of the few countries in the world to remain neutral. From 1944 to 1947, Afghanistan experienced a series of revolts by various tribes. After the end of the Second World War, Zahir Shah recognised the need for the modernisation of Afghanistan and recruited a number of foreign advisers to assist with the process. During this period Afghanistan's first modern university was founded. During his reign a number of potential advances and reforms were derailed as a result of factionalism and political infighting. He also requested financial aid from both the United States and the Soviet Union, and Afghanistan was one of few countries in the world to receive aid from both the Cold War enemies. In a 1969 interview, Zahir Shah said that he is "not a capitalist. But I also don’t want socialism. I don’t want socialism that would bring about the kind of situation [that exists] in Czechoslovakia. I don’t want us to become the servants of Russia or China or the servant of any other place." He was considered a relatively "mild" leader compared to previous Kings; Zahir Shah had never signed a warrant for execution of anyone for political reasons during his reign. He also used his power several times to reduce capital punishment given to some criminals convicted in court cases. At Zahir Shah's behest a new constitution was introduced in 1964 which made Afghanistan a modern democratic state by introducing free elections, a parliament, civil rights, women's rights and universal suffrage. At least five Afghani little Pul coins during his reign bore the Arabic title: المتوكل على الله محمد ظاهر شاه, "AlMutawakkil 'ala Allah Muhammad Zhahir Shah" which means "The leaner on God, Muhammad Zhahir Shah". The title "AlMutawakkil 'ala Allah", "The leaner on God" is taken from Quran 8:61. By the time he returned to Afghanistan in 2002, his rule was characterized by a lengthy span of peace. Exile In 1973, while Zahir Shah was abroad in Italy, his cousin Mohammad Daoud Khan staged a coup d'état and established an autocratic republican government. As a former Prime Minister, Daoud Khan had been forced to resign by Zahir Shah a decade earlier and felt that Zahir Shah lacked leadership and that the parliamentary system prevented real progressivism. In August 1973, Zahir Shah sent a letter from Rome to Khan in Kabul declaring his abdication, saying he respected "the will of my compatriots" after realizing the people of Afghanistan "with absolute majority welcomed a Republican regime". Zahir Shah lived in exile in Italy for twenty-nine years alongside his wife Queen Humaira Begum and some other royal family members. Initially they lived in a three‐room apartment on Rome's Via Cassia. In the same city, relatives of the 1920s King Amanullah Khan, of the same house of Barakzai, still lived. President Daoud Khan continued to send money to them in Italy which were incomes from property and estates of the former royal family. After the Saur Revolution, the leftist Khalq government cut all incoming money to Italy. Zahir eventually lived in a villa in the affluent community of Olgiata on Via Cassia, north of Rome, where he spent his time playing golf and chess, as well as tending to his garden. He was financially supported by the Shah of Iran since the new Afghan government failed to provide him a monthly salary. The Shah also supported his two sons who were studying in the United States and Canada. He was prohibited from returning to Afghanistan during the late 1970s by the Soviet-assisted Communist government. In 1983 during the Soviet–Afghan War, Zahir Shah was cautiously involved with plans to develop a government in exile. Ultimately these plans failed because he could not reach a consensus with powerful Islamist factions. It has also been reported that Afghanistan, the Soviet Union and India had all tried to persuade Zahir Shah to return as chief of a neutral, possibly interim, administration in Kabul. Both the Soviet Union and the United States sent representatives to meet him, and President Mohammad Najibullah supported Zahir Shah to play a role in a possible interim government in the quest for peace. In May 1990, Zahir Shah issued a long statement through Voice of America and the BBC calling for unity and peace among Afghans, and offering his services. This reportedly led to a spark of interest and approval among the Kabul populace. However, the idea of a revived political role for Zahir Shah was met with hostility by some, notably radical Islamist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 1991, Zahir Shah survived an attempt on his life by a knife-wielding assassin masquerading as a Portuguese journalist. After the fall of the pro-Soviet government, Zahir Shah was favored by many to return and restore the monarchy to unify the country and as he was acceptable to most factions. However these efforts were blocked mostly by Pakistan's ISI, who feared his stance on the Durand Line issue. In June 1995, Zahir Shah's former envoy Sardar Wali announced at talks in Islamabad, Pakistan, that Zahir Shah was willing to participate in peace talks to end the Afghan Civil War, but no consensus was ever reached. Return to Afghanistan On 18 April 2002, at the age of 87 and four months after the end of Taliban rule, Zahir Shah returned to Afghanistan, flown in an Italian military plane, and welcomed at Kabul's airport by Hamid Karzai and other officials. His return was widely welcomed by Afghans, and he was |
are the most common types of misos available, different varieties may be preferred in particular regions of Japan. In the eastern Kantō region that includes Tokyo, the darker brownish akamiso is popular while in the western Kansai region encompassing Osaka, Kyoto, and Kobe, the lighter shiromiso is preferred. A more nuanced breakdown of the flavors is: Kome miso (米味噌) or "rice miso" can be yellow, yellowish white, red, etc. Whitish miso is made from boiled soybeans, and reddish miso is made from steamed soybeans. Kome miso is consumed more in eastern Japan and the Hokuriku and Kinki areas. Mugi miso (麦味噌) or "barley miso" is a whitish miso which is produced in Kyushu, western Chugoku, and Shikoku areas. Another reddish mugi miso is produced in the northern Kanto area. Mugi miso has a peculiar smell. Mame miso (豆味噌) or "soybean miso" is a darker, more reddish brown than kome miso. This is not so sweet as some other varieties, but has some astringency and good umami (旨味). This miso requires a long maturing term. Mame miso is consumed mostly in Aichi prefecture, part of Gifu prefecture, and part of Mie prefecture. Soybean (grain-free) miso is also labeled hatchō miso (八丁味噌). Hatchō miso is an Okazaki, Aichi specialty and has its origins in Mikawa Province during the Sengoku period. The processing method with large wooden barrels and stones on the lid remains unchanged. Chōgō (調合) or Awase (合わせ) miso, or "mixed miso" comes in many types, because it is a mixture or compound of other varieties of miso. This may improve the weak points of each type of miso. For example, mame miso is very salty, but when combined with kome miso the finished product has a mild taste. Akamiso (赤味噌) or red miso is aged, sometimes for more than one year. Therefore, due to the Maillard reaction, the color changes gradually from white to red or black, thus giving it the name red miso. Characteristics of the flavor are saltiness and some astringency with umami. It is often a much stronger-tasting miso. Factors in the depth of color are the formula of the soybeans and the quantity used. Generally, steamed soybeans are more deeply colored than boiled soybeans. Shiromiso (白味噌) or white miso is the most widely produced miso, made in many regions of the country. Its main ingredients are rice, barley, and a small quantity of soybeans. If a greater quantity of soybeans were added, the miso would be red or brown. Compared with red miso, white miso has a very short fermentation time. The taste is sweet, and the umami is soft or light (compared to red miso). Chemical properties of flavor and aroma compounds The distinct and unique aroma of miso determines its quality. Many reactions occur among the components of miso, primarily the Maillard reaction, a non-enzymatic reaction of an amino group with a reducing sugar. The volatile compounds produced from this reaction give miso its characteristic flavor and aroma. Depending on the microorganism in combination with the variety of soybean or cereal used, many classes of flavor compounds are produced that give rise to the different types of miso. Fermentation products such as furanone compounds, including 4-hydroxy-2(or 5)-ethyl-5(or 2)-methyl-3(2H)-furanone (HEMF) and 4-hydroxy-2,5 dimethyl-3(2H)-furanone (HDMF) are novel flavor compounds of miso. HEMF is especially known for its sweet aroma and is very important for the sensory evaluation of the aroma of rice miso. The unique sensory properties of miso are complex; however, the key factor involved in the overall quality of the final product is the enzymatic activity of microorganisms. They use the composition of miso (rice, barley, and soybeans) to produce different pigments, flavor and aroma compounds. Proteolysis of soybean protein produces constituent amino acids that impart an umami taste that enhance the relatively dull taste of soybean by itself. Soy protein contains a substantial amount of glutamate, the salt of which is known as MSG or monosodium glutamate, a popular ingredient used by food manufacturers to improve the taste of their products. The umami effect of MSG itself is one-dimensional; however the umami taste of miso is multi-dimensional because of the myriad of different amino acids and fermentation products present. Barley miso is a traditional farmhouse variety made for personal use. Often called "rural miso", domestic barley is more often used than imported barley. Containing glutamic acid and aromatic compounds such as ferulic acid and vanillic acid, barley miso is distinguished by a characteristic flavor. Fermentation Miso's unique properties and flavour profile can be attributed to the compounds produced through the fermentation process. Miso, depending on the variety, consists of a starter culture called koji (麹), soybeans, and usually a grain (either rice, barley, or rye). The miso goes through a two step process; first creating the koji, and second the koji is combined with the other components and the mixture is left to be enzymatically digested, fermented and aged. Creating koji Koji is produced by introducing the mould Aspergillus oryzae onto steamed white rice. This mould culture comes from dried A. oryzae spores called tane-koji or "starter koji" and is isolated from plant matter (usually rice) and cultivated. In the past, the natural presence of A. oryzae spores was relied upon to create koji, but because of the difficulty of producing the culture, tane-koji is added almost exclusively in both industrial and traditional production of miso. Tane-koji is produced much in the same way as koji, but also has a small portion of wood ash added to the mixture which gives important nutrients to the fungus as well as promoting sporulation. A. oryzae is an aerobic fungus and is the most active fermenting agents in koji as it produces amylolytic, and proteolytic enzymes which are essential to creating the final miso product. Amylolytic enzymes such as amylase aid in the breakdown of starch in the grains to sugar and dextrin, while proteolytic enzymes such as protease catalyze the breakdown of proteins into smaller peptides or amino acids. These both aid in the enzymatic digestion of the mixture of rice and soybeans. Depending on the strain of A. oryzae, enzymatic composition varies thereby changing the characteristics of the final miso product. For example, the strain used to create the sweeter white miso would likely produce a higher content of amylolytic enzymes, while comparatively a soybean miso might have a higher content of proteolytic enzyme. To create optimal conditions for enzymatic production and the growth of A. oryzae, the koji's environment must be carefully regulated. Temperature, humidity and oxygen content, are all important factors in not only maximizing mould growth and enzyme production, but to prevent other harmful bacteria from producing. Once the koji has reached a desirable flavour profile it is usually mixed with salt to prevent further fermentation. Although other strains of fungi have been used to produce koji, A. oryzae is the most desirable because of a number of properties, including the fact that it does not produce aflatoxin. Storage and preparation Miso typically comes as a paste in a sealed container requiring refrigeration after opening. Natural miso is a living food containing many beneficial microorganisms such as Tetragenococcus halophilus which can be killed by overcooking. For this | the Maillard reaction, the color changes gradually from white to red or black, thus giving it the name red miso. Characteristics of the flavor are saltiness and some astringency with umami. It is often a much stronger-tasting miso. Factors in the depth of color are the formula of the soybeans and the quantity used. Generally, steamed soybeans are more deeply colored than boiled soybeans. Shiromiso (白味噌) or white miso is the most widely produced miso, made in many regions of the country. Its main ingredients are rice, barley, and a small quantity of soybeans. If a greater quantity of soybeans were added, the miso would be red or brown. Compared with red miso, white miso has a very short fermentation time. The taste is sweet, and the umami is soft or light (compared to red miso). Chemical properties of flavor and aroma compounds The distinct and unique aroma of miso determines its quality. Many reactions occur among the components of miso, primarily the Maillard reaction, a non-enzymatic reaction of an amino group with a reducing sugar. The volatile compounds produced from this reaction give miso its characteristic flavor and aroma. Depending on the microorganism in combination with the variety of soybean or cereal used, many classes of flavor compounds are produced that give rise to the different types of miso. Fermentation products such as furanone compounds, including 4-hydroxy-2(or 5)-ethyl-5(or 2)-methyl-3(2H)-furanone (HEMF) and 4-hydroxy-2,5 dimethyl-3(2H)-furanone (HDMF) are novel flavor compounds of miso. HEMF is especially known for its sweet aroma and is very important for the sensory evaluation of the aroma of rice miso. The unique sensory properties of miso are complex; however, the key factor involved in the overall quality of the final product is the enzymatic activity of microorganisms. They use the composition of miso (rice, barley, and soybeans) to produce different pigments, flavor and aroma compounds. Proteolysis of soybean protein produces constituent amino acids that impart an umami taste that enhance the relatively dull taste of soybean by itself. Soy protein contains a substantial amount of glutamate, the salt of which is known as MSG or monosodium glutamate, a popular ingredient used by food manufacturers to improve the taste of their products. The umami effect of MSG itself is one-dimensional; however the umami taste of miso is multi-dimensional because of the myriad of different amino acids and fermentation products present. Barley miso is a traditional farmhouse variety made for personal use. Often called "rural miso", domestic barley is more often used than imported barley. Containing glutamic acid and aromatic compounds such as ferulic acid and vanillic acid, barley miso is distinguished by a characteristic flavor. Fermentation Miso's unique properties and flavour profile can be attributed to the compounds produced through the fermentation process. Miso, depending on the variety, consists of a starter culture called koji (麹), soybeans, and usually a grain (either rice, barley, or rye). The miso goes through a two step process; first creating the koji, and second the koji is combined with the other components and the mixture is left to be enzymatically digested, fermented and aged. Creating koji Koji is produced by introducing the mould Aspergillus oryzae onto steamed white rice. This mould culture comes from dried A. oryzae spores called tane-koji or "starter koji" and is isolated from plant matter (usually rice) and cultivated. In the past, the natural presence of A. oryzae spores was relied upon to create koji, but because of the difficulty of producing the culture, tane-koji is added almost exclusively in both industrial and traditional production of miso. Tane-koji is produced much in the same way as koji, but also has a small portion of wood ash added to the mixture which gives important nutrients to the fungus as well as promoting sporulation. A. oryzae is an aerobic fungus and is the most active fermenting agents in koji as it produces amylolytic, and proteolytic enzymes which are essential to creating the final miso product. Amylolytic enzymes such as amylase aid in the breakdown of starch in the grains to sugar and dextrin, while proteolytic enzymes such as protease catalyze the breakdown of proteins into smaller peptides or amino acids. These both aid in the enzymatic digestion of the mixture of rice and soybeans. Depending on the strain of A. oryzae, enzymatic composition varies thereby changing the characteristics of the final miso product. For example, the strain used to create the sweeter white miso would likely produce a higher content of amylolytic enzymes, while comparatively a soybean miso might have a higher content of proteolytic enzyme. To create optimal conditions for enzymatic production and the growth of A. oryzae, the koji's environment must be carefully regulated. Temperature, humidity and oxygen content, are all important factors in not only maximizing mould growth and enzyme production, but to prevent other harmful bacteria from producing. Once the koji has reached a desirable flavour profile it is usually mixed with salt to prevent further fermentation. Although other strains of fungi have been used to produce koji, A. oryzae is the most desirable because of a number of properties, including the fact that it does not produce aflatoxin. Storage and preparation Miso typically comes as a paste in a sealed container requiring refrigeration after opening. Natural miso is a living food containing many beneficial microorganisms such as Tetragenococcus halophilus which can be killed by overcooking. For this reason, the miso should be added to soups or other foods being prepared just before they are removed from the heat. Using miso without any cooking may be even better. Outside Japan, a popular practice is to add miso only to foods that have cooled to preserve kōjikin cultures in miso. Nonetheless, miso and soy foods play a large role in the Japanese diet, and many cooked miso dishes are popular. Usage Miso is a part of many Japanese-style meals. It most commonly appears as the main ingredient of miso soup, which is eaten daily by much of the Japanese population. The pairing of plain rice and miso soup is considered a fundamental unit of Japanese cuisine. This pairing is the basis of a traditional Japanese breakfast. Miso is used in many other types of soup and soup-like dishes, including some kinds of ramen, udon, nabe, and imoni. Generally, such dishes have the title miso prefixed to their name (for example, miso-udon), and have a heavier, earthier flavor and aroma compared to other Japanese soups that are not miso-based. Many traditional confections use a sweet, thick miso glaze, such as mochi and dango. Miso-glazed treats are strongly associated with Japanese festivals, although they are available year-round at supermarkets. The consistency of miso glaze ranges from thick and taffy-like to thin and drippy. Soybean miso is used to make a type of pickle called misozuke. These pickles are typically made from cucumber, daikon, Nappa cabbage, or eggplant, and are sweeter and less salty than the standard Japanese salt pickle. Other foods with miso as an ingredient include: dengaku (miso sweetened with molasses used for grilling) yakimochi (charcoal-grilled mochi covered in miso) miso-braised vegetables or mushrooms marinades: fish or chicken can be marinated in a combination of miso and rice wine overnight to be grilled. Corn |
River Tees, and he seized a multitude of people and many herds of cattle: and the Scots called this the raid of Albidosorum, that is, Nainndisi. But others say that Constantine made this raid, asking of the king, Malcolm, that the kingship should be given to him for a week's time, so that he could visit the English. In fact, it was Malcolm who made the raid, but Constantine incited him, as I have said. Woolf suggests that the association of Constantine with the raid is a late addition, one derived from a now-lost saga or poem. He died in the shield wall next to his men. Máel Coluim would be the third in his immediate family to die violently, his father Donald II and grandfather Constantine I both having met similar fates 54 years earlier in 900 and 77 years earlier in 877, respectively. In 945, Edmund I of England, having expelled Amlaíb Cuarán (Olaf Sihtricsson) from Northumbria, devastated Cumbria and blinded two sons of Domnall mac Eógain, king of Strathclyde. It is said that he then "let" or "commended" Strathclyde to Máel Coluim in return for an alliance. What is to be understood by "let" or "commended" is unclear, but it may well mean that Máel Coluim had been the overlord of Strathclyde and that Edmund recognised this while taking lands in southern Cumbria for himself. The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba says that Máel Coluim took an army into Moray "and slew Cellach". Cellach is not named in the surviving genealogies of the rulers of Moray, and his identity is unknown. Máel Coluim appears to have | according to the Chronicle. The Annals of Ulster for 952 report a battle between "the men of Alba and the Britons [of Strathclyde] and the English" against the foreigners, i.e., the Northmen or the Norse-Gaels. This battle is not reported by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and it is unclear whether it should be related to the expulsion of Amlaíb Cuarán from York or the return of Eric. The Annals of Ulster report that Máel Coluim was killed in 954. Other sources place this most probably in the Mearns, either at Fetteresso following the Chronicle, or at Dunnottar following The Prophecy of Berchán. He was buried on Iona. Some versions of the Chronicle, and the Chronicle of Melrose, are read as placing Máel Coluim's death at Blervie, near Forres. Issue The name of Máel Coluim's wife is not known; however, it is known he had 2 sons: Dub, King of Scotland, also known as Dub mac Maíl Coluim and Duff, King of Alba 962–967 Kenneth II of Scotland, also known as Cináed mac Maíl Coluim, King of Alba 971–995 References Further reading For primary sources see also External links below. Anderson, Alan Orr, Early Sources of Scottish History A.D 500–1286, volume 1. Reprinted with corrections. Paul Watkins, Stamford, 1990. |
provoked this strife, Máel Snechtai survived until 1085. Malcolm and William Rufus When William Rufus became king of England after his father's death, Malcolm did not intervene in the rebellions by supporters of Robert Curthose which followed. In 1091, William Rufus confiscated Edgar Ætheling's lands in England, and Edgar fled north to Scotland. In May, Malcolm marched south, not to raid and take slaves and plunder, but to besiege Newcastle, built by Robert Curthose in 1080. This appears to have been an attempt to advance the frontier south from the River Tweed to the River Tees. The threat was enough to bring the English king back from Normandy, where he had been fighting Robert Curthose. In September, learning of William Rufus's approaching army, Malcolm withdrew north and the English followed. Unlike in 1072, Malcolm was prepared to fight, but a peace was arranged by Edgar Ætheling and Robert Curthose whereby Malcolm again acknowledged the overlordship of the English king. In 1092, the peace began to break down. Based on the idea that the Scots controlled much of modern Cumbria, it had been supposed that William Rufus's new castle at Carlisle and his settlement of English peasants in the surrounds was the cause. It is unlikely that Malcolm controlled Cumbria, and the dispute instead concerned the estates granted to Malcolm by William Rufus's father in 1072 for his maintenance when visiting England. Malcolm sent messengers to discuss the question and William Rufus agreed to a meeting. Malcolm travelled south to Gloucester, stopping at Wilton Abbey to visit his daughter Edith and sister-in-law Cristina. Malcolm arrived there on 24 August 1093 to find that William Rufus refused to negotiate, insisting that the dispute be judged by the English barons. This Malcolm refused to accept, and returned immediately to Scotland. It does not appear that William Rufus intended to provoke a war, but, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, war came: Malcolm was accompanied by Edward, his eldest son by Margaret and probable heir-designate (or tánaiste), and by Edgar. Even by the standards of the time, the ravaging of Northumbria by the Scots was seen as harsh. Death While marching north again, Malcolm was ambushed by Robert de Mowbray, Earl of Northumbria, whose lands he had devastated, near Alnwick on 13 November 1093. There he was killed by Arkil Morel, steward of Bamburgh Castle. The conflict became known as the Battle of Alnwick. Edward was mortally wounded in the same fight. Margaret, it is said, died soon after receiving the news of their deaths from Edgar. The Annals of Ulster say: Malcolm's body was taken to Tynemouth Priory for burial. The king's body was sent north for reburial, in the reign of his son Alexander, at Dunfermline Abbey, or possibly Iona. On 19 June 1250, following the canonisation of Malcolm's wife Margaret by Pope Innocent IV, Margaret's remains were disinterred and placed in a reliquary. Tradition has it that as the reliquary was carried to the high altar of Dunfermline Abbey, past Malcolm's grave, it became too heavy to move. As a result, Malcolm's remains were also disinterred, and buried next to Margaret beside the altar. Issue Malcolm and Ingibiorg had three sons: Duncan II of Scotland, succeeded his father as King of Scotland Donald, died ca. 1094 Malcolm, died ca. 1085 (apocryphal) Malcolm and Margaret had eight children, six sons and two daughters: Edward, killed 1093 Edmund of Scotland Ethelred, abbot of Dunkeld King Edgar of Scotland King Alexander I of Scotland Matilda of Scotland, married Henry I of England Mary of Scotland, married Eustace III of Boulogne King David I of Scotland Depictions in fiction Malcolm appears in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth as Malcolm. He is the son of King Duncan and heir to the throne. He first appears in the second scene where he is talking to a sergeant, with Duncan. The sergeant tells them how the battle was won thanks to Macbeth. Then Ross comes and Duncan decides that Macbeth should take the title of Thane of Cawdor. Then he later appears in Act 1.4 talking about the execution of the former Thane of Cawdor. Macbeth then enters and they congratulate him on his victory. He later appears in Macbeth's castle as a guest. When his father is killed he is suspected of the murder so he escapes to England. He later makes an appearance in Act 4.3, where he talks to Macduff about Macbeth and what to do. They both decide to start a war against him. In Act 5.4 he is seen in Dunsinane getting ready for war. He orders the troops to hide behind branches and slowly advance towards the castle. In Act 5.8 he watches the battle against Macbeth and Macduff with Siward and Ross. When eventually Macbeth is killed, Malcolm takes over as king. The married life of Malcolm III and Margaret has been the subject of three historical novels: A Goodly Pearl (1905) by Mary H. Debenham, and Malcolm Canmore's Pearl (1907) by Agnes Grant Hay, and Sing, Morning Star by Jane Oliver (1949). They focus on court life in Dunfermline, and Margaret helping introduce Anglo-Saxon culture in Scotland. The latter two novels cover events to 1093, ending with Malcolm's death. Malcolm's conflict with William the Conqueror is depicted in the screenplay, Malcolm Son of Duncan, by Laura Ballou which is part of the reading reference library at the Clan Donnachaidh Society Center in Perthshire, Scotland. Malcolm III was depicted by Nigel Tranter in his novels MacBeth the King and Margaret the Queen as the bastard son of Duncan I and the daughter of a miller at Forteviot. He was depicted as being a fan of everything Anglo-Saxon in the latter novel. In the Disney animated series Gargoyles Malcolm makes an appearance as the young son of King Duncan known simply as "Canmore". He is exiled to England after his father is killed in battle by Macbeth. Upon his return to claim the Scottish throne he takes up the mantle of the "Hunter" and destroys the last of the few remaining gargoyle clans of Scotland. Notes References Anderson, Alan Orr, Early Sources of Scottish History A.D 500–1286, volume 1. Reprinted with corrections. Paul Watkins, Stamford, 1990. Anderson, Alan Orr, Scottish Annals from English Chroniclers. D. Nutt, London, 1908. Anderson, Marjorie Ogilvie, Kings and Kingship in Early Scotland. Scottish Academic Press, Edinburgh, revised edition 1980. Anon., Orkneyinga Saga: The History of the Earls of Orkney, tr. Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards. Penguin, London, 1978. Barrell, A.D.M. Medieval Scotland. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. Barrow, G.W.S., Kingship and Unity: Scotland, 1000–1306. Reprinted, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1989. Barrow, G.W.S., The Kingdom of the Scots. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2003. Broun, Dauvit, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. Boydell, Woodbridge, 1999. Burton, John Hill, The History of Scotland, New Edition, 8 vols, Edinburgh 1876 Clancy, Thomas Owen, "St. Margaret" in Michael Lynch (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Scottish History. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. Duncan, A.A.M., The Kingship of the Scots 842–1292: Succession and | for the match. Malcolm appears to have enjoyed a peaceful relationship with the Earldom of Orkney, ruled jointly by his possible stepsons, Paul and Erlend Thorfinnsson. The Orkneyinga Saga reports strife with Norway but this is may be misplaced as it associates this with Magnus Barefoot, who became king of Norway only in 1093, the year of Malcolm's death. Malcolm gave sanctuary to Tostig Godwinson when the Northumbrians drove him out in 1065, and appears to have offered indirect support to the ill-fated invasion of England by Harald Hardrada and Tostig in 1066, which ended in defeat and death at the battle of Stamford Bridge. In 1068, he granted asylum to a group of English exiles fleeing from William of Normandy, among them Agatha, widow of Edward the Confessor's nephew Edward the Exile, and her children: Edgar Ætheling and his sisters Margaret and Cristina. They were accompanied by Gospatric, by this time earl of Bamburgh. The exiles were disappointed, however, if they had expected immediate assistance from the Scots. Marriage to Margaret In 1069 the exiles returned to England, to join a spreading revolt in the north. Even though Gospatric and Siward's son Waltheof submitted by the end of the year, the arrival of a Danish army under Sweyn Estridsson seemed to ensure that William's position remained weak. Malcolm decided on war, and took his army south into Cumbria and across the Pennines, wasting Teesdale and Cleveland then marching north, loaded with loot, to Wearmouth. There Malcolm met Edgar and his family, who were invited to return with him, but did not. As Sweyn had by now been bought off with a large Danegeld, Malcolm took his army home. Against the backdrop of William's scorched earth policy against the northern English rebels, William sent Gospatric to raid Scotland through Cumbria as a further act of reprisal. In return, the Scots fleet raided the Northumbrian coast where Gospatric's possessions were concentrated. Late in the year, perhaps shipwrecked on their way to a European exile, Edgar and his family again arrived in Scotland, this time to remain. By the end of 1070, Malcolm had married Edgar's sister Margaret (later known as Saint Margaret). The naming of their children represented a break with the traditional Scots regal names such as Malcolm, Cináed and Áed. The point of naming Margaret's sons—Edward after her father Edward the Exile, Edmund for her grandfather Edmund Ironside, Ethelred for her great-grandfather Ethelred the Unready and Edgar for her great-great-grandfather Edgar and her brother, briefly the elected king, Edgar Ætheling—was unlikely to be missed in England, where William of Normandy's grasp on power was far from secure. Whether the adoption of the classical Alexander for the future Alexander I of Scotland (either for Pope Alexander II or for Alexander the Great) and the biblical David for the future David I of Scotland represented a recognition that William of Normandy would not be easily removed, or was due to the repetition of Anglo-Saxon royal names—another Edmund had preceded Edgar—is not known. Margaret also gave Malcolm two daughters, Edith, who married Henry I of England, and Mary, who married Eustace III of Boulogne. In 1072, with the Harrying of the North completed and his position again secure, William of Normandy came north with an army and a fleet. Malcolm met William at Abernethy and, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "became his man" and handed over his eldest son Duncan as a hostage and arranged peace between William and Edgar. Accepting the overlordship of the king of the English was no novelty, as previous kings had done so without result. The same was true of Malcolm; his agreement with the English king was followed by further raids into Northumbria, which led to further trouble in the earldom and the killing of Bishop William Walcher at Gateshead. In 1080, William sent his son Robert Curthose north with an army while his brother Odo punished the Northumbrians. Malcolm again made peace, and this time kept it for over a decade. Malcolm faced little recorded internal opposition, with the exception of Lulach's son Máel Snechtai. In an unusual entry, for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle contains little on Scotland, it says that in 1078: Whatever provoked this strife, Máel Snechtai survived until 1085. Malcolm and William Rufus When William Rufus became king of England after his father's death, Malcolm did not intervene in the rebellions by supporters of Robert Curthose which followed. In 1091, William Rufus confiscated Edgar Ætheling's lands in England, and Edgar fled north to Scotland. In May, Malcolm marched south, not to raid and take slaves and plunder, but to besiege Newcastle, built by Robert Curthose in 1080. This appears to have been an attempt to advance the frontier south from the River Tweed to the River Tees. The threat was enough to bring the English king back from Normandy, where he had been fighting Robert Curthose. In September, learning of William Rufus's approaching army, Malcolm withdrew north and the English followed. Unlike in 1072, Malcolm was prepared to fight, but a peace was arranged by Edgar Ætheling and Robert Curthose whereby Malcolm again acknowledged the overlordship of the English king. In 1092, the peace began |
to communications protocols and network layers. The MTU is specified in terms of bytes or octets of the largest PDU that the layer can pass onwards. MTU parameters usually appear in association with a communications interface (NIC, serial port, etc.). Standards (Ethernet, for example) can fix the size of an MTU; or systems (such as point-to-point serial links) may decide MTU at connect time. Underlying data link and physical layers usually add overhead to the network layer data to be transported, so for a given maximum frame size of a medium, one needs to subtract the amount of overhead to calculate that medium's MTU. For example, with Ethernet, the maximum frame size is 1518 bytes, 18 bytes of which are overhead (header and frame check sequence), resulting in an MTU of 1500 bytes. Tradeoffs A larger MTU brings greater efficiency because each network packet carries more user data while protocol overheads, such as headers or underlying per-packet delays, remain fixed; the resulting higher efficiency means an improvement in bulk protocol throughput. A larger MTU also requires processing of fewer packets for the same amount of data. In some systems, per-packet-processing can be a critical performance limitation. However, this gain is not without a downside. Large packets occupy a slow link for more time than a smaller packet, causing greater delays to subsequent packets, and increasing network delay and delay variation. For example, a 1500-byte packet, the largest allowed by Ethernet at the network layer, ties up a 14.4k modem for about one second. Large packets are also problematic in the presence of communications errors. If no forward error correction is used, corruption of a single bit in a packet requires that the entire packet be retransmitted, which can be costly. At a given bit error rate, larger packets are more susceptible to corruption. Their greater payload makes retransmissions of larger packets take longer. Despite the negative effects on retransmission duration, large packets can still have a net positive effect on end-to-end TCP performance. Internet protocol The Internet protocol suite was designed to work over many different networking technologies, each of which may use packets of different sizes. While a host will know the MTU of its own interface and possibly that of its peers (from initial handshakes), it will not initially know the lowest MTU in a chain of links to other peers. Another potential problem is that higher-level protocols may create packets larger than even the local link supports. IPv4 allows fragmentation which divides the datagram into pieces, each small enough to accommodate a specified MTU limitation. This fragmentation process takes place at the internet layer. The fragmented packets are marked so that the IP layer of the destination host knows it should reassemble the packets into the original datagram. All fragments of a packet must arrive for the packet to be considered received. If the network drops any fragment, the entire packet is lost. When the number of packets that must be fragmented or the number of fragments is great, fragmentation can cause unreasonable or unnecessary overhead. For example, various tunneling situations may exceed the MTU by very little as they add just a header's worth of data. The addition is small, but each packet now has to be sent in two fragments, the second of which carries very little payload. The same amount of payload is being moved, but every intermediate router has to forward twice as many packets. The Internet Protocol requires that hosts must be able to process IP datagrams of at least 576 bytes (for IPv4) or 1280 bytes (for IPv6). However, this does not preclude link layers with an MTU smaller than this minimum MTU from conveying IP data. For example, according to IPv6's specification, if a particular link layer cannot deliver an IP datagram of 1280 bytes in a single frame, then the link layer must provide its own fragmentation and reassembly mechanism, separate from the IP fragmentation mechanism, to ensure that a 1280-byte IP datagram can be delivered, intact, to the IP layer. MTUs for common media In the context of Internet Protocol, MTU refers to the maximum size of an IP packet that can be transmitted without fragmentation over a | MTU by very little as they add just a header's worth of data. The addition is small, but each packet now has to be sent in two fragments, the second of which carries very little payload. The same amount of payload is being moved, but every intermediate router has to forward twice as many packets. The Internet Protocol requires that hosts must be able to process IP datagrams of at least 576 bytes (for IPv4) or 1280 bytes (for IPv6). However, this does not preclude link layers with an MTU smaller than this minimum MTU from conveying IP data. For example, according to IPv6's specification, if a particular link layer cannot deliver an IP datagram of 1280 bytes in a single frame, then the link layer must provide its own fragmentation and reassembly mechanism, separate from the IP fragmentation mechanism, to ensure that a 1280-byte IP datagram can be delivered, intact, to the IP layer. MTUs for common media In the context of Internet Protocol, MTU refers to the maximum size of an IP packet that can be transmitted without fragmentation over a given medium. The size of an IP packet includes IP headers but excludes headers from the link layer. In the case of an Ethernet frame this adds an overhead of 18 bytes, or 22 bytes with an IEEE 802.1Q tag for VLAN tagging or class of service. The MTU should not be confused with the minimum datagram size that all hosts must be prepared to accept. This is 576 bytes for IPv4 and of 1280 bytes for IPv6. Ethernet maximum frame size The IP MTU and Ethernet maximum frame size are configured separately. In Ethernet switch configuration, MTU may refer to Ethernet maximum frame size. In Ethernet-based routers, MTU normally refers to the IP MTU. If jumbo frames are allowed in a network, the IP MTU should also be adjusted upwards to take advantage of this. Since the IP packet is carried by an Ethernet frame, the Ethernet frame has to be larger than the IP packet. With the normal untagged Ethernet frame overhead of 18 bytes, the Ethernet maximum frame size is 1518 bytes. If a 1500 byte IP packet is to be carried over a tagged Ethernet connection, the Ethernet frame maximum size needs to be 1522 due to the larger size of an 802.1Q tagged frame. 802.3ac increases the standard Ethernet maximum frame size to accommodate this. Path MTU Discovery The Internet Protocol defines the path MTU of an Internet transmission path as the smallest MTU supported by any of the hops on the path between a source and destination. Put another way, the path MTU is the largest packet size that can traverse this path without suffering fragmentation. Path MTU Discovery is a technique for determining the path MTU between two IP hosts, defined for both IPv4 and IPv6. It works by sending packets with the DF (don't fragment) option in the IP header set. Any device along the path whose MTU is smaller than the packet will drop such packets and send back an ICMP Destination Unreachable (Datagram Too Big) message which indicates its MTU. This information allows the source host to reduce its assumed path MTU appropriately. The process repeats until the MTU becomes small enough to traverse the entire path without fragmentation. Standard Ethernet supports an MTU of 1500 bytes and Ethernet implementation supporting jumbo frames, allow for an MTU up to 9000 bytes. However, border protocols like PPPoE will reduce this. Path MTU Discovery exposes the difference between the MTU seen by Ethernet end-nodes and the Path MTU. Unfortunately, increasing numbers of networks drop ICMP traffic (for example, to prevent denial-of-service attacks), which prevents path MTU discovery from working. Packetization Layer Path MTU Discovery is a Path MTU Discovery technique which responds more robustly to ICMP filtering. In an IP network, the path from the source address to the destination address may change in response to various events (load-balancing, congestion, outages, etc.) and this could result in the path MTU changing (sometimes repeatedly) during a transmission, which may introduce further packet drops before the host finds a new reliable MTU. A failure of Path MTU Discovery carries the possible result of making some sites behind badly configured firewalls unreachable. A connection with mismatched MTU may work for low-volume data but fail as soon as a host sends a large block of data. For example, with Internet Relay Chat a connecting client might see the initial messages up to and including the initial ping (sent by the server as an anti-spoofing measure), but get no response after that. This is because the large set of welcome messages sent at that point are packets that exceed the path MTU. One can possibly work around this, depending on which part of the network one controls; for example one can change the MSS (maximum segment size) in |
and chartered by the United States Navy Military Sealift Command as a Maritime Prepositioning ship serving at Diego Garcia laden with U.S. Air Force munitions. She is self-sustaining, that is, she can unload herself, an | Maritime Prepositioning ship serving at Diego Garcia laden with U.S. Air Force munitions. She is self-sustaining, that is, she can unload herself, an asset in harbors with little or no infrastructure. Her 120-long-ton capacity roll-on/roll-off ramp |
are not counted. Located in the Mount Baker Wilderness, it is visible from much of Greater Victoria, Nanaimo, and Greater Vancouver in British Columbia, and to the south, from Seattle (and on clear days Tacoma) in Washington. Indigenous peoples have known the mountain for thousands of years, but the first written record of the mountain is from Spanish explorer Gonzalo Lopez de Haro, who mapped it in 1790 as , "Great Mount Carmel". The explorer George Vancouver renamed the mountain for 3rd Lieutenant Joseph Baker of HMS Discovery, who saw it on April 30, 1792. History Mount Baker was well-known to indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Indigenous names for the mountain include Koma Kulshan or Kulshan (Lummi: , "white sentinel", and , "puncture wound", i.e. "crater"); Quck Sam-ik (, "white mountain"); Kobah (, "white sentinel", and Tukullum or Nahcullum (in the language of the unidentified "Koma tribe"). In 1790, Manuel Quimper of the Spanish Navy set sail from Nootka, a temporary settlement on Vancouver Island, with orders to explore the newly discovered Strait of Juan de Fuca. Accompanying Quimper was first-pilot Gonzalo Lopez de Haro, who drew detailed charts during the six-week expedition. Although Quimper's journal of the voyage does not refer to the mountain, one of Haro's manuscript charts includes a sketch of Mount Baker. The Spanish named the snowy volcano , as it reminded them of the white-clad monks of the Carmelite Monastery. The British explorer George Vancouver left England a year later. His mission was to survey the northwest coast of America. Vancouver and his crew reached the Pacific Northwest coast in 1792. While anchored in Dungeness Bay on the south shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Joseph Baker made an observation of Mount Baker, which Vancouver recorded in his journal: Six years later, the official narrative of this voyage was published, including the first printed reference to the mountain. By the mid-1850s, Mount Baker was a well-known feature on the horizon to the explorers and fur traders who traveled in the Puget Sound region. Isaac I. Stevens, the first governor of Washington Territory, wrote about Mount Baker in 1853: Climbing history First European ascent Edmund Thomas Coleman, an Englishman who resided in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada and a veteran of the Alps, made the first attempt to ascend the mountain in 1866. He chose a route via the Skagit River, but was forced to turn back when local Native Americans refused him passage. Later that same year, Coleman recruited Whatcom County settlers Edward Eldridge, John Bennett, and John Tennant to aid him in his second attempt to scale the mountain. After approaching via the North Fork of the Nooksack River, the party navigated through what is now known as Coleman Glacier and ascended to within several hundred feet of the summit before turning back in the face of an "overhanging cornice of ice" and threatening weather. Coleman later returned to the mountain after two years. At 4:00 pm on August 17, 1868, Coleman, Eldridge, Tennant and two new companions (David Ogilvy and Thomas Stratton) scaled the summit via the Middle Fork Nooksack River, Marmot Ridge, Coleman Glacier, and the north margin of the Roman Wall. Notable ascents 1948 North Ridge (AD, AI 2-3, 3700 feet) Fred Beckey, Ralph and Dick Widrig (August 1948) Geology The present-day cone of Mount Baker is relatively young; it is perhaps less than 100,000 years old. The volcano sits atop a similar older volcanic cone called Black Buttes, which was active between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago. Much of Mount Baker's earlier geological record eroded away during the last ice age (which culminated 15,000–20,000 years ago), by thick ice sheets that filled the valleys and surrounded the volcano. In the last 14,000 years, the area around the mountain has been largely ice-free, but the mountain itself remains heavily covered with snow and ice. Isolated ridges of lava and hydrothermally altered rock, especially in the area of Sherman Crater, are exposed between glaciers on the upper flanks of the volcano; the lower flanks are steep and heavily vegetated. Volcanic rocks of Mount Baker and Black Buttes rest on a foundation of non-volcanic rocks. Deposits recording the last 14,000 years at Mount Baker indicate that Mount Baker has not had highly explosive eruptions like those of other volcanoes in the Cascade Volcanic Arc, such as Mount St. Helens, Glacier Peak, or the Mount Meager massif, nor has it erupted frequently. During this period, four episodes of magmatic eruptive activity have been recently recognized. Magmatic eruptions have produced tephra, pyroclastic flows, and lava flows from summit vents and the Schriebers Meadow Cone. The most destructive and most frequent events at Mount Baker have been lahars or debris flows and debris avalanches; many, if not most, of these were not related to magmatic eruptions, but may have been induced by magma intrusion, steam eruptions, earthquakes, gravitational instability, or possibly even heavy rainfall. Eruptive history Early history Research beginning in the late 1990s shows that Mount Baker is the youngest of several volcanic centers in the area and one of the youngest volcanoes in the Cascade Range. The Pliocene Hannegan caldera is preserved northeast of Mount Baker Volcanic activity in the Mount Baker volcanic field began more than one million years ago, but many of the earliest lava and tephra deposits have been removed by glacial erosion. The pale-colored rocks northeast of the modern volcano mark the site of the ancient (1.15 million years old) Kulshan caldera that collapsed after an enormous ash eruption one million years ago. Subsequently, eruptions in the Mount Baker area have produced cones and lava flows of andesite, the rock that constitutes much of other Cascade Range volcanoes such as Rainier, Adams, and Hood. From about 900,000 years ago to the present, numerous andesitic volcanic centers in the area have come and disappeared through glacial erosion. The largest of these cones is the Black Buttes edifice, active between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago and formerly bigger than today's Mount Baker. Modern craters and cone Mount Baker was built from stacks of lava and volcanic breccia prior to the end of the last glacial period, which ended about 15,000 years ago. Two craters are on the mountain. Ice-filled Carmelo Crater is under the summit ice dome. This crater is the source for the last cone-building eruptions The highest point of Mount Baker, Grant Peak, is on the exposed southeast rim of Carmelo Crater, which is a small pile of andesitic scoria lying on top of a stack of lava flows just below. Carmelo Crater is deeply dissected on its south side by the younger Sherman Crater. This crater is south of the summit, and its ice-covered floor is below the summit ice dome. This crater is the site of all Holocene eruptive activity. Hundreds of fumaroles vent gases, primarily , , and . Lava flows from the summit vent erupted between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago, and during the final stages of edifice construction, blocky pyroclastic flows entered the volcano's southeastern drainages. An eruption from Sherman Crater 6,600 years ago erupted a blanket of ash that extended more than to the east. Today, sulfurous gases reach the surface via two fumarole pathways: Dorr Fumarole, northeast of the summit, and Sherman Crater, south of the summit. Both are sites of hydrothermal alteration, converting lavas to weak, white-to-yellow clays; sulfur is a common mineral around these fumaroles. At Sherman Crater, collapses of this weakened rock generated lahars in the 1840s. Mazama Park eruptive period: 6,600 years ago Around 6,600 years | the Middle Fork of the Nooksack River. It was at least deep downstream from the volcano. At that time, the Nooksack River is believed to have drained north into the Fraser River; this lahar is unlikely to have reached Bellingham Bay. Next, a small hydrovolcanic eruption occurred at Sherman Crater, triggering a second collapse of the flank just east of the Roman Wall. That collapse also became a lahar that mainly followed the course of the first lahar for at least , and also spilled into tributaries of the Baker River. Finally, an eruption cloud deposited ash as far as downwind to the northeast and east. Historical activity Several eruptions occurred from Sherman Crater during the 19th century; they were witnessed from the Bellingham area. A possible eruption was seen in June 1792 during the Spanish expedition of Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés. Their report read, in part: In 1843, explorers reported a widespread layer of newly fallen rock fragments "like a snowfall" and that the forest was "on fire for miles around". These fires were unlikely to have been caused by ashfall, however, as charred material is not found with deposits of this fine-grained volcanic ash, which was almost certainly cooled in the atmosphere before falling. Rivers south of the volcano were reportedly clogged with ash, and Native Americans reported that many salmon perished. Reports of flooding on the Skagit River from the eruption are, however, probably greatly exaggerated. A short time later, two collapses of the east side of Sherman Crater produced two lahars, the first and larger of which flowed into the natural Baker Lake, increasing its level by at least . The location of the 19th-century lake is now covered by waters of the modern dam-impounded Baker Lake. Similar but lower-level hydrovolcanic activity at Sherman Crater continued intermittently for several decades afterward. On 26 November 1860, passengers who were traveling by steamer from New Westminster to Victoria reported that Mount Baker was "puffing out large volumes of smoke, which upon breaking, rolled down the snow-covered sides of the mountain, forming a pleasing effect of light and shade." In 1891, about of rock fell producing a lahar that traveled more than and covered . Activity in the 20th century decreased from the 19th century. Numerous small debris avalanches fell from Sherman Peak and descended the Boulder Glacier; a large one occurred on July 27, 2007. In early March 1975, a dramatic increase in fumarolic activity and snow melt in the Sherman Crater area raised concern that an eruption might be imminent. Heat flow increased more than tenfold. Additional monitoring equipment was installed and several geophysical surveys were conducted to try to detect the movement of magma. The increased thermal activity prompted public officials and Puget Power to temporarily close public access to the popular Baker Lake recreation area and to lower the reservoir's water level by . If those actions had not been taken, significant avalanches of debris from the Sherman Crater area could have swept directly into the reservoir, triggering a disastrous wave that could have caused human fatalities and damage to the reservoir. Other than the increased heat flow, few anomalies were recorded during the geophysical surveys, nor were any other precursory activities observed that would indicate that magma was moving up into the volcano. Several small lahars formed from material ejected onto the surrounding glaciers and acidic water was discharged into Baker Lake for many months. Activity gradually declined over the next two years, but stabilized at a higher level than before 1975. The increased level of fumarolic activity has continued at Mount Baker since 1975, but no other changes suggest that magma movement is involved. Current research at Mount Baker A considerable amount of research has been done at Mount Baker over the past decade, and it is now among the most-studied of the Cascade volcanoes. Recent and ongoing projects include gravimetric and GPS-based geodetic monitoring, fumarole gas sampling, tephra distribution mapping, new interpretations of the Schriebers Meadow lava flow, and hazards analyses. Mapping of Carmelo and Sherman craters, and interpretations of the eruptive history, continue, as well. The Mount Baker Volcano Research Center maintains an online archive of abstracts of this work, and an extensive references list, as well as photos. Climate Glaciers and hydrology Eleven named glaciers descend from Mount Baker. Two additional glaciers (Hadley Glacier and Sholes Glacier) descend |
after conversion. These ships, delivered to MSC in the mid-1980s, built at Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co., Chester, Pennsylvania, and converted at National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, San Diego. They were previously owned by Waterman Steamship Corporation but recently sold to MSC and now operated by Keystone Shipping Company. They were all part of the Waterman Line C7-S-133a Series. Builder: Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co., Chester, PA; General Dynamics Quincy Shipbuilding Division, Quincy, Massachusetts Converted: National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, San Diego, California Power Plant: 2 boilers; 2 GE turbines; ; 1 shaft Length: Beam: Displacement: 48,754 tons (49,536 metric tons) full load Cargo capacity: Containers, 532; ro-ro, ; JP-5 barrels, 20,290; DF-2 barrels, 12,355; Mogas barrels, 3,717; stable water, 2,189; cranes, two twin 50-ton and one 30-ton gantry Helicopters: platform only Speed: Ships: (formerly SS Sgt. Matej Kocak, SS John B. Waterman) (formerly SS PFC Eugene A. Obregon, SS Thomas Heywood) (formerly SS Maj. Stephen W. Pless, SS Charles Carroll) Crew: 34 civilians, 10 technicians 2nd Lieutenant John P. Bobo class The 2nd Lieutenant John P. Bobo-class ships are new construction ships delivered to MSC in the mid-1980s from General Dynamics Quincy Shipbuilding Division, Quincy, Massachusetts They were owned by American Overseas Marine (AMSEA) but have been recently sold to MSC and are now operated by Crowley Technical Management. Builders: General Dynamics Quincy Shipbuilding Division, Quincy, Massachusetts Power Plant: 2 Stork-Werkspoor 16TM410 diesels; sustained; 1 Omnithruster JT1000 bow thruster, Length: Beam: Displacement: 44,330 tons (45,041 metric tons) full load Cargo capacity: Containers, 530; ro-ro, ; JP-5 barrels, 20,776; DF-2 barrels, 13,334; Mogas barrels, 4,880; stable water, 2,357; cranes, one single and two twin 39-ton Helicopters: platform only Speed: Ships: (formerly MV 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo) (formerly MV PFC | previously owned by Waterman Steamship Corporation but recently sold to MSC and now operated by Keystone Shipping Company. They were all part of the Waterman Line C7-S-133a Series. Builder: Sun Shipbuilding & Drydock Co., Chester, PA; General Dynamics Quincy Shipbuilding Division, Quincy, Massachusetts Converted: National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, San Diego, California Power Plant: 2 boilers; 2 GE turbines; ; 1 shaft Length: Beam: Displacement: 48,754 tons (49,536 metric tons) full load Cargo capacity: Containers, 532; ro-ro, ; JP-5 barrels, 20,290; DF-2 barrels, 12,355; Mogas barrels, 3,717; stable water, 2,189; cranes, two twin 50-ton and one 30-ton gantry Helicopters: platform only Speed: Ships: (formerly SS Sgt. Matej Kocak, SS John B. Waterman) (formerly SS PFC Eugene A. Obregon, SS Thomas Heywood) (formerly SS Maj. Stephen W. Pless, SS Charles Carroll) Crew: 34 civilians, 10 technicians 2nd Lieutenant John P. Bobo class The 2nd Lieutenant John P. Bobo-class ships are new construction ships delivered to MSC in the mid-1980s from General Dynamics Quincy Shipbuilding Division, Quincy, Massachusetts They were owned by American Overseas Marine (AMSEA) but have been recently sold to MSC and are now operated by Crowley Technical Management. Builders: General Dynamics Quincy Shipbuilding Division, Quincy, Massachusetts Power Plant: 2 Stork-Werkspoor 16TM410 diesels; sustained; 1 Omnithruster JT1000 bow thruster, Length: Beam: Displacement: 44,330 tons (45,041 metric tons) full load Cargo capacity: Containers, 530; ro-ro, ; JP-5 barrels, 20,776; DF-2 barrels, 13,334; Mogas barrels, 4,880; stable water, 2,357; cranes, one single and two twin 39-ton Helicopters: platform only Speed: Ships: (formerly MV 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo) (formerly MV PFC Dewayne T. Williams) (formerly MV 1st Lt. Baldomero Lopez) (formerly MV 1st Lt. Jack Lummus) (formerly MV Sgt. William R. Button) Crew: 38 civilians, 10 technicians Capt Steven L. Bennett class Length: Beam: Draft: Displacement: Speed: Civilian: 24 contract mariners SSG Edward A. Carter Jr. class Length: Beam: Draft: Displacement: Speed: Civilian: 22 contract mariners Buffalo Soldier class Length: Beam: Draft: Displacement: Speed: Civilian: 21 contract mariners Maj. Bernard F. Fisher class Length: Beam: Draft: Displacement: Speed: Civilian: 24 contract mariners 1st Lt. Harry L. Martin class Length: Beam: Draft: Displacement: Speed: Civilian: 25 contract mariners LCPL Roy M. Wheat class Length: Beam: Draft: Displacement: Speed: Civilian: 29 contract mariners LTC John U. |
Agency and author of The Collapse of the Soviet Military, says that Rust's flight irreparably damaged the reputation of the Soviet military. This enabled Gorbachev to remove many of the strongest opponents to his reforms. Minister of Defence Sergei Sokolov and the head of the Soviet Air Defence Forces Alexander Koldunov were dismissed along with hundreds of other officers. This was the biggest turnover in the Soviet military since Stalin's purges 50 years earlier. Rust's rented Reims Cessna F172P (serial #F17202087), registered D-ECJB, was sold to Japan where it was exhibited for several years. In 2008 it was returned to Germany and was placed in the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. Later life While doing his obligatory community service (Zivildienst) in a West German hospital in 1989, Rust stabbed a female co-worker who had rejected him. The victim barely survived. He was convicted of injuring her and sentenced to two and a half years in prison, but was released after 15 months. Since then he has lived a fragmented life, describing himself as a "bit of an oddball". After being released from court, he converted to Hinduism in 1996 to become engaged to a daughter of an Indian tea merchant. In 2001, he was convicted of stealing a cashmere pullover and ordered to pay a fine of DM10,000, which was later reduced to DM600. A further brush with the law came in 2005, when he was convicted of fraud and had to pay a €1,500 fine. In 2009 Rust described himself as a professional poker player. Most recently, in 2012, he described himself as an analyst at a Zurich-based investment bank. Peace activism In October 2015, The Hindu published an interview with Rust to mark the 25th anniversary of German reunification. Rust surmised that institutional failures in Western countries to preserve moral standards and uphold the primacy of democratic ideals were creating mistrust between peoples and governments. Pointing to the genesis of a New Cold War between Russia and the Western powers, Rust suggested that India should tread with caution and avoid entanglement: "India will be better served if it follows a policy of neutrality while interacting with EU member countries as the big European powers at present are following the foreign policy of the U.S. unquestioningly". He claimed: "Governments have been dominated by the corporate entities and citizens have ceased to matter in public policy". In popular culture Because Rust's flight seemed like a blow to the authority of the Soviet regime, it was the source of numerous jokes and urban legends. For a while after the incident, Red Square was jokingly referred to by Muscovites as Sheremetyevo-3 (Sheremetyevo-1 and -2 being the two terminals at Moscow's international airport). At the end of 1987, the police radio code used by law enforcement officers in Moscow was allegedly updated to include a code for an aircraft landing. In the media Following the 20th anniversary of his flight on 28 May 2007, the international media interviewed Rust about the flight and its aftermath. The Washington Post and Bild both have online editions of their interviews. The most comprehensive televised interview available online is produced by the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. In their interview Rust in Red Square, recorded in May 2007, Rust gives a full account of the flight in English. References External links Excerpts of video capturing Rust's | emergency and a rescue effort was organized, including a Finnish Border Guard patrol boat. They found an oil patch near Sipoo where Rust had disappeared from radar observation, and conducted an underwater search but did not find anything. Rust crossed the Baltic coastline over Estonia and turned towards Moscow. At 14:29 he appeared on Soviet Air Defence Forces (PVO) radar and, after failure to reply to an IFF signal, was assigned combat number 8255. Three SAM battalions of 54th Air Defence Corps tracked him for some time, but failed to obtain permission to launch missiles at him. All air defences were brought to readiness and two interceptors were sent to investigate. At 14:48, near Gdov, MiG-23 pilot Senior Lieutenant A. Puchnin observed a white sport plane similar to a Yakovlev Yak-12 and asked for permission to engage, but was denied. The fighters lost contact with Rust soon after this. While they were being directed back to him, he disappeared from radar near Staraya Russa. West German magazine Bunte speculated that he might have landed there for some time, noting that he changed his clothes during his flight and that he took too much time to fly to Moscow considering his plane's speed and the weather conditions. Air defence re-established contact with Rust's plane several times but confusion followed all of these events. The PVO system had shortly before been divided into several districts, which simplified management but created additional overhead for tracking officers at the districts' borders. The local air regiment near Pskov was on maneuvers and, due to inexperienced pilots' tendency to forget correct IFF designator settings, local control officers assigned all traffic in the area friendly status, including Rust. Near Torzhok there was a similar situation, as increased air traffic was created by a rescue effort for an air crash the previous day. Rust, flying a slow propeller-driven aircraft, was confused with one of the helicopters taking part in the rescue. He was spotted several more times and given false friendly recognition twice. Rust was considered as a domestic training plane defying regulations, and was assigned the least priority by air defense. Around 19:00, Rust appeared above Moscow. He had initially intended to land in the Kremlin, but he reasoned that landing inside, hidden by the Kremlin walls, would have allowed the KGB to arrest him and deny the incident. Therefore, he changed his landing spot to Red Square. Heavy pedestrian traffic did not allow him to land there either, so after circling about the square one more time, he was able to land on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge by St. Basil's Cathedral. A later inquiry found that trolleybus wires normally strung over the bridge—which would have prevented his landing there—had been removed for maintenance that morning, and were replaced the next day. After taxiing past the cathedral, he stopped about from the square, where he was greeted by curious passersby and asked for autographs. When asked where he was from, he replied "Germany" making the bystanders think he was from East Germany; but when he said West Germany, they were surprised. A British doctor videotaped Rust circling over Red Square and landing on the bridge. Rust was arrested two hours later. Aftermath Rust's trial began in Moscow on 2 September 1987. He was sentenced to four years in a general-regime labour camp for hooliganism, |
viruses and worms, Trojan horses generally do not attempt to inject themselves into other files or otherwise propagate themselves. In spring 2017 Mac users were hit by the new version of Proton Remote Access Trojan (RAT) trained to extract password data from various sources, such as browser auto-fill data, the Mac-OS keychain, and password vaults. Rootkits Once malicious software is installed on a system, it is essential that it stays concealed, to avoid detection. Software packages known as rootkits allow this concealment, by modifying the host's operating system so that the malware is hidden from the user. Rootkits can prevent a harmful process from being visible in the system's list of processes, or keep its files from being read. Some types of harmful software contain routines to evade identification and/or removal attempts, not merely to hide themselves. An early example of this behavior is recorded in the Jargon File tale of a pair of programs infesting a Xerox CP-V time sharing system: Backdoors A backdoor is a method of bypassing normal authentication procedures, usually over a connection to a network such as the Internet. Once a system has been compromised, one or more backdoors may be installed in order to allow access in the future, invisibly to the user. The idea has often been suggested that computer manufacturers preinstall backdoors on their systems to provide technical support for customers, but this has never been reliably verified. It was reported in 2014 that US government agencies had been diverting computers purchased by those considered "targets" to secret workshops where software or hardware permitting remote access by the agency was installed, considered to be among the most productive operations to obtain access to networks around the world. Backdoors may be installed by Trojan horses, worms, implants, or other methods. Infectious Malware The best-known types of malware, viruses and worms, are known for the manner in which they spread, rather than any specific types of behavior and have been likened to biological viruses. Worm A worm is a stand-alone malware software that transmits itself over a network to infect other computers and can copy itself without infecting files. These definitions lead to the observation that a virus requires the user to run an infected software or operating system for the virus to spread, whereas a worm spreads itself. Virus A computer virus is software usually hidden within another seemingly innocuous program that can produce copies of itself and insert them into other programs or files, and that usually performs a harmful action (such as destroying data). An example of this is a portable execution infection, a technique, usually used to spread malware, that inserts extra data or executable code into PE files. A computer virus is software that embeds itself in some other executable software (including the operating system itself) on the target system without the user's knowledge and consent and when it is run, the virus is spread to other executable files. Ransomware Screen-locking ransomware Lock-screens, or screen lockers is a type of “cyber police” ransomware that blocks screens on Windows or Android devices with a false accusation in harvesting illegal content, trying to scare the victims into paying up a fee. Jisut and SLocker impact Android devices more than other lock-screens, with Jisut making up nearly 60 percent of all Android ransomware detections. Encryption-based ransomware Encryption-based ransomware, like the name suggests, is a type of ransomware that encrypts all files on an infected machine. These types of malware then display a pop-up informing the user that their files have been encrypted and that they must pay (usually in Bitcoin) to recover them. Some examples of encryption-based ransomware are CryptoLocker and WannaCry. Grayware Grayware (sometimes spelled as greyware) is a term, coming into use around 2004, that applies to any unwanted application or file that can worsen the performance of computers and may cause security risks but which is not typically considered malware. Greyware are applications that behave in an annoying or undesirable manner, and yet are less serious or troublesome than malware. Grayware encompasses spyware, adware, fraudulent dialers, joke programs ("jokeware"), remote access tools and other unwanted programs that may harm the performance of computers or cause inconvenience. For example, at one point, Sony BMG compact discs silently installed a rootkit on purchasers' computers with the intention of preventing illicit copying. Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) Potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) or potentially unwanted applications (PUAs) are applications that would be considered unwanted despite being downloaded often by the user, possibly after failing to read a download agreement. PUPs include spyware, adware, and fraudulent dialers. Many security products classify unauthorised key generators as grayware, although they frequently carry true malware in addition to their ostensible purpose. Malwarebytes lists several criteria for classifying a program as a PUP. Some types of adware (using stolen certificates) turn off anti-malware and virus protection; technical remedies are available. Evasion Since the beginning of 2015, a sizable portion of malware has been utilizing a combination of many techniques designed to avoid detection and analysis. From the more common, to the least common: evasion of analysis and detection by fingerprinting the environment when executed. confusing automated tools' detection methods. This allows malware to avoid detection by technologies such as signature-based antivirus software by changing the server used by the malware. timing-based evasion. This is when malware runs at certain times or following certain actions taken by the user, so it executes during certain vulnerable periods, such as during the boot process, while remaining dormant the rest of the time. obfuscating internal data so that automated tools do not detect the malware. An increasingly common technique (2015) is adware that uses stolen certificates to disable anti-malware and virus protection; technical remedies are available to deal with the adware. Nowadays, one of the most sophisticated and stealthy ways of evasion is to use information hiding techniques, namely stegomalware. A survey on stegomalware was published by Cabaj et al. in 2018. Another type of evasion technique is Fileless malware or Advanced Volatile Threats (AVTs). Fileless malware does not require a file to operate. It runs within memory and utilizes existing system tools to carry out malicious acts. Because there are no files on the system, there are no executable files for antivirus and forensic tools to analyze, making such malware nearly impossible to detect. The only way to detect fileless malware is to catch it operating in real time. Recently these types of attacks have become more frequent with a 432% increase in 2017 and makeup 35% of the attacks in 2018. Such attacks are not easy to perform but are becoming more prevalent with the | unwanted despite being downloaded often by the user, possibly after failing to read a download agreement. PUPs include spyware, adware, and fraudulent dialers. Many security products classify unauthorised key generators as grayware, although they frequently carry true malware in addition to their ostensible purpose. Malwarebytes lists several criteria for classifying a program as a PUP. Some types of adware (using stolen certificates) turn off anti-malware and virus protection; technical remedies are available. Evasion Since the beginning of 2015, a sizable portion of malware has been utilizing a combination of many techniques designed to avoid detection and analysis. From the more common, to the least common: evasion of analysis and detection by fingerprinting the environment when executed. confusing automated tools' detection methods. This allows malware to avoid detection by technologies such as signature-based antivirus software by changing the server used by the malware. timing-based evasion. This is when malware runs at certain times or following certain actions taken by the user, so it executes during certain vulnerable periods, such as during the boot process, while remaining dormant the rest of the time. obfuscating internal data so that automated tools do not detect the malware. An increasingly common technique (2015) is adware that uses stolen certificates to disable anti-malware and virus protection; technical remedies are available to deal with the adware. Nowadays, one of the most sophisticated and stealthy ways of evasion is to use information hiding techniques, namely stegomalware. A survey on stegomalware was published by Cabaj et al. in 2018. Another type of evasion technique is Fileless malware or Advanced Volatile Threats (AVTs). Fileless malware does not require a file to operate. It runs within memory and utilizes existing system tools to carry out malicious acts. Because there are no files on the system, there are no executable files for antivirus and forensic tools to analyze, making such malware nearly impossible to detect. The only way to detect fileless malware is to catch it operating in real time. Recently these types of attacks have become more frequent with a 432% increase in 2017 and makeup 35% of the attacks in 2018. Such attacks are not easy to perform but are becoming more prevalent with the help of exploit-kits. Risks Vulnerable software A vulnerability is a weakness, flaw or software bug in an application, a complete computer, an operating system, or a computer network that is exploited by malware to bypass defences or gain privileges it requires to run. For example, TestDisk 6.4 or earlier contained a vulnerability that allowed attackers to inject code into Windows. Malware can exploit security defects (security bugs or vulnerabilities) in the operating system, applications (such as browsers, e.g. older versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer supported by Windows XP), or in vulnerable versions of browser plugins such as Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat or Reader, or Java SE. For example, a common method is exploitation of a buffer overrun vulnerability, where software designed to store data in a specified region of memory does not prevent more data than the buffer can accommodate being supplied. Malware may provide data that overflows the buffer, with malicious executable code or data after the end; when this payload is accessed it does what the attacker, not the legitimate software, determines. Malware can exploit recently discovered vulnerabilities before developers have had time to release a suitable patch. Even when new patches addressing the vulnerability have been released, they may not necessarily be installed immediately, allowing malware to take advantage of systems lacking patches. Sometimes even applying patches or installing new versions does not automatically uninstall the old versions. Security advisories from plug-in providers announce security-related updates. Common vulnerabilities are assigned CVE IDs and listed in the US National Vulnerability Database. Secunia PSI is an example of software, free for personal use, that will check a PC for vulnerable out-of-date software, and attempt to update it. Other approaches involve using firewalls and intrusion prevention systems to monitor unusual traffic patterns on the local computer network. Excessive privileges Users and programs can be assigned more privileges than they require, and malware can take advantage of this. For example, of 940 Android apps sampled, one third of them asked for more privileges than they required. Apps targeting the Android platform can be a major source of malware infection but one solution is to use third party software to detect apps that have been assigned excessive privileges. Some systems allow all users to modify their internal structures, and such users today would be considered over-privileged users. This was the standard operating procedure for early microcomputer and home computer systems, where there was no distinction between an administrator or root, and a regular user of the system. In some systems, non-administrator users are over-privileged by design, in the sense that they are allowed to modify internal structures of the system. In some environments, users are over-privileged because they have been inappropriately granted administrator or equivalent status. This can be because users tend to demand more privileges than they need, so often end up being assigned unnecessary privileges. Some systems allow code executed by a user to access all rights of that user, which is known as over-privileged code. This was also standard operating procedure for early microcomputer and home computer systems. Malware, running as over-privileged code, can use this privilege to subvert the system. Almost all currently popular operating systems, and also many scripting applications allow code too many privileges, usually in the sense that when a user executes code, the system allows that code all rights of that user. Weak passwords A credential attack occurs when a user account with administrative privileges is cracked and that account is used to provide malware with appropriate privileges. Typically, the attack succeeds because the weakest form of account security is used, which is typically a short password that can be cracked using a dictionary or brute force attack. Using strong passwords and enabling two-factor authentication can reduce this risk. With the latter enabled, even if an attacker can crack the password, they cannot use the account without also having the token possessed by the legitimate user of that account. Use of the same operating system Homogeneity can be a vulnerability. For example, when all computers in a network run the same operating system, upon exploiting one, one worm can exploit them all: In particular, Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X have such a large share of the market that an exploited vulnerability concentrating on either operating system could subvert a large number of systems. It is estimated that approximately 83% of malware infections between January and March 2020 were spread via systems running Windows 10. This risk is mitigated by segmenting the networks into different subnetworks and setting up firewalls to block traffic between them. Mitigation Antivirus / Anti-malware software Anti-malware (sometimes also called antivirus) programs block and remove some or all types of malware. For example, Microsoft Security Essentials (for Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7) and Windows Defender (for Windows 8, 10 and 11) provides real-time protection. The Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool removes malicious software from the system. Additionally, several capable antivirus software programs are available for free download from the Internet (usually restricted to non-commercial use). Tests found some free programs to be competitive with commercial ones. Typically, antivirus software can combat malware in the following ways: Real-time protection: They can provide real time protection against the installation of malware software on a computer. This type of malware protection works the same way as that of antivirus protection in that the anti-malware software scans all incoming network data for malware and blocks any threats it comes across. Removal: Anti-malware software programs can be used solely for detection and removal of malware software that has already been installed onto a computer. This type of anti-malware software scans the contents of the Windows registry, operating system files, and installed programs on a computer and will provide a list of any threats found, allowing the user to choose which files to delete or keep, or to compare this list to a list of known malware components, removing files that match. Sandboxing: Provide sandboxing of apps considered dangerous (such as web browsers where most vulnerabilities are likely to be installed from). Real-time protection A specific component of anti-malware software, commonly referred to as an on-access or real-time scanner, hooks deep into the operating system's core or kernel and functions in a manner similar to how certain malware itself would attempt to operate, though with the user's informed permission for protecting the system. Any time the operating system accesses a file, the on-access scanner checks if the file infected or not. Typically, when an infected file is found, execution is stopped and the file is quarantined to prevent further damage with the intention to prevent irreversible system damage. Most AVs allow users to override this behaviour. This can have a considerable performance impact on the operating system, though the degree of impact is dependent on how many pages it creates in virtual memory. Sandboxing Because many malware components are installed as a result of browser exploits or user error, using security software (some of which are anti-malware, though many are not) to "sandbox" browsers (essentially isolate the browser from the computer and hence any malware induced change) can also be effective in helping to restrict any damage done. Website security scans Website vulnerability scans check the website, detect malware, may note outdated software, and may report known security issues, in order to reduce the risk of the site being compromised. Network Segregation Structuring a network as a set of smaller networks, and limiting the flow of traffic between them to that known to be legitimate, can hinder the ability of infectious malware to replicate itself across the wider network. Software Defined Networking provides techniques to implement such controls. "Air gap" isolation or "parallel network" As a last resort, computers can be protected from malware, and the risk of infected computers disseminating trusted information can be greatly reduced by imposing an "air gap" (i.e. completely disconnecting them from all other networks) and applying enhanced controls over the entry and exit of software and data from the outside world. However, malware can still cross the air gap in some situations, not least due to the need to introduce software into the air-gapped network and can damage the availability or integrity of assets thereon. Stuxnet is an example of malware that is introduced to the target environment via a USB drive, causing damage to processes supported on the environment without the need to exfiltrate data. AirHopper, BitWhisper, GSMem and Fansmitter are four techniques introduced by researchers that can leak data from air-gapped computers using electromagnetic, thermal and acoustic emissions. See also Botnet Browser hijacking Comparison of antivirus software Computer security Cuckoo's egg (metaphor) Cyber spying Domain generation algorithm Facebook malware File binder Identity theft Industrial espionage |
qualifies for this status because his family originates from India. Muttiah announced on 3 April 2011 that he was retiring from all sport. Spelling and meaning of name Even though his name was widely romanised as Muralitharan from the start of his career, he prefers the spelling Muralidaran. The different spellings have arisen because the Tamil letter த can be pronounced as both 't' and 'd' depending on its place in a word. It is often transliterated as 'th' to distinguish it from another letter, ட, which is a retroflex 't' or 'd'. In 2007, when Cricket Australia decided to unveil the new Warne-Muralidaran Trophy, to be contested between Australia and Sri Lanka, Muralitharan was requested to clarify how his name should be spelt. Cricket Australia spokesman Peter Young confirmed that "the spelling he's given is Muralidaran". The first-day cover involving Muralitharan bears an official seal captioned as "The highest wicket taker in Test cricket, MUTHIAH MURALIDARAN, First Day of Issue 03.12.2007, Camp Post Office, Asgiriya International Cricket Stadium, Kandy". The name Muralitharan is derived from murali dhar (Devnagri: मुरली धर) meaning "the bearer of the flute", which is a synonym for Krishna, a deity in Hinduism who is said to play upon his bamboo flute while looking after cattle. A variation of this Sanskrit name spelt as 'Muralidharan' and 'Muraleedharan' is a common name amongst Tamil and Malayali Hindus. Domestic cricket In Sri Lanka In domestic cricket, Muralitharan played for two first-class Sri Lankan sides, Tamil Union Cricket and Athletic Club in the Premier Trophy and Central Province in the Provincial Championship. His record is exceptional – 234 wickets at 14.51 runs in 46 matches. In England He also played county cricket in England, mainly for Lancashire (1999, 2001, 2005 and 2007), appearing in twenty-eight first-class games for the club. He played five first class games for Kent during the 2003 season. His bowling record in English domestic cricket is also exceptional – 236 wickets at 15.62 runs in 33 matches. Despite his efforts, he was never on a title-winning first-class domestic team in either the Premier Trophy or the County Championship. He was unusual amongst his contemporaries in that he played in more Test matches than other first-class games (116 Tests and 99 other first-class matches as of 2007). Muralitharan was signed by Gloucestershire in 2011 to play in T20 matches. He renewed his T20 contract with Gloucestershire in 2012, but did not stay on for the 2013 season. In India Muralitharan was contracted to represent Bengal in the 2008–09 Ranji Trophy tournament. He was expected to play about four matches in the tournament's second division – the Plate League. In February 2008, Muralitharan was slated to play Twenty20 cricket for the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League (IPL). He was bought for $600,000 by India Cements, the Chennai franchisee of the IPL, through a bidding process. The Chennai Super Kings were the runners-up in the inaugural edition of the IPL, losing to the Rajasthan Royals in the final. Muralitharan captured 11 wickets in 15 games, at an economy rate of 6.96 an over. In 2010, in the third season of IPL, Muralitharan was part of the Chennai Super Kings side that won the IPL championship. Muralitharan also remained the side's leading wicket-taker after all the three tournaments. At the 2011 IPL Player Auction Muralitharan was bought by Kochi Tuskers Kerala for US$1.1 million. In the 2012 season Muralitharan moved to Royal Challengers Bangalore, where he took 14 wickets in 9 games and had an average economy rate of 6.38. He played for Royal Challengers Bangalore from 2012 to 2014. He decided to retire from the IPL in 2014. In 2015, Muralitharan was appointed as the bowling coach and mentor of the IPL team Sunrisers Hyderabad. In Australia Muttiah Muralitharan signed for the Melbourne Renegades to play Twenty20 cricket in the Big Bash League in 2012. He stated, "I wanted to play one season in Australia and the opportunity from the Melbourne Renegades was there so I took it with both hands." International career Bowling style and career progress Muralitharan is the first wrist-spinning off-spinner in the history of the game. He bowls marathon spells, yet he is usually on the attack. His unique bowling action begins with a short run-up, and culminates with an open-chested extremely wristy release from a partly supinated forearm which had him mistaken for a leg-spinner early in his career by Allan Border. Aside from his stock delivery, the off-break, of which he claimed to have two variations (during a recorded television 'doosra' show off with Mark Nicholas from Channel 4 in 2004), his main deliveries are a fast topspinner which lands on the seam and usually goes straight on, and the doosra, a surprise delivery which turns from leg to off (the opposite direction of his stock delivery) with no easily discernible change of action. Additionally, he would occasionally use one of his several unnamed novelties. His super-flexible wrist makes him especially potent and guarantees him turn on any surface. From his debut in 1992, Muralitharan took 800 Test wickets and over 500 One Day International wickets, becoming the first player to take 1,000 wickets combined in the two main forms of international cricket. Test cricket Emerging years On 28 August 1992 at the age of 20, Muralitharan made his debut against Australia at the Khettarama Stadium and claimed 3 for 141. Craig McDermott was his first Test wicket. His freakish action and his angular run-up showed that this was no run-of-the-mill spinner. During his first Test, there was one dismissal which convinced many of Muralitharan's special powers. Tom Moody's leg-stump was dislodged when he shouldered arms to a delivery that pitched at least two feet outside the off-stump. The youthful Muralitharan went from strength to strength, playing a major part in Sri Lanka's back-to-back Test victories against England and New Zealand in 1992–93. It was at this point in his career that he struck a close bond with his leader, mentor and one time business partner, the authoritative captain Arjuna Ranatunga. This relationship formed the bedrock of his success and meant that there were few doubts about his status as the team's sole wicket-taker. Ranatunga was thoroughly convinced that Muralitharan's precocious talent would signal a new era in Sri Lanka's short Test history. In August 1993 at Moratuwa, Muralitharan captured 5 for 104 in South Africa's first innings, his first five-wicket haul in Tests. His wickets included Kepler Wessels, Hansie Cronje and Jonty Rhodes. Muralitharan continued to baffle batsman outside the shores of Sri Lanka, irrespective of the team's performance. In Sri Lanka's humiliating drubbing at the hands of India in 1993–94, where all three Tests were innings defeats, Muralitharan was the sole success, with 12 wickets in the rubber. His perseverance in the face of some astronomical scores by the fearsome quartet of Mohammed Azharuddin, Sachin Tendulkar, Navjot Sidhu and Vinod Kambli was in sharp contrast to the submission with which his teammates played the series. It was in New Zealand in March 1995 that Muralitharan displayed his qualities as a match-winner on any surface. In Sri Lanka's first triumph on foreign soil, Muralitharan confused the crease-bound New Zealanders on a grassy pitch in Dunedin. The Sri Lankan manager Duleep Mendis' claim that Muralitharan can turn the ball on concrete was confirmed. On the eve of his tour of Pakistan later that year, doubts were cast on his ability to trouble subcontinental batsmen. By taking 19 wickets in the series and delivering a historic 2–1 victory, the off-spinner silenced the doubters. The Pakistanis, who had negotiated Warne's leg-breaks in the previous home series, were never at ease against him. Prior to the eventful Boxing Day Test of 1995, Muralitharan had captured 80 wickets in 22 Tests at an unflattering average of 32.74. Even at that point in his career he was the leading wicket taker for Sri Lanka having gone past Rumesh Ratnayake's aggregate of 73 wickets. Boxing Day Test 1995 During the second Test between Sri Lanka and Australia at the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Boxing Day 1995, Australian umpire Darrell Hair called Muralitharan for throwing in front of a crowd of 55,239. The off-spinner was no-balled seven times in three overs by Hair, who believed the then 23-year-old was bending his arm and straightening it in the process of delivery; an illegal action in cricket. Muralitharan had bowled two overs before lunch from umpire Steve Dunne's or the Members' End of the ground with umpire Hair at square leg and these passed without incident. At he took up the attack from umpire Hair's or the southern end. Muralitharan's third over was a maiden with all deliveries again passed as legitimate but in his fourth Hair no-balled him twice for throwing on the fourth and sixth balls. The umpire continued to call him three times in his fifth over on the second, fourth and sixth balls. While the bowler stood with his hands on his hips perplexed, the five calls provoked an immediate response by the Sri Lankan captain Arjuna Ranatunga who left the field at to take advice from his team management. He returned at and continued with Muralitharan who was called two more times in his sixth over on the second and sixth balls. At Ranatunga removed the bowler from the attack, although he reintroduced him at at umpire Dunne's end. Although Hair reports in his book, "Decision Maker", that at the end of the tea break he stated that he would call Muralitharan no matter which end he bowled he did not do so. Muralitharan completed another twelve overs without further no-balls and, after bowling Mark Waugh, finished the day with figures of 18–3–58–1. After being no-balled Muralitharan bowled a further 32 overs from umpire Steve Dunne's end without protest from either Dunne or Hair, at square leg. The Sri Lankan camp was outraged after the incident, but the ICC defended Hair, outlining a list of steps they had taken in the past to determine, without result, the legitimacy of Muralitharan's action. By calling Muralitharan from the bowlers' end Hair overrode what is normally regarded as the authority of the square leg umpire in adjudicating on throwing. Dunne would have had to break convention to support his partner. At the end of the match the Sri Lankans requested from the ICC permission to confer with Hair to find out exactly how to remedy the problem with their bowler. Despite the game's controlling body agreeing to it, the Australian Cricket Board vetoed it on the grounds that it might lead to umpires being quizzed by teams after every game and meant that the throwing controversy would continue into the World Series Cup during the coming week. The Sri Lankans were disappointed they did not get an explanation and decided they would continue playing their bowler in matches not umpired by Hair and wanted to know whether other umpires would support or reject Hair's judgement. Muralitharan's action was cleared by the ICC after biomechanical analysis at the University of Western Australia and at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology in 1996. They concluded that his action created the 'optical illusion of throwing'. Mid career On 16 March 1997, Muralitharan became the first Sri Lankan to reach 100 test wickets, when he dismissed Stephen Fleming in the second innings of the Hamilton Test. In January 1998, Muralitharan took his first ten-wicket haul against Zimbabwe in the first test at Kandy. Sri Lanka won by eight wickets and Muralitharan had figures of 12 for 117. In August that same year Muralitharan produces his career-best test match figures of 16 for 220, in the one-off test against England. In England's second innings Muralitharan bowled a marathon 54.2 overs to pick up 9 for 65 runs, the other wicket being a run out. Ben Hollioake becomes his 200th test wicket. Sri Lanka won by ten wickets, their first Test victory in England. After breaking the world record for the most test wickets in 2007, Muralitharan commented that his 1998 performance at the Oval against England, was his career highlight. He stated "Everyone thought I was a good bowler then and I didn't look back from there." Playing his 58th test, Muralitharan claimed his 300th test wicket when he dismissed Shaun Pollock in the First Test in Durban, in December 2000. Only Dennis Lillee reached the milestone faster, in his 56th test. On 4 January 2002 in Kandy Muralitharan might have finished with the best-ever figures for a single innings, but after he had claimed nine wickets against Zimbabwe Russel Arnold dropped a catch at short leg. He missed out on the tenth when Chaminda Vaas dismissed Henry Olonga caught behind amid stifled appeals. Muralitharan follows up his 9 for 51 in the first innings with 4 for 64 in the second, equalling Richard Hadlee's record of 10 ten-wicket match hauls, but needing 15 fewer Tests to do so. On 15 January 2002 playing in his 72nd test, Muralitharan became the fastest and youngest to reach the 400-wicket landmark when he bowled Olonga in the third Test in Galle. On 16 March 2004 Muralitharan became the fastest and the youngest bowler to reach 500 wickets during the second test between Sri Lanka and Australia played in Kandy. In his 87th test, he bowled Kasprowicz to claim his 500th victim just four days after Warne reached the landmark on the fifth day of the First Test between the two teams at Galle. Warne took 108 tests to reach 500. Muralitharan took 4–48 on the first day of the second Test as Australia were skittled for 120 in the first innings. Passing Walsh and Warne In May 2004, Muralitharan overtook West Indian Courtney Walsh's record of 519 Test match wickets to become the highest wicket-taker. Zimbabwe's Mluleki Nkala becomes Muralitharan's 520th scalp in Tests. Muralitharan held the record until Shane Warne claimed it in October 2004. Warne surpassed Sri Lankan Muttiah Muralitharan's mark of 532 wickets by dismissing India's Irfan Pathan. Warne said he enjoyed his duel with Muralitharan, who was sidelined following shoulder surgery at the time. After an outstanding year Muralitharan was adjudged as the Wisden Leading Cricketer in the World in 2006. In six Tests, he took 60 wickets. He took ten in each of four successive matches, the second time he performed such a feat. The opponents for his 60-wicket haul were England away, South Africa at home and New Zealand away: serious opposition. In all, Muralitharan took 90 wickets in 11 Tests in the calendar year. For his performances in 2006, he was named in the World Test XI by ICC and Cricinfo. In July 2007, Muttiah Muralitharan became the second bowler after Australia's Shane Warne to capture 700 Test wickets. The off-spinner reached the landmark when he had Bangladesh's last man Syed Rasel caught in the deep by Farveez Maharoof on the fourth day of the third and final Test at the Asgiriya stadium in Kandy. The dismissal signalled Sri Lanka's victory by an innings and 193 runs to give the host a 3–0 sweep of the series. Muralitharan finished with six wickets in each innings to claim 10 wickets or more in a Test for the 20th time. However, he was unable to pass Warne's record of 708 wickets when Sri Lanka toured Australia in November 2007, capturing just four wickets in two Test matches. Muralitharan reclaimed the record for most Test wickets during the first Test against England at Kandy on 2007. The spinner bowled England's Paul Collingwood to claim his 709th Test victim and overtaking Shane Warne in the process. Muralitharan reached the mark in his 116th Test – 29 fewer than Warne – and had conceded only 21.77 runs per wicket compared to the Australian's 25.41. This was Muralitharan's 61st 5-wicket haul. Warne believed that Muralitharan would take "1,000 wickets" before he retired. Former record holder Courtney Walsh also opined that this would be possible if Muralitharan retained his hunger for wickets. Muralitharan himself believed there was a possibility that he would reach this milestone. For his performances in 2007, he was named in the World Test XI by ICC and Cricinfo. Beyond the world record In July 2008, Muralitharan and Ajantha Mendis stopped India's strong batting as Sri Lanka won the first Test by a record innings and 239 runs in Colombo. Muralitharan finished the match with 11 wickets for 110, as India were shot out for 138 in their second innings after conceding a lead of 377 on the fourth day. He was well supported by debutant Ajantha Mendis, an unorthodox spinner with plenty of variation, who took eight wickets in his debut match. Muralitharan believed the emergence of Mendis would help prolong his own career. Muralitharan, 36, and 23-year-old Mendis formed a formidable partnership in the first Test thrashing of India, taking 19 of the 20 wickets between them. "If he keeps performing this way, he will definitely take a lot of wickets in international cricket. Now that he has come, I think I can play Test cricket a few more years. Bowling 50 overs in a Test innings is very hard. Now if I bowl only 30–35 and he bowls more than me, the job will get easier for me." For his performances in 2008, he was named in the World Test XI by ICC. Performance analysis In July 2007, Muralitharan achieved a career peak Test Bowling Rating of 920, based on the LG ICC Player Rankings. This is the highest ever rating achieved by a spin bowler in Test cricket. This also puts him in fourth place in the LG ICC Best-Ever Test bowling ratings. Muralitharan has the unique distinction of getting 10 or more wickets in a match against all other nine Test playing nations as well as capturing over 50 wickets against each of them. He also obtained 7 or more wickets in an innings against five nations, namely England, India, South Africa, West Indies and Zimbabwe (refer to table above). Muttiah Muralitharan also took at least five five-fors against all the other nine Test sides. He currently holds the highest wickets/match ratio (6.1) for any bowler with over 200 Test wickets and also represented Sri Lanka in 118 Tests of the 175 that they have played (67.4%). Against teams excluding Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, Muralitharan took 624 wickets in 108 Tests. By comparison, excluding his matches against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, Warne took 691 wickets in 142 tests. Murali's average of 24.05 is slightly superior to Warne's career average of 25.41. Muralitharan won 18 Man of the Match awards in Test cricket. During Muralitharan's playing days, the ICC Future Tours Programme denied Sri Lanka and several other teams a level playing field. As a consequence Muralitharan never toured South Africa after December 2002 and never playing a Test at the spin-friendly Sydney Cricket Ground. Another comparison of Muralitharan's bowling record against other successful international bowlers is their career record away from home. Muralitharan received criticism that he enjoyed great success on home soil, taking wickets on pitches that are more spin-friendly than other international pitches. A quick analysis of his Test record of matches played outside Sri Lanka shows that from 52 matches he took 278 wickets at an average of 26.24 runs per wicket, with a strike rate of 60.1 balls per wicket. Similarly, spin bowling rival Shane Warne retired with a slightly superior 'away' record of 362 wickets from 73 matches, at an average of 25.50 and a strike rate of 56.7. Due to the variabilities of Test cricket such as grounds played at and opposition played against it is difficult to compare the quality of the top level players and, as such, is very difficult and subjective. However, it is clear that Muralitharan did much better playing at home to test minnows Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, averaging less than 16 runs a wicket. Cricinfo's statistics editor S Rajesh concluded that the decade 2000–2009 was the best 10-year period for Test batsmen since the 1940s. Muralitharan was clearly the leading Test wicket-taker during this period, capturing 565 wickets at 20.97 in spite of the dominance of the bat over ball. Shane Warne captured 357 wickets at an average of 25.17 during the decade. Of spinners with over Test 100 wickets only John Briggs (17.75), Jim Laker (21.24), Bill O'Reilly (22.59) and Clarrie Grimmett (24.21) have sub 25.00 bowling averages. Muralitharan was on the winning side on 54 of the 133 test matches he played. In those games he captured a total of 438 wickets (8.1 wickets per match), at an outstanding average of 16.18 per wicket and a strike rate of 42.7. Muralitharan took 795 wickets for his country Sri Lanka in 132 tests. The next most wickets for Sri Lanka in these 132 Tests was Chaminda Vaas' 309 – less than 40% of the spinner's pile. No one else managed 100. Collectively Sri Lankan bowlers tallied 1968 wickets across that span, of which Muralitharan accounted for 40.4%. Among the 24 other Sri Lankans who took more than 10 of those wickets, only Lasith Malinga did so at a better strike rate (52.3) than Muralitharan's 54.9 – and the latter bowled rather more overs, 6657.1 of them to be precise. Test wicket milestones One day internationals Career summary On 12 August 1993 Muralitharan made his One Day International (ODI) debut against India at the Khettarama Stadium and took 1 for 38 off ten overs. Pravin Amre was his first ODI wicket. On 27 October 2000 in Sharjah, Muralitharan captured 7 for 30 against India, which were then the best bowling figures in One Day Internationals. On 9 April 2002 Muralitharan achieved a career peak ODI Bowling Rating of 913, based on the LG ICC Player Rankings. This is the highest ever rating achieved by a spin bowler in One Day Internationals. This also puts him in fourth place in the LG ICC Best-Ever ODI bowling ratings. In 2006, Muralitharan had the second (now third) highest number of runs (99) hit off him in a One Day International Innings. The Australians, especially Adam Gilchrist, attacked Muralitharan's bowling more than usual that day. Yet, for his performances in 2006, he was named in the World ODI XI by the ICC. Muralitharan does not have a great record against the Australians in ODIs and this was proved again as he was ineffective in the finals of the 2007 World Cup; his chief tormentor again being Gilchrist. Yet, for his performances in 2007, he was named in the World ODI XI by the ICC. He was named in the 'Team of the Tournament' by Cricinfo for the 2007 World Cup. Muralitharan played in five Cricket World Cup tournaments, in 1996, 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011. He captured 67 World Cup wickets and is second in the list behind Glenn McGrath who has 71, and represented Sri Lanka in three World Cup finals. In 1996 Muralitharan was part Sri Lanka's World Cup winning team that defeated Australia in Lahore, Pakistan. Muralitharan also played in the 2007 World Cup final, when Australia defeated Sri Lanka in Bridgetown, Barbados. He picked up 23 wickets in the 2007 World Cup, and finished as the second highest wicket taker in the tournament behind Glenn McGrath. He was part of the 2011 team who lost the world cup final against India in Mumbai. It was his farewell match as well. He was named in the 'Team of the Tournament' for the 2011 World Cup by the ICC. Muttiah Muralitharan was left out of the Sri Lankan one-day squad to tour West Indies in April 2008. The chairman of selectors Ashantha De Mel clarifying the non-selection stated that "We know he (Muralitharan) can still play in the next World Cup if he is properly looked after, so we want to use him sparingly to preserve him for the big games and the World Cup coming up in the Asian sub-continent where Muralitharan will be a threat." Muralitharan has the highest number of career wickets in One Day Internationals, having overtaken Wasim Akram on 2009. Akram took 502 wickets in 356 matches. On 2009, Muralitharan dismissed Yuvraj Singh in his 327th match, the third ODI against India in Colombo to equal Akram's record. He won 13 Man of the Match awards in this form of the game. Batting An aggressive lower order batsman who usually batted at No. 11, Muralitharan was known for his tendency to back away to leg and slog. Sometimes, he could be troublesome for bowlers because of his unorthodox and adventurous ways. Once, in a Test match against England, while playing Alex Tudor, he moved back towards his leg stump trying to hook the ball and ended up lying on the ground sideways after the shot. He was infamously run out in a match against New Zealand when he left his crease to congratulate Kumar Sangakkara, who had just scored a single to reach his century; the New Zealand fielder had not yet returned the ball to the wicketkeeper, so the ball was still in play. His highest Test score of 67 came against India at Kandy in 2001, including three sixes and five fours. He made valuable scores on occasion, including 30 runs against England at the Oval in 1998, including 5 fours, 38 runs (4 fours, 1 six) against England at Galle in 2003, 43 runs (5 fours, 3 sixes) against Australia at Kandy in 2004 36 runs against the West Indies at Colombo in 2005, and his highest-ever ODI score, 33 not out (4 fours and 2 sixes off 16 balls) against Bangladesh in the final of the 2009 Tri-Series in Bangladesh. In the latter match, Muralitharan's effort, which included three fours and a six off one over, played a key role in Sri Lanka winning the match and series after the first eight overs saw them reduced to 6 for 5, the lowest score ever recorded in an ODI at the fall of the fifth wicket. Muralitharan has a strike rate close to 70 in Test cricket and scored over 55% of his Test runs in fours and sixes. Muralitharan, together with Chaminda Vaas, holds the record for the highest 10th wicket partnership in Tests for Sri Lanka. The pair put on 79 runs for the last wicket at the Asgiriya Stadium against Australia in March 2004. Muralitharan also holds the record for scoring most runs in Test cricket while batting at the number 11 position. Muralitharan currently holds the record for the most ducks (dismissals for zero) ever in international cricket (Tests, ODI's and Twenty20), with a total of 59 ducks. Abuse in Australia Muralitharan voiced his frustration at routinely being heckled by Australian crowds who accuse him of throwing – one common jeer directed at him was "No Ball!". Following the then Australian Prime Minister John Howard's statement that Muralitharan was a "chucker", in 2004, Muralitharan indicated that he would skip future tours to Australia. Tom Moody, the former Sri Lanka coach and former Australian Test cricketer, said he was embarrassed by the derogatory reaction and negative attention directed towards Muttiah Muralitharan by Australian crowds. Moody stated that "As an Australian when I have been with the Sri Lankan team in Australia, or playing against them in the World Cup, it's the only situation we find in the whole of the cricketing world where we have this disgraceful slant on a cricketer". During the 2008 Commonwealth Bank series in Australia, some members of the Sri Lankan contingent including Muralitharan, were the target of an egg throwing incident in Hobart. The Sri Lankan cricket selector Don Anurasiri was hit by an egg, while Muralitharan and two others were verbally abused by a car-load of people as they were walking from a restaurant back to the hotel. Due to the incident taking place at night, it is unclear whether Muralitharan was indeed the target of the culprits. Even though the Australian coach of the Sri Lankan team, Trevor Bayliss, down-played the incident as "a non-event", Cricket Australia tightened security around the team. In response to this episode Muralitharan was quoted as saying "When you come to Australia, you expect such incidents". At the conclusion of Muralitharan's test career cricket writer Rahul Bhattacharya summed up Muralitharan's trials thus: "Murali is described often as a fox. This seems right. Unlike hedgehog bowlers who pursue one big idea, Murali, like a fox, had many ways of pursuit. Like a fox he did not hunt in a pack. Like a fox he was himself cruelly hunted for sport in some parts of the world. Fox hunting was banned a few years ago in England, but is still legal in Australia." Retirement On 7 July 2010, Muttiah Muralitharan formally announced his retirement from Test cricket at a media briefing in Colombo. He confirmed that the first Test Match against India due to commence on , 2010 would be his last, but indicated that he was willing to play One-Day Internationals if it was considered necessary leading up to the 2011 World Cup, which Sri Lanka co-hosted. He identified Sri Lanka's World Cup win of 1996 as his greatest moment as a cricketer. He also stated that there were some regrets during his 19-year playing career. "Not winning Test matches in South Africa, Australia and India are regrets. But I am sure we will win very soon." At the start of his last match, Muralitharan was eight short of 800 wickets. At the fall of the ninth wicket of the Indian's second innings Muralitharan still needed one wicket to reach the milestone. After 90 minutes of resistance Muralitharan was able to dismiss the last Indian batsman Pragyan Ojha on the last delivery of the final over of his Test career. By doing so he became the only bowler to reach 800 wickets in Test cricket. Sri Lanka won the match by 10 wickets, the seventh time they have done so and the second time they have done it against India. In late 2010, Muralitharan announced his retirement from international cricket after 2011 Cricket World Cup, co-hosted by Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka announcing "This World Cup will be my last outing. I am retiring totally from international cricket thereafter. My time is up. I've signed up to play for two years in IPL." His final ODI appearance in Sri Lankan soil came during the semi-final clash against New Zealand, where Muralitharan took the wicket of Scott Styris in his last delivery. His last ODI was against India in the World Cup final at Mumbai, however Sri Lanka lost the match and Murali couldn't take any wickets. After retirement In July 2014, he played for the Rest of the World side in the Bicentenary Celebration match at Lord's. Coaching career Muralitharan is the bowling coach of Sunrisers Hyderabad since 2015. Under in his tenure the Sunrisers Hyderabad emerged as IPL Champions in 2016. He has also been appointed as the head coach of Thiruvallur Veerans in the 2nd edition of the TNPL. In 2014, Muralitharan joined the Australian national team as a coaching consultant for the Test series against Pakistan in the United Arab Emirates. On 11 March 2014, he was appointed | the five Wisden Cricketers of the Century. Former Australian captain Steve Waugh called him "the Don Bradman of bowling". Muralitharan was selected as the Wisden Leading Cricketer in the World in 2000 and in 2006. On 15 November 2007, the Warne-Muralidaran Trophy was unveiled named after the two leading wicket-takers in Test cricket, Shane Warne and Muralitharan. The trophy displays images of the two spin bowlers' hands each holding a cricket ball. This trophy will be contested between Australia and Sri Lanka in all future Test series. On 3 December 2007, just hours after Muttiah Muralitharan became Test cricket's leading Test wicket-taker, Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) announced it had unveiled a portrait of the Sri Lanka off-spinner at Lord's. On the same day the Philatelic Bureau of the Department of Posts in Sri Lanka issued a circular stamp with a denomination of Rs. 5 to mark the world record set by Muttiah Muralitharan. The circular design was meant to denote the cricket ball. Australian musician Alston Koch provoked worldwide interest when he recorded the only official tribute song to Muralitharan. The song was even mentioned on the BBC's Test match Special. The Muralitharan Song video was also released after he broke the world record. On 10 January 2008, the Parliament of Sri Lanka felicitated Muttiah Muralitharan for his world record breaking feat of being the highest wicket taker in Test cricket. This was the first time that a sportsman had been honoured in the country's Supreme Legislature. The Central Provincial Council in Kandy has renamed the International Cricket Stadium in Pallekele after Muttiah Muralitharan. Controversy of bowling action Throughout much of his international career, Muralitharan's action was suspected of contravening the laws of the game by the straightening of his bowling arm during delivery. Although he was cited three times, subsequent biomechanical testing led the ICC to clear him of the charge and permit him to continue bowling. Biomechanical testing conducted on four occasions fueled debate as to whether his action was in fact illegal or actually an illusion created by his allegedly unique ability to generate extra movement both at the shoulder as well the wrist, which enables him to bowl the doosra without straightening the elbow. First throwing citation and testing Initial concerns as to whether Muralitharan's action contravened the laws of the game by straightening his bowling arm during delivery broke into open controversy after Australian umpire Darrell Hair called a "no-ball" for an illegal action seven times during the Boxing Day Test match in Melbourne, Australia, in 1995. Australian Sir Donald Bradman, universally regarded as the greatest batsman in history, was later quoted as saying it was the "worst example of umpiring that [he had] witnessed, and against everything the game stands for. Clearly Murali does not throw the ball". Ten days later, on 5 January 1996, Sri Lanka played the West Indies in the seventh ODI of the triangular World Series competition, in Brisbane. Umpire Ross Emerson officiating in his debut international match, no-balled Muralitharan three times in his first over, twice in his second and twice in his third. It was an identical tally to that called by Hair on Boxing Day and (like Hair) Emerson made his calls from the bowler's end while his partner stood silent. The main difference was that several no-balls were for leg-breaks instead of the bowler's normal off-breaks. In February 1996, just before the World Cup, Muralitharan underwent biomechanical analysis at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology under the supervision of Prof. Ravindra Goonetilleke, who declared his action legal in the conditions tested, citing a congenital defect in Muralitharan's arm which makes him incapable of fully straightening the arm but gives the appearance of fully straightening it. Although under the original Laws a bowler's arm did not have to be fully straightened to be an illegal delivery, it was concluded that his action created the 'optical illusion of throwing'. Based on this evidence, ICC gave clearance to Muralitharan to continue bowling. Second citation and testing Doubts about Muralitharan's action persisted, however. On the 1998–99 tour to Australia he was once again called for throwing by Ross Emerson during a One Day International against England at the Adelaide Oval in Australia. The Sri Lankan team almost abandoned the match, but after instructions from the President of the Board of Control for Cricket in Sri Lanka, the game resumed. The Sri Lankan captain at the time Arjuna Ranatunga, was later fined and given a suspended ban from the game as a result. It later emerged that at the time of this match Emerson was on sick leave from his non-cricket job due to a stress-related illness and he stood down for the rest of the series. Muralitharan was sent for further tests in Perth and England and was cleared again. At no stage was Muralitharan requested to change or remodel his action, by the ICC. Up to this point in his career (1999) Muralitharan primarily bowled two types of deliveries, namely the off-break and the topspinner. He had not yet mastered the doosra. Third citation and testing Muralitharan continued bowling, taking his 500th Test wicket in the second Test against Australia in Kandy on 2004. At the end of the series his doosra delivery was officially called into question by match referee Chris Broad. At the University of Western Australia (Department of Human Movement and Exercise Science), three-dimensional kinematic measurements of Muttiah Muralitharan's bowling arm were taken using an optical motion capture system while he bowled his doosra. Muralitharan's mean elbow extension angle for the doosra delivery was 14°, which was subsequently reduced to a mean of 10.2° after remedial training at the university. The findings reported to ICC by the University of Western Australia's study was that Muralitharan's doosra contravened the established ICC elbow extension limit of 5° for spinners. Under the original throwing Laws of Cricket, the umpires officiating were under an obligation to call "no-ball" to a delivery that they were not entirely happy was absolutely fair. This Law gave the umpires absolutely no discretion. In 2000, the Laws were changed to put an allowable figure of straightening of 5° for spinners, 7.5° for medium pacers and 10° for fast bowlers in an attempt to more clearly define what was legal. But these figures proved difficult to enforce due to umpires being unable to discern actual amounts of straightening and the differentiation between the three different allowable figures. Testing in Test match conditions is not currently possible "when the identification of elbow and shoulder joint centres in on-field data collection, where a shirt is worn, also involves large errors. In a match the ability to differentiate anatomical movements such as 'elbow extension' by digitising segment end-points, particularly if you have segment rotations, is extremely difficult and prone to error. This is certainly the case with spin bowlers. It is therefore not surprising that laboratory testing is preferred, particularly for spin bowlers, where an appropriate pitch length and run-up can be structured. This is clearly the only way to test players, where data would be able to withstand scientific and therefore legal scrutiny." An extensive ICC study, the results of which were released in November 2004, was conducted to investigate the "chucking issue". A laboratory kinematic analysis of 42 non-Test playing bowlers done by Ferdinands and Kersting (2004) established that the 5° limit for slow and spin bowlers was particularly impractical. Due to the overwhelming scientific findings, researchers recommended that a flat rate of 15° tolerable elbow extension be used to define a preliminary demarcation point between bowling and throwing. A panel of former Test players consisting of Aravinda de Silva, Angus Fraser, Michael Holding, Tony Lewis, Tim May and the ICC's Dave Richardson, with the assistance of several biomechanical experts, stated that 99% of all bowlers in the history of cricket straighten their arms when bowling. Only one player tested (part-time bowler Ramnaresh Sarwan) reportedly did not transgress the pre 2000 rules. Many of these reports have controversially not been published and as such, the 99% figure stated has yet to be proved. In fact, Muralitharan stirred up controversy when he said during an interview with a Melbourne radio station that Jason Gillespie, Glenn McGrath and Brett Lee flexed their arms by 12, 13 and 14–15 degrees respectively, although it is unclear as to where Muralitharan quoted these figures from. Muralitharan was censured by the Sri Lankan Cricket Board for these comments. The ICC Executive was asked to ratify the panel's recommendations at the ICC's Annual General Meeting in February 2005. Based on the recommendations the ICC issued a new guideline (which was effective from 2005) allowing for extensions or hyperextensions of up to 15 degrees for all types of bowlers, thus deeming Muralitharan's doosra to be legal. Explaining why the maximum level of 15 degrees was arrived at, panel member Angus Fraser stated "That is the number which biomechanics says that it (straightening) becomes visible. It is difficult for the naked eye to see less than 15 degrees in a bowler's action. We found when the biceps reached the shoulder the amount of bend was around 165 degrees. Very few bowlers can get to 180 degrees because the joint doesn't allow that. ... but once you go further than 15 degrees you get into an area which is starting to give you an unfair advantage and you are breaking the law". University of South Australia study The original decision of disallowing the doosra bowling action was hailed widely as justifiable on account of being scientifically based. Hence, a team of Australian scientists representing the University of South Australia conducted an independent research, in line with modern Artificial Intelligence and biomechanics to solve the controversial issue arise from doosra. The University of South Australia's study, founded by Prof. Mahinda Pathegama, and contributed by Prof. Ozdemir Gol, Prof. J. Mazumdar, Prof. Tony Worsley and Prof. Lakmi Jain has analyzed the previous studies with close scrutiny since the techniques in their fields of expertise are employed in the course of assessment as the basis for decision-making. The findings based on this scientific study are overwhelming and Dave Richardson, general manager ICC stated that "the ICC is currently reviewing the Law on throwing and the ICC regulations and the study done by Prof. Mahinda Pathegama with UniSA scientists is a valuable source of information in this regard." The team of Australian scientists including Sri Lankan-born Australian scientist, Prof. Mahinda Pathegama reporting their findings, in line with the Muralitharan test to ICC, has analyzed in-depth various issues, such as Pitfalls in image interpretation when using 2D images for 3D modeling associates compared to the modern techniques in Artificial Intelligence and biomechanics, and Biomechanics assessment for doosra bowling action, etc. Pathegama at al. (2004) further reports on the Disagreement of expression on measurement accuracy in the Murali Report, with the analysis of the Motion tracking system used for the Murali Report, and discussing Cognitive aspects, Evidence of errors in Anthropometric assessment and movement tracking, Lateral inhibition in response tracking, Psycho-physiological aspect on post-assessments, Angular measurement errors, Skin marker induced errors, Geometrics-and physics-based 3D modeling and the Approach to on-field assessment, etc. The Muralitharan Report produced by the University of Western Australia's study has considered the Richards study done in 1999 to evaluate the error margin. University of South Australia's study done by Prof. Mahinda Pathegama argued that the Richards study which was presented by the University of Western Australia's study has used a rigid aluminium bar that only rotated in the horizontal plane to introduce such error margin. Pathegama's report stated that "in view of the system used in the test itself yielding considerable error even with a rigid aluminum bar (an accuracy level of approximately 4 degrees as stated in the Murali Report), it stands to reason that the error margin would be considerably larger when tracking skin markers on a spin bowler's moving upper limb by this same system". Vincent Barnes in an interview argues that Bruce Elliott, the UWA professor who is also the ICC biomechanist, had made an interesting discovery in his dealings with finger spinners. "He said he had found that a lot of bowlers from the subcontinent could bowl the doosra legally, but not Caucasian bowlers." Fourth round of testing On 2 February 2006, Muralitharan underwent a fourth round of biomechanical testing at the University of Western Australia. There had been criticism that the previous round of tests in July 2004 did not replicate match conditions due to a slower bowling speed in the laboratory tests. The results showed that the average elbow extension while bowling the 'doosra' delivery was 12.2 degrees, at an average of . The average for his off-break was 12.9 degrees at . Bowling with an arm brace In July 2004 Muralitharan was filmed in England, bowling with an arm brace on. The film was shown on Britain's Channel 4 during the Test against England on 2004. Initially, Muralitharan bowled three balls – the off-spinner, the top-spinner and the doosra – as he would in a match. Then he bowled the same three balls with a brace that is made from steel bars, which are set into strong resin. This brace has been moulded to his right arm, is approximately 46 centimetres long and weighs just under 1 kilogram. TV presenter Mark Nicholas who tried the brace himself, confirmed that "There is no way an arm can be bent, or flexed, when it is in this brace." All three balls reacted in the same way as when bowled without the brace. They were not bowled quite so fast because the weight of the brace restricts the speed of Muralitharan's shoulder rotation, but the spin was still there. With the brace on, there still appeared to be a jerk in his action. When studying the film at varying speeds, it still appeared as if he straightened his arm, even though the brace makes it impossible to do so. His unique shoulder rotation and amazing wrist action seem to create the illusion that he straightens his arm. The off-spinner said the exercise was to convince a sceptical public rather than sway an ICC investigation into bowling actions launched after he was reported by match referee Chris Broad for his doosra delivery in March 2004, the third time action was taken on his bowling. In an interview for August 2004 edition of Wisden Asia Cricket, Muralitharan stated "I think it will prove a point to those who had said that it was physically impossible to bowl a ball that turned the other way. I proved that it was possible to bowl the doosra without bending the arm." In 2004 at the R Premadasa Stadium in Colombo, Muralitharan voluntarily performed a series of tests with live video cameras. Michael Slater and Ravi Shastri witnessed it all unfold. Muralitharan once again showed he could bowl all his deliveries including the doosra with an arm brace that prevents any straightening of his elbow. Orthopediatrician Dr Mandeep Dillon stated that Muralitharan's unusual ability to generate extra movement both at the shoulder as well the wrist enables him to bowl the doosra without straightening the elbow. Critics and converts Two vocal critics of Muralitharan's action have been former test cricketers, Australian Dean Jones and Bishan Bedi, the former Indian captain. Dean Jones later admitted to being wrong in his assessment of Murali when he witnessed first hand Murali bowling with an arm-brace on. Michael Holding, the former West Indian fast bowler was also a critic of Muralitharan, but withdrew his criticisms under the light of the tests carried out. Holding had been quoted as being in "110% agreement" with Bedi, who likened Murali's action to a "javelin throw" and more recently, compared to a "shot putter". Following the ICC study, as a member of the panel that conducted the study, Holding stated, "The scientific evidence is overwhelming ... When bowlers who to the naked eye look to have pure actions are thoroughly analysed with the sophisticated technology now in place, they are likely to be shown as straightening their arm by 11 and in some cases 12 degrees. Under a strict interpretation of the Law, these players are breaking the rules. The game needs to deal with this reality and make its judgment as to how it accommodates this fact." In May 2002, Adam Gilchrist, speaking at a Carlton (Australian) Football Club luncheon, claimed Muralitharan's action does not comply with the laws of cricket. The Melbourne-based Age newspaper quoted Gilchrist as saying."Yeah, I think he does (chuck), and I say that because, if you read the laws of the game, there's no doubt in my mind that he and many others, throughout cricket history have." These comments were made before the doosra controversy, in spite of Muralitharan's action having been cleared by ICC in both 1996 and 1999. For his comment Gilchrist was reprimanded by the Australian Cricket Board (ACB) and found guilty of being in breach of ACB rules concerned with "detrimental public comment". During the 2006 tour of New Zealand another Muralitharan critic, former New Zealand captain and cricket commentator Martin Crowe, called for Muralitharan's doosra to be monitored more closely, asserting that his action seemed to deteriorate during a match. Earlier that year when delivering the Cowdrey lecture at Lords Martin Crowe had demanded zero tolerance instead of 15 degrees for throwing and specifically branded Muttiah Muralitharan a chucker. In response to Crowe's criticism ICC general manager Dave Richardson stated that the scientific evidence presented by biomechanists Professor Bruce Elliot, Dr Paul Hurrion and Mr Marc Portuswith was overwhelming and clarified that "Some bowlers, even those not suspected of having flawed actions, were found likely to be straightening their arms by 11 or 12 degrees. And at the same time, some bowlers that may appear to be throwing may be hyper-extending or bowl with permanently bent elbows. Under a strict interpretation of the law, they were breaking the rules – but if we ruled out every bowler that did that then there would be no bowlers left." Scientific research on bowling actions Since 1999 there has been a number of scientific research publications discussing Muralitharan's bowling action as well the need for defining the legality of a bowling action using biomechanical concepts. This research directly contributed towards the official acceptance of Muralitharan's bowling action and convinced the ICC to redefine the bowling laws in cricket. The key publications are listed below: Elliot, B.C., Alderson, J., Reid, S. and Foster, D. (2004). Bowling Report of Muttiah Muralitharan. Ferdinands, R.E.D. (2004). Three-dimensional biomechanical analysis of bowling in cricket. PhD Thesis, University of Waikato. Ferdinands, R.E.D. and Kersting, U.G. (2004). Elbow Angle Extension and implication for the legality of the bowling action in Cricket. In A McIntosh (Ed.), Proceedings of Australasian Biomechanic Conference 5 ( – 10), University of New South Wales, Sydney, pp. 26–27. Ferdinands, R.E.D. and Kersting, U.G. (2007). An evaluation of biomechanical measures of bowling action legality in cricket. Sports Biomechanics, Volume 6, Issue 2007, pages 315–333 Goonetilleke, R.S. (1999). Legality of bowling actions in cricket. Ergonomics, 42 (10), 1386–1397. Lloyd, D. G., Alderson, J. and Elliot, B.C. (2000). An upper limb kinematic for the examination of cricket bowling: A case study of Muttiah Muralitharan. Journal of Sports Sciences, 18, 975–982. Marshall, R. and Ferdinands R. (2003). The effect of a flexed elbow on bowling speed in cricket. Sports Biomechanics, 2(1), 65–71. Pathegama, M., Göl, Ö, Mazumdar, J., Winefield, T. and Jain, L (2003) 'Use of imprecise biomedical image analysis and anthropometric assessment in biomechanics with particular reference to competitive cricket', UniSA Scientific Study, SEIE, University of South Australia, Australia. Pathegama, M. and Göl, Ö (2004) 'Special Report on the Controversial doosra bowling action based on UniSA scientific study: As per the invitation made by David Richardson, general manager, ICC), EIE, University of South Australia, Australia. Portus, M., Mason, B., Rath, D. and Rosemond, C. (2003). Fast bowling arm actions and the illegal delivery law in men's high performance cricket matches. Science and Medicine in Cricket. R. Stretch, T. Noakes and C. Vauhan (Eds.), Com Press, Ports Elizabeth, South Africa, pp. 41–54. Philanthropy Muralitharan, along with his |
Science Teacher in the early 1980s. Inspired by this article, Maurice Oehler, a high school chemistry teacher from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, founded the National Mole Day Foundation (NMDF) on May 15, 1991. Many high schools around the United States, South Africa, Australia, and Canada celebrate Mole Day as a way to get their students interested in chemistry, with various activities often related to chemistry or moles. The American Chemical Society sponsors National Chemistry Week, which occurs from the Sunday through Saturday during which October | activities often related to chemistry or moles. The American Chemical Society sponsors National Chemistry Week, which occurs from the Sunday through Saturday during which October 23 falls. This makes Mole Day an integral part of National Chemistry Week. See also Pi Day Square Root Day References External links Maurice Oehler obituary Chemistry events Observances about science October |
of Sepultura's 20th Anniversary. The show on 7 December at the Philipshalle in Düsseldorf was recorded and later released as the Stage Fright DVD. Motörhead picked up their first Grammy in the awards of 2005 in the Best Metal Performance category for their cover of Metallica's "Whiplash" on Metallic Attack: The Ultimate Tribute. "They've managed to get the knife in," Lemmy grumbled. "It was only a mercy fuck – it was our 30th anniversary. If they gave us a Grammy for one of our albums or songs, it would mean something." From March until early May 2005, the band toured the United States, and in June and August were on the "30th Anniversary" tour in Europe. On 22 August, they were the subject of an hour-long documentary, Live Fast, Die Old, aired on Channel 4 as part of The Other Side series of documentaries, filmed by new and established directors. On 20 September, a compilation containing the band's appearances on BBC Radio 1 and a concert recording from Paris Theatre, London, was released as BBC Live & In-Session. In October, the band toured Europe with Mondo Generator before returning to Britain to tour with In Flames and Girlschool in October and November. During the show at the Brixton Academy on 19 November, Lemmy joined Girlschool on stage to play "Please Don't Touch". Motörhead finished the year's tours in December, with two engagements in New Zealand and five in Australia with Mötley Crüe. Also in 2005, Motörhead played on the Vaya Con Tioz farewell festival Böhse Onkelz at Lausitzring. In 2006, the band performed a four-date House of Blues tour in the States in March with Meldrum and from June until early August played at European open-air festivals with some indoor headlining shows. On 28 October, the band performed at The Rock Freakers Ball in Kansas City before heading off to tour Great Britain with Clutch and Crucified Barbara. During that tour, Kiss of Death was released on 29 August 2006 via Sanctuary Records, with a video for "Be My Baby". The tour ended on 25 November at the Brixton Academy, where Phil Campbell played on "Killed By Death" during Crucified Barbara's support set. Twelve shows in Europe with Meldrum took them through the end of November to early December, the first two shows also featuring Skew Siskin. In November, the band agreed to a sponsorship deal with the Greenbank B under-10s football team from North Hykeham, Lincoln, putting the band's name as well as War-Pig on the team's shirts; the under-10s run out to "Ace of Spades". Lemmy is old friends with Gary Weight, the team's manager; Weight "sent an email off to them and they came back and said it was a great idea" and hopes the deal will draw inspired performances from his team. On 25 April 2007, the band played at the Poliedro de Caracas in Caracas, Venezuela, and on 29 April at the Fundiçao Progresso, Rio de Janeiro. In June, Motörhead played an engagement at the Royal Festival Hall as part of Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown. On 26 February 2008, No Sleep 'til Hammersmith was reissued again as a two disc CD. From March through to June 2008, the band convened in Los Angeles with producer Cameron Webb to begin work on their 19th album Motörizer. Mikkey Dee's drum tracks were recorded at Dave Grohl's studio. Motörizer was released on 26 August. It does not feature artwork by Joe Petagno, the artist who designed many of their classic covers. In June 2008 the band performed on the main stage of the Download festival. Between 6 and 31 August, Motörhead joined Judas Priest, Heaven & Hell and Testament on the Metal Masters Tour. On 20 August the band played at the Roseland Ballroom, New York, as part of "The Volcom Tour 2008", which continued with The Misfits, Airbourne, Valient Thorr and Year Long Disaster at House of Blues, Anaheim, California on 2 September, playing a further thirteen dates. The band concluded the tour without the supporting bands, playing one more show at the Roseland Ballroom on 20 September, and the final engagement, at The Stone Pony, Asbury Park, New Jersey on 21 September. On 30 September, Reuters reported that Neverdie Studios had signed a deal with Lemmy and Motörhead to develop and market Lemmy's Castle and Motorhead Stadium inside the virtual world of Entropia Universe, an online universe. The year's touring ended with a 34-date tour of Europe with a variety of support bands including Danko Jones, Saxon, Witchcraft, and Airbourne. On 6 March 2009, the band played in the Middle East for the first time, at the annual Dubai Desert Rock Festival. On 1 April Motörhead were reported to have entered into a two-year sponsorship deal with UK Roller Derby team the Lincolnshire Bombers Roller Girls. That September, noted drummer Matt Sorum filled in for Mikkey Dee for a U.S. tour. "I was absolutely blown away and was very honoured to get the call," Sorum said. "You know what I love about Lemmy? He's always on time. We go on stage, no delays. Being in bands where you have to wait around for a couple of hours fucks you up." In November 2009, the band were supported by NWOBHM veterans Sweet Savage on the Irish leg of the tour (30 years after first sharing the stage together) and punk and goth rock legends The Damned on the UK leg of their world tour. On The Damned's official website, Captain Sensible said: "Ha ha ... we're working with Lemmy again, are we? Excellent! He's the real deal, the absolute antithesis to all that the likes of Simon Cowell stand for. And for that we should all be grateful. This tour will be a celebration of all things rock 'n' roll ... pity the poor roadies is all I can say!" The Wörld Is Yours, Aftershock and Bad Magic, 2010–2015 In a November 2009 interview with ABORT Magazine's E.S. Day, Lemmy said that Motörhead would enter the studio in February 2010 "to rehearse, write and record" their 20th studio album, to be released by the end of the year. The album was recorded with Cameron Webb and Welsh producer Romesh Dodangoda in Longwave Studio, Cardiff. In an interview with Hungarian television in July 2010, drummer Mikkey Dee announced that the album was finished, with 11 tracks. The album's name was said to be The Wörld Is Yours. On 3 November 2010, Future plc, a UK media company, announced that Motörhead were to release The Wörld is Yours via an exclusive publishing deal with Classic Rock magazine on 14 December 2010. The standard CD release of The Wörld is Yours would go on sale on 17 January 2011, through Motörhead's own label, Motörhead Music. To coincide with the release of their upcoming album, Motörhead embarked on a 35th Anniversary UK tour, from 8–28 November 2010, and a European tour from 30 November 2010 – 19 December 2010. They also took their tour to the Americas in 2011. In October, the band recorded a slow blues version of their longtime hit "Ace of Spades" for a TV spot for Kronenbourg beer. On 5 December the single "Get Back in Line" was released, followed by the release of a video for the single on 6 December. In December, Mikkey Dee stated to French journalists that Motörhead are planning to release a box-set with several DVDs in 2011. He did not give any details but said that it will come in a "beautiful package including many surprises". On 17 January 2011, it was announced that Motörhead would be part of the Sonisphere Festival in Knebworth. In August 2011, they headlined the Brutal Assault open-air festival in the Czech Republic. On 2 March 2011 Motörhead performed on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. On 9 July 2011, former guitarist Würzel died of a heart attack. In celebration of 35 years' touring, in late 2011 the band released the live DVD The Wörld Is Ours – Vol 1 – Everywhere Further Than Everyplace Else, including performances at the O2 Apollo Manchester, Best Buy Theater, New York City and Teatro Caupolicán, Santiago de Chile. On 19 December 2011, it was announced that Motörhead would play at the German festivals Rock am Ring and Rock im Park in Nürburgring and Nuremberg respectively in June 2012. On 12 January 2012, it was announced that Motörhead were touring the US and Canada in early 2012, along with three other metal bands Megadeth, Volbeat and Lacuna Coil. The Gigantour took place from 26 January to 28 February 2012, but Motörhead missed the final four shows because Lemmy had a combination of an upper respiratory viral infection and voice strain, resulting in severe laryngitis. Lemmy wrote on Facebook, "I'm giving my voice a good rest", hoping he would recover soon to play at the Mayhem Festival, which was held from 30 June to 5 August 2012. Motörhead also took part on 23 June in the Rock-A-Field Luxembourg Open Air Festival in Roeser. In an April 2012 interview with Classic Rock Revisited, Lemmy was asked if Motörhead were planning to make a follow-up to The Wörld Is Yours. He replied, "We have not started writing any songs yet but we will. We put out an album out every two years. I will continue to do that as long as I can afford an amp." On 28 June 2012, Lemmy told Auburn Reporter that Motörhead will release their next album in 2013 and they had written "about 6 songs so far." On 23 October 2012, Lemmy told Billboard.com that the band had planned to enter the studio in January to begin recording the album for a mid-2013 release. On 28 February 2013, it was announced that Motörhead had begun recording their new album. Motörhead released the live DVD The Wörld Is Ours – Vol. 2 – Anyplace Crazy As Anywhere Else in September 2012. On 18 June 2013, the new album's title was revealed to be Aftershock. In mid-November 2013, Motörhead were due to embark on a European tour alongside Saxon, followed by a tour in Germany and Scandinavia due to last until mid December 2013 but the dates were postponed and rescheduled for February and March 2014 due to Lemmy's health problems. However, in January 2014, Motörhead announced the cancellation of the new February and March dates of their European tour as Lemmy was still to reach full recovery from diabetes related health problems. But the same month, the band was confirmed for Coachella Festival to take place across two weekends in spring 2014 (12–14 and 19–21 April) in Indio, California, the exact dates to be revealed as 13 and 20 April 2014. In February 2014, Motörhead confirmed a Summer tour 2014 with eight European dates (from 24 June to 10 August) in France (2 dates), Switzerland, Italy, Germany (2 dates), Russia and Ukraine. In March 2014, the band announced a Los Angeles date on 11 April 2014 at Club Nokia. Later on, two new dates on 17 and 18 April 2014 respectively in Las Vegas (Pearl) and San Francisco (Warfield) were added. Still in March 2014, Motörhead announced that three heavy metal bands Megadeth, Anthrax and themselves would perform from 22 to 26 September 2014 at the first annual Motörhead's Motörboat cruise on board the Carnival Ecstasy (self-proclaimed "The Loudest Boat in the World"), due to sail from Miami and visit the ports of Key West and the Cozumel island just off Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. In a September 2014 interview on Full Metal Jackie, Lemmy stated that Motörhead would "probably" enter the studio in January 2015 to start work on their 22nd studio album for a tentative late 2015 release. On 25 February 2015, Motörhead officially confirmed that they were in the studio recording their new album in Los Angeles with longtime producer Cameron Webb. On 27 May 2015, the band released teasers on their Facebook page with the roman number "XXXX" on it. On 4 June the new album (which would be their last) Bad Magic was launched for pre-order on Amazon, revealing its title and cover art which also shows the "XXXX", coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the band. The album was released on 28 August 2015. The band performed at the UK's Glastonbury Festival in June 2015. Their final UK gig was at the Eden Project on 27 June 2015. While touring the album as the "40th anniversary Tour", Motörhead had to cut short their Salt Lake City show on 27 August 2015 (in the Rocky Mountains) due to Lemmy's breathing problems (the result of an altitude sickness) and then they had to cancel completely day-off their Denver Riot Fest set on 28 August 2015. Their tour picked up again on 1 September 2015 at Emo's in Austin, Texas (moved from Cedar Park Center) but the group were again forced to abandon their set after three songs and to cancel subsequent shows (from the show on 2 September 2015 in San Antonio, Texas to the show on 5 September 2015 in Houston, Texas included). Despite his ongoing health issues forcing Motörhead to cut short or cancel several US shows, Lemmy Kilmister was able to bounce back in time for the trio's annual Motörboat heavy metal cruise from Miami to the Bahamas which ran from 28 September through 2 October 2015 including performances by bands such as Slayer, Anthrax, Exodus, Suicidal Tendencies and Corrosion of Conformity. For this occasion, Motörhead performed live two entire (identical) sets on 30 September and 1 October 2015. Motörhead continued the "40th Anniversary Tour" in Europe in November and December. They played concerts in Germany, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Their final concert was in Berlin, Germany on 11 December 2015. After Lemmy's death, drummer Mikkey Dee spoke in an interview about him: "He was terribly gaunt. He spent all his energy on stage and afterwards he was very, very tired. It's incredible that he could even play, that he could finish the Europe tour. It was only 20 days ago. Unbelievable." The "40th Anniversary Tour" was planned to continue in January 2016 in the band's home country the UK, the first concert would have been in Newcastle on 23 January 2016. Lemmy's death and breakup, Clean Your Clock and Under Cöver, 2015–2017 On 28 December 2015, Lemmy died, four days after celebrating his 70th birthday. He was the second Motörhead member to die in 2015, following Phil Taylor the previous month. The band posted the following message on Facebook: The following day, drummer Mikkey Dee confirmed that Motörhead would not continue, stating, "Motörhead is over, of course. Lemmy was Motörhead. We won't be doing any more tours or anything. And there won't be any more records. But the brand survives, and Lemmy lives on in the hearts of everyone." Two days after Lemmy's death, guitarist Phil Campbell also stated that "Motörhead is no longer". A few days later, the band's long-time manager Todd Singerman told the press that Lemmy had experienced chest pains two days after his 70th birthday party (held at Whisky a Go Go) and visited into the emergency room, but was released the next day. However, Singerman was concerned because Lemmy's speech was "getting bad" and took him to a brain scan. On 26 December the doctor came into Lemmy's apartment, "brought the results and told us all that he has two to six months to live". Lemmy reacted calmly. "He took it better than all of us", said Singerman. "His only comment was, 'Oh, only two months, huh?' The doctor goes, 'Yeah, Lem, I don't want to bullshit you. It's bad, and there's nothing anyone can do. I would be lying to you if I told you there was a chance.'" Plans were made to treat Lemmy at home. A video game console at the Rainbow Bar and Grill that Lemmy loved to play was brought to his apartment. On 28 December 2015, he spent hours on the console, and Rainbow owner Mikael Maglieri paid a visit. Lemmy died in his sleep later that day. An autopsy on Kilmister showed that the causes of death were prostate cancer, a cardiac arrhythmia, and congestive heart failure. Initially planned on 27 May 2016, UDR Music released on 10 June 2016 Clean Your Clock, a Motörhead archive live album due to contain material recorded at the 20 and 21 November 2015 shows at the Zenith in Munich. On 1 September 2017, Motörhead released Under Cöver, a covers album featuring covers throughout Motörhead's history, along with covers only found on tribute albums, and new recordings. Former Motörhead guitarist "Fast" Eddie Clarke died on 10 January 2018 after a battle with pneumonia at the age of 67, making him the last member of the band's classic lineup (following Taylor and Lemmy) to die. Original Motörhead guitarist Larry Wallis died on 19 September 2019 at age 70 from an unknown cause. Musical style In a biography of the band, senior editor for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, wrote: "Motörhead's overwhelmingly loud and fast style of heavy metal was one of the most groundbreaking styles the genre had to offer in the late '70s" and though "Motörhead wasn't punk rock ... they were the first metal band to harness that energy and, in the process, they created speed metal and thrash metal." Although Motörhead is often considered a heavy metal band, Lemmy always described Motörhead's music as simply "rock and roll". In 2011, he said: "We were not heavy metal. We were a rock 'n' roll band. Still are. Everyone always describes | double-disc compilation album, The Best Of, on 26 August. Four dates in Japan preceded the band's 25th anniversary concert on 22 October at the Brixton Academy in London, where guest appearances were made by "Fast" Eddie Clarke, Brian May, Doro Pesch, Whitfield Crane, Ace, Paul Inder and Todd Campbell. The show also featured the return of the Bomber lighting rig. The event was filmed and released the following year as the 25 & Alive Boneshaker DVD, and the CD of the show, Live at Brixton Academy, was released two years after that. Lemmy states the reason for the DVD as wanting "to record it for the posterity or whatever it is. I nodded off through the 10th anniversary, we never did anything on the 20th, so the 25th made sense." A tour of West and East Europe followed the anniversary concert, taking the band through October, November and December. The schedule for the Eastern European tour was quite brutal, involving two 18-hour drives back-to-back and little time off, at the Warsaw venue the band did not arrive until 11 o'clock and the crew were still loading into the venue at one in the morning, while the fans waited. After taking a month off, the band began working on a new album at Chuck Reid's house in the Hollywood Hills. This album, Hammered, was released the following year. On 1 April 2001, the band gave a one-song performance for Triple H's entrance at WrestleMania X-Seven at the Reliant Astrodome in Houston. The second leg of the "We Are Motörhead" tour began in May in Ireland, moving across to the United Kingdom. In Manchester, the band were supported by Goldblade, and by Pure Rubbish at the two London shows. The second London show also included Backyard Babies and Paul Inder, who was guest musician for "Killed By Death". Between June and August, Motörhead played at a number of rock festivals in Europe; including as the Graspop Metal Meeting in Belgium, the Quart Festival in Norway, and the Wacken Open Air on 4 August, where four songs were recorded for the 25 & Alive Boneshaker DVD. The band returned to the States for a seven show tour between late September and early October. In April 2002, a DVD of some of Motörhead's performances from the 1970s and 1980s along with some stock footage of the band was released as The Best of Motörhead. Two weeks earlier, the Hammered album was released and supported by the "Hammered" tour, which kicked off in the States at around the same time. The United States dates continued until late May, and a European leg followed between June and August. In October, the band played five dates in Great Britain with Anthrax, Skew Siskin and Psycho Squad. The final venue was the Wembley Arena in London, where instead of Psycho Squad, the band were supported by Hawkwind, with Lemmy performing "Silver Machine" on stage with them. Throughout the rest of October and better part of November, the band were on a European tour with Anthrax. In April and May 2003, the band continued to promote the Hammered album in the States, and on the three dates Phil Campbell had to miss, his mother having died, Todd Youth stood in for him. Between late May and mid-July the band played seven dates at Summer Festivals in Europe and from late-July until the end of August, they were touring the United States with Iron Maiden and Dio. On 7 October a comprehensive five-disc collection of the band's recordings covering 1975–2002 was released as Stone Deaf Forever!. On 1 September 2003, the band returned to Hollywood's Whisky A Go-Go club for the Hollywood Rock Walk of Fame Induction. During October, the band performed a tour of Great Britain with The Wildhearts and Young Heart Attack. The band performed seven shows across Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain between 21 and 28 October and from late November until early December they were in Germany and Switzerland, touring with Skew Siskin and Mustasch. On 9 December, the previously recorded Live at Brixton Academy album was released. Inferno, Kiss of Death and Motörizer, 2004–2009 Motörhead performed an invitation-only concert at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London on 22 February 2004; at Summer Festivals in South America during May; and in Europe during June, July and August. They had already spent time in the studio, working on Inferno, which was released on 22 June and followed by the "Inferno" tour of Ireland with Class of Zero for three dates. Joined by Sepultura, the tour hit Great Britain. Some of the London show at the Hammersmith Apollo was filmed for TV as Gene Simmons introduced the extra opening act The Class, made up of school children from his Channel 4 series Rock School. Würzel guested on "Overkill". The band continued the tour with Sepultura across Europe through the rest of November and December. At the show in Magdeburg, Germany on 4 December Motörhead joined Sepultura on stage during their support slot playing the song "Orgasmatron", in celebration of Sepultura's 20th Anniversary. The show on 7 December at the Philipshalle in Düsseldorf was recorded and later released as the Stage Fright DVD. Motörhead picked up their first Grammy in the awards of 2005 in the Best Metal Performance category for their cover of Metallica's "Whiplash" on Metallic Attack: The Ultimate Tribute. "They've managed to get the knife in," Lemmy grumbled. "It was only a mercy fuck – it was our 30th anniversary. If they gave us a Grammy for one of our albums or songs, it would mean something." From March until early May 2005, the band toured the United States, and in June and August were on the "30th Anniversary" tour in Europe. On 22 August, they were the subject of an hour-long documentary, Live Fast, Die Old, aired on Channel 4 as part of The Other Side series of documentaries, filmed by new and established directors. On 20 September, a compilation containing the band's appearances on BBC Radio 1 and a concert recording from Paris Theatre, London, was released as BBC Live & In-Session. In October, the band toured Europe with Mondo Generator before returning to Britain to tour with In Flames and Girlschool in October and November. During the show at the Brixton Academy on 19 November, Lemmy joined Girlschool on stage to play "Please Don't Touch". Motörhead finished the year's tours in December, with two engagements in New Zealand and five in Australia with Mötley Crüe. Also in 2005, Motörhead played on the Vaya Con Tioz farewell festival Böhse Onkelz at Lausitzring. In 2006, the band performed a four-date House of Blues tour in the States in March with Meldrum and from June until early August played at European open-air festivals with some indoor headlining shows. On 28 October, the band performed at The Rock Freakers Ball in Kansas City before heading off to tour Great Britain with Clutch and Crucified Barbara. During that tour, Kiss of Death was released on 29 August 2006 via Sanctuary Records, with a video for "Be My Baby". The tour ended on 25 November at the Brixton Academy, where Phil Campbell played on "Killed By Death" during Crucified Barbara's support set. Twelve shows in Europe with Meldrum took them through the end of November to early December, the first two shows also featuring Skew Siskin. In November, the band agreed to a sponsorship deal with the Greenbank B under-10s football team from North Hykeham, Lincoln, putting the band's name as well as War-Pig on the team's shirts; the under-10s run out to "Ace of Spades". Lemmy is old friends with Gary Weight, the team's manager; Weight "sent an email off to them and they came back and said it was a great idea" and hopes the deal will draw inspired performances from his team. On 25 April 2007, the band played at the Poliedro de Caracas in Caracas, Venezuela, and on 29 April at the Fundiçao Progresso, Rio de Janeiro. In June, Motörhead played an engagement at the Royal Festival Hall as part of Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown. On 26 February 2008, No Sleep 'til Hammersmith was reissued again as a two disc CD. From March through to June 2008, the band convened in Los Angeles with producer Cameron Webb to begin work on their 19th album Motörizer. Mikkey Dee's drum tracks were recorded at Dave Grohl's studio. Motörizer was released on 26 August. It does not feature artwork by Joe Petagno, the artist who designed many of their classic covers. In June 2008 the band performed on the main stage of the Download festival. Between 6 and 31 August, Motörhead joined Judas Priest, Heaven & Hell and Testament on the Metal Masters Tour. On 20 August the band played at the Roseland Ballroom, New York, as part of "The Volcom Tour 2008", which continued with The Misfits, Airbourne, Valient Thorr and Year Long Disaster at House of Blues, Anaheim, California on 2 September, playing a further thirteen dates. The band concluded the tour without the supporting bands, playing one more show at the Roseland Ballroom on 20 September, and the final engagement, at The Stone Pony, Asbury Park, New Jersey on 21 September. On 30 September, Reuters reported that Neverdie Studios had signed a deal with Lemmy and Motörhead to develop and market Lemmy's Castle and Motorhead Stadium inside the virtual world of Entropia Universe, an online universe. The year's touring ended with a 34-date tour of Europe with a variety of support bands including Danko Jones, Saxon, Witchcraft, and Airbourne. On 6 March 2009, the band played in the Middle East for the first time, at the annual Dubai Desert Rock Festival. On 1 April Motörhead were reported to have entered into a two-year sponsorship deal with UK Roller Derby team the Lincolnshire Bombers Roller Girls. That September, noted drummer Matt Sorum filled in for Mikkey Dee for a U.S. tour. "I was absolutely blown away and was very honoured to get the call," Sorum said. "You know what I love about Lemmy? He's always on time. We go on stage, no delays. Being in bands where you have to wait around for a couple of hours fucks you up." In November 2009, the band were supported by NWOBHM veterans Sweet Savage on the Irish leg of the tour (30 years after first sharing the stage together) and punk and goth rock legends The Damned on the UK leg of their world tour. On The Damned's official website, Captain Sensible said: "Ha ha ... we're working with Lemmy again, are we? Excellent! He's the real deal, the absolute antithesis to all that the likes of Simon Cowell stand for. And for that we should all be grateful. This tour will be a celebration of all things rock 'n' roll ... pity the poor roadies is all I can say!" The Wörld Is Yours, Aftershock and Bad Magic, 2010–2015 In a November 2009 interview with ABORT Magazine's E.S. Day, Lemmy said that Motörhead would enter the studio in February 2010 "to rehearse, write and record" their 20th studio album, to be released by the end of the year. The album was recorded with Cameron Webb and Welsh producer Romesh Dodangoda in Longwave Studio, Cardiff. In an interview with Hungarian television in July 2010, drummer Mikkey Dee announced that the album was finished, with 11 tracks. The album's name was said to be The Wörld Is Yours. On 3 November 2010, Future plc, a UK media company, announced that Motörhead were to release The Wörld is Yours via an exclusive publishing deal with Classic Rock magazine on 14 December 2010. The standard CD release of The Wörld is Yours would go on sale on 17 January 2011, through Motörhead's own label, Motörhead Music. To coincide with the release of their upcoming album, Motörhead embarked on a 35th Anniversary UK tour, from 8–28 November 2010, and a European tour from 30 November 2010 – 19 December 2010. They also took their tour to the Americas in 2011. In October, the band recorded a slow blues version of their longtime hit "Ace of Spades" for a TV spot for Kronenbourg beer. On 5 December the single "Get Back in Line" was released, followed by the release of a video for the single on 6 December. In December, Mikkey Dee stated to French journalists that Motörhead are planning to release a box-set with several DVDs in 2011. He did not give any details but said that it will come in a "beautiful package including many surprises". On 17 January 2011, it was announced that Motörhead would be part of the Sonisphere Festival in Knebworth. In August 2011, they headlined the Brutal Assault open-air festival in the Czech Republic. On 2 March 2011 Motörhead performed on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. On 9 July 2011, former guitarist Würzel died of a heart attack. In celebration of 35 years' touring, in late 2011 the band released the live DVD The Wörld Is Ours – Vol 1 – Everywhere Further Than Everyplace Else, including performances at the O2 Apollo Manchester, Best Buy Theater, New York City and Teatro Caupolicán, Santiago de Chile. On 19 December 2011, it was announced that Motörhead would play at the German festivals Rock am Ring and Rock im Park in Nürburgring and Nuremberg respectively in June 2012. On 12 January 2012, it was announced that Motörhead were touring the US and Canada in early 2012, along with three other metal bands Megadeth, Volbeat and Lacuna Coil. The Gigantour took place from 26 January to 28 February 2012, but Motörhead missed the final four shows because Lemmy had a combination of an upper respiratory viral infection and voice strain, resulting in severe laryngitis. Lemmy wrote on Facebook, "I'm giving my voice a good rest", hoping he would recover soon to play at the Mayhem Festival, which was held from 30 June to 5 August 2012. Motörhead also took part on 23 June in the Rock-A-Field Luxembourg Open Air Festival in Roeser. In an April 2012 interview with Classic Rock Revisited, Lemmy was asked if Motörhead were planning to make a follow-up to The Wörld Is Yours. He replied, "We have not started writing any songs yet but we will. We put out an album out every two years. I will continue to do that as long as I can afford an amp." On 28 June 2012, Lemmy told Auburn Reporter that Motörhead will release their next album in 2013 and they had written "about 6 songs so far." On 23 October 2012, Lemmy told Billboard.com that the band had planned to enter the studio in January to begin recording the album for a mid-2013 release. On 28 February 2013, it was announced that Motörhead had begun recording their new album. Motörhead released the live DVD The Wörld Is Ours – Vol. 2 – Anyplace Crazy As Anywhere Else in September 2012. On 18 June 2013, the new album's title was revealed to be Aftershock. In mid-November 2013, Motörhead were due to embark on a European tour alongside Saxon, followed by a tour in Germany and Scandinavia due to last until mid December 2013 but the dates were postponed and rescheduled for February and March 2014 due to Lemmy's health problems. However, in January 2014, Motörhead announced the cancellation of the new February and March dates of their European tour as Lemmy was still to reach full recovery from diabetes related health problems. But the same month, the band was confirmed for Coachella Festival to take place across two weekends in spring 2014 (12–14 and 19–21 April) in Indio, California, the exact dates to be revealed as 13 and 20 April 2014. In February 2014, Motörhead confirmed a Summer tour 2014 with eight European dates (from 24 June to 10 August) in France (2 dates), Switzerland, Italy, Germany (2 dates), Russia and Ukraine. In March 2014, the band announced a Los Angeles date on 11 April 2014 at Club Nokia. Later on, two new dates on 17 and 18 April 2014 respectively in Las Vegas (Pearl) and San Francisco (Warfield) were added. Still in March 2014, Motörhead announced that three heavy metal bands Megadeth, Anthrax and themselves would perform from 22 to 26 September 2014 at the first annual Motörhead's Motörboat cruise on board the Carnival Ecstasy (self-proclaimed "The Loudest Boat in the World"), due to sail from Miami and visit the ports of Key West and the Cozumel island just off Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula. In a September 2014 interview on Full Metal Jackie, Lemmy stated that Motörhead would "probably" enter the studio in January 2015 to start work on their 22nd studio album for a tentative late 2015 release. On 25 February 2015, Motörhead officially confirmed that they were in the studio recording their new album in Los Angeles with longtime producer Cameron Webb. On 27 May 2015, the band released teasers on their Facebook page with the roman number "XXXX" on it. On 4 June the new album (which would be their last) Bad Magic was launched for pre-order on Amazon, revealing its title and cover art which also shows the "XXXX", coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the band. The album was released on 28 August 2015. The band performed at the UK's Glastonbury Festival in June 2015. Their final UK gig was at the Eden Project on 27 June 2015. While touring the album as the "40th anniversary Tour", Motörhead had to cut short their Salt Lake City show on 27 August 2015 (in the Rocky Mountains) due to Lemmy's breathing problems (the result of an altitude sickness) and then they had to cancel completely day-off their Denver Riot Fest set on 28 August 2015. Their tour picked up again on 1 September 2015 at Emo's in Austin, Texas (moved from Cedar Park Center) but the group were again forced to abandon their set after three songs and to cancel subsequent shows (from the show on 2 September 2015 in San Antonio, Texas to the show on 5 September 2015 in Houston, Texas included). Despite his ongoing health issues forcing Motörhead to cut short or cancel several US shows, Lemmy Kilmister was able to bounce back in time for the trio's annual Motörboat heavy metal cruise from Miami to the Bahamas which ran from 28 September through 2 October 2015 including performances by bands such as Slayer, Anthrax, Exodus, Suicidal Tendencies and Corrosion of Conformity. For this occasion, Motörhead performed live two entire (identical) sets on 30 September and 1 October 2015. Motörhead continued the "40th Anniversary Tour" in Europe in November and December. They played concerts in Germany, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Their final concert was in Berlin, Germany on 11 December 2015. After Lemmy's death, drummer Mikkey Dee spoke in an interview about him: "He was terribly gaunt. He spent all his energy on stage and afterwards he was very, very tired. It's incredible that he could even play, that he could finish the Europe tour. It was only 20 days ago. Unbelievable." The "40th Anniversary Tour" was planned to continue in January 2016 in the band's home country the UK, the first concert would have been in Newcastle on 23 January 2016. Lemmy's death and breakup, Clean Your Clock and Under Cöver, 2015–2017 On 28 December 2015, Lemmy died, four days after celebrating his 70th birthday. He was the second Motörhead member to die in 2015, following Phil Taylor the previous month. The band posted the following message on Facebook: The following day, drummer Mikkey Dee confirmed that Motörhead would not continue, stating, "Motörhead is over, of course. Lemmy was Motörhead. We won't be doing any more tours or anything. And there won't be any more records. But the brand survives, and Lemmy lives on in the hearts of everyone." Two days after Lemmy's death, guitarist Phil Campbell also stated that "Motörhead is no longer". A few days later, the band's long-time manager Todd Singerman told the press that Lemmy had experienced chest pains two days after his 70th birthday party (held at Whisky a Go Go) and visited into the emergency room, but was released the next day. However, Singerman was concerned because Lemmy's speech was "getting bad" and took him to a brain scan. On 26 December the doctor came into Lemmy's apartment, "brought the results and told us all that he has two to six months to live". Lemmy reacted calmly. "He took it better than all of us", said Singerman. "His only comment was, 'Oh, only two months, huh?' The doctor goes, 'Yeah, Lem, I don't want to bullshit you. It's bad, and there's nothing anyone can do. I would be lying to you if I told you there was a chance.'" Plans were made to treat Lemmy at home. A video game console at the Rainbow Bar and Grill that Lemmy loved to play was brought to his apartment. On 28 December 2015, he spent hours on the console, and Rainbow owner Mikael Maglieri paid a visit. Lemmy died in his sleep later that day. An autopsy on Kilmister showed that the causes of death were prostate cancer, a cardiac arrhythmia, and congestive heart failure. Initially planned on 27 May 2016, UDR Music released on 10 June 2016 Clean Your Clock, a Motörhead archive live album due to contain material recorded at the 20 and 21 November 2015 shows at the Zenith in Munich. On 1 September 2017, Motörhead released Under Cöver, a covers album featuring covers throughout Motörhead's history, along with covers only found on tribute albums, and new recordings. Former Motörhead guitarist "Fast" Eddie Clarke died on 10 January 2018 after a battle with pneumonia at the age of 67, making him the last member of the band's classic lineup (following Taylor and Lemmy) to die. Original Motörhead guitarist Larry Wallis died on 19 September 2019 at age 70 from an unknown cause. Musical style In a biography of the band, senior editor for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine, wrote: "Motörhead's overwhelmingly loud and fast style of heavy metal was one of the most groundbreaking styles the genre had to offer in the late '70s" and though "Motörhead wasn't punk rock ... they were the first metal band to harness that energy and, in the process, they created speed metal and thrash metal." Although Motörhead is often considered a heavy metal band, Lemmy always described Motörhead's music as simply "rock and roll". In 2011, he said: "We were not heavy metal. We were a rock 'n' roll band. Still are. Everyone always describes us as heavy metal even when I tell them otherwise. Why won't people listen?" In 2014, he reiterated to Der Spiegel that he did not particularly like heavy metal. Lemmy had stated that he generally felt more kinship with punk rockers than with heavy metal bands: Motörhead had engagements with fellow Brits, The Damned, with whom he played bass on a handful of late 1970s engagements, as well as having penned the song "R.A.M.O.N.E.S." as a tribute to the Ramones. Motörhead, Lemmy stated, have more in common aesthetically with The Damned than Black Sabbath, and nothing whatsoever in common with Judas Priest. Lemmy said he felt little kinship with the speed metal bands Motörhead have inspired: The NME stated that their brief solos were just long enough "... to open another bottle of beer", while a 1977 Stereo Review commented that "they know they're like animals, and they don't want to appear any other way. In view of the many ugly frogs in heavy metal who think they are God's gift to womankind these Quasimodos even seem charming in their own way". Motörhead's approach has not changed drastically over the band's career, though this is a deliberate choice: erstwhile Motörhead drummer Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor said that rock icons like Chuck Berry and Little Richard never drastically altered their style, and, like them, Motörhead preferred to play what they enjoyed and did best. This fondness for the first decade of rock and roll (mid-1950s to mid-1960s) is also reflected in some of Motörhead's occasional cover songs from that era. Lemmy often played power chords in his basslines. When asked about whether he had begun as a rhythm guitarist, he stated: Name and logo The name "Motörhead" is a reference to users of the drug amphetamine. The band's distinctive fanged-face logo, with its oversized boar's tusks, chains, and spikes, was created by artist Joe Petagno in 1977 for the cover of the Motörhead album and has appeared in many variations on covers of ensuing albums. The fanged face has been referred to variously as "War-Pig" and "Snaggletooth". The band's name is usually printed in a lowercase form of blackletter. The umlaut character ö is possibly derived from the similar "heavy metal umlaut" in the name of their 1975 acquaintances Blue Öyster Cult. However, this umlaut does not alter the pronunciation of the band's name. When asked if Germans pronounced the band "Motuuuurhead", Lemmy answered "No, they don't. I only put it in there to look mean". Snaggletooth is the fanged face that serves as the symbol of Motörhead. Artist Joe Petagno drew it in 1977 for the cover of the band's debut album (with designer Phil Smee who turned it into a negative and did the lettering to complete the logo), having met Lemmy while doing some work with Hawkwind. Petagno stated: Eddie Clarke was less sure about the imagery to begin with: It has remained a symbol of Motörhead throughout the years, with Petagno creating many variations of Snaggletooth, or as some have called it and written it down as War-Pig, for the covers of ensuing albums. Only two of the original covers for Motörhead's 22 studio albums do not feature any variation of War-Pig on the cover: On Parole and Overnight Sensation (of which, On Parole was never sanctioned by the band), and was in any case reissued with a black Snaggletooth on a white background. Phil is wearing a Snaggletooth badge on the cover of Ace of Spades. The cover of "Iron Fist" depicts a metal gauntlet wearing four skull-shaped rings, one of which is Snaggletooth, while the rear of the album-sleeve shows a fully detailed 3-D metal sculpture of the symbol. Originally the Snaggletooth design included a swastika on one of the helmet's spikes. This was painted out on later re-releases of the albums on CD. On 21 September 2007, Petagno announced that "there will be no more "HEADS" from my hand", citing irreconcilable differences between himself and the band's current management, Singerman Entertainment. Petagno stated: In reply, Lemmy stated: Wrestling Motörhead are well known in the professional wrestling world for performing wrestler Triple H's entrance music, "The Game", which he has used as his entrance music since January 2001. In addition to the song playing whenever Triple H appears on WWE programming such as Raw or SmackDown, and at other pay-per-view wrestling events, the band have performed the song live for him at WrestleMania X-Seven and WrestleMania 21. Their song "Rock Out" was also used as the theme song of the WWE pay-per-view Unforgiven in 2008. Motörhead also provided the entrance music for Triple H's faction Evolution, entitled "Line in the Sand". "The Game" was released on both the American version of the Hammered and WWF The Music, Vol. 5 albums, and "Line in the Sand" was released on the WWE ThemeAddict: The Music, Vol. 6 album. Motörhead have since performed a third entrance track for Triple H, entitled "King of Kings", which made its debut at WrestleMania 22. Triple H has also introduced the band in concert. Lemmy inspired Triple H's facial hair, and Triple H spoke at Lemmy's funeral. Awards and nominations Classic Rock Roll of Honour Awards |- | 2005 || Lemmy Kilmister || Living Legend || |- | 2011 || Lemmy (for Lemmy Kilmister) || Film/DVD || Echo Awards |- | 2016 || Bad Magic || Best Rock/Alternative International || Grammy Awards |- | 1992 || 1916 || rowspan="4"|Best Metal Performance || |- | 2000 || "Enter Sandman" || |- | 2005 || "Whiplash" || |- | 2015 || "Heartbreaker" || Kerrang Awards |- | 2000 || Motörhead || Silver K || |- | 2019 || Motörhead || Inspiration || Metal Hammer Awards (Germany) |- | 2010 || Motörhead || Best International || |- | 2013 || Motörhead || Maximum Metal || Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards (United Kingdom) |- | 2005 || Lemmy || Golden God || |- | 2013 || Motörhead || Golden God || Revolver Music Awards |- | rowspan="2"|2010 || Motörhead || Best Live Band || |- | rowspan="2"|Lemmy Kilmister || Revolver Golden Gods Lifetime Achievement Award || |- | 2013 || Paul Gray Best Bassist || Rock and Roll Hall of Fame |- | 2020 || Motörhead || Performers || Members Final line-up Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister – bass, lead vocals (1975–2015; his death) Phil "Wizzö" Campbell – guitars, backing vocals (1984–2015) Mikkey Dee – drums (1992–2015) Previous members Larry Wallis – guitars, backing vocals (1975–1976; died 2019) Lucas Fox – drums (1975) Phil "Philthy Animal" Taylor – drums (1975–1984, 1987–1992; died 2015) "Fast" Eddie Clarke – guitars, backing vocals (1976–1982; died 2018) Brian "Robbo" Robertson – guitars, backing vocals (1982–1983) Michael "Würzel" Burston – guitars, backing vocals (1984–1995; died 2011) Pete Gill – drums (1984–1987) Discography Studio albums Motörhead (1977) Overkill (1979) Bomber (1979) On Parole (1979) Ace of Spades (1980) Iron Fist (1982) Another Perfect Day (1983) Orgasmatron (1986) Rock 'n' Roll (1987) 1916 (1991) March ör Die (1992) Bastards (1993) Sacrifice (1995) Overnight Sensation (1996) Snake Bite Love (1998) We Are Motörhead (2000) Hammered (2002) Inferno (2004) Kiss of Death (2006) Motörizer (2008) The Wörld Is Yours (2010) Aftershock (2013) Bad Magic (2015) Tours 1975–1977: The Early Days of Motörhead 1977–1978: Beyond The Threshold of Pain Tour 1979: Overkill Tour 1979–1980: Bomber Tour 1980–1981: Ace of Spades Tour (incl. the Short Sharp Pain In The Neck tour in late March / early April 1981) 1981: No Sleep 'Til Christmas Tour 1982: Iron Fist Tour 1983: Another Perfect Tour 1984: No Remorse Tour 1985: 10th Anniversary Tour 1986–1987: Orgasmatron Tour 1987–1989: Rock 'n' Roll Tour 1991–1992: 1916 Tour 1992–1993: March ör Die/Bombers & Eagles Tour '92 1993–1994: Bastards Tour 1995–1996: Sacrifice Tour 1996–1997: Overnight Sensation Tour 1998–1999: Snake Bite Love Tour 2000–2001: We Are Motörhead Tour 2002–2004: Hammered Tour 2004–2006: Inferno Tour 2006–2008: Kiss of Death Tour 2008: Metal Masters Tour 2008: The Volcom Tour 2008 2008–2010: Motörizer Tour 2010: 35th Anniversary Tour 2011–2012: The Wörld Is Yours Tour Mayhem Festival 2012 2012–2013: Kings of The Road Tour 2014–2015: Aftershock Tour 2015: 40th Anniversary Tour Filmography 1987: Eat the Rich: soundtrack includes "Nothing Up My Sleeve", "Built for Speed", "Orgasmatron", "Doctor Rock", "On the Road (live)", "Eat the Rich" and "Bess" – New Line Home Entertainment. Halfway through shooting, the idea of gradually replacing the members of the ballroom band with Motörhead was hit upon. At first there are no Motörhead personnel, then Phil Campbell appears, followed by Würzel and Phil Taylor. The scene involving Lemmy riding a motorcycle is played by a female stunt double as Lemmy was on tour with Motörhead in America at the time the scene had to be shot. 2010: Lemmy (49% Motherf**ker. 51% Son of a |
refer to: Science and technology Memory management unit, a computer component Manned Maneuvering Unit, a NASA spacesuit rocket pack Milli mass unit, an unofficial unit of mass Minimum Mapping Unit, a spatial measure used in remote sensing and cartography Education Manchester Metropolitan University, in England Marymount University, in Arlington, Virginia Mount Mansfield Union | unofficial unit of mass Minimum Mapping Unit, a spatial measure used in remote sensing and cartography Education Manchester Metropolitan University, in England Marymount University, in Arlington, Virginia Mount Mansfield Union High School, in Jericho, Vermont Mount Meru University, in Tanzania Mountains of the Moon University, in Fort Portal, Uganda Multimedia University, in Malaysia |
the distant past. However, a more thorough analysis of data from the WMAP and from the Planck satellite, which has a resolution three times higher than WMAP, did not reveal any statistically significant evidence of such a bubble universe collision. In addition, there was no evidence of any gravitational pull of other universes on ours. Proponents and skeptics Modern proponents of one or more of the multiverse hypotheses include Don Page, Brian Greene, Max Tegmark, Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, Michio Kaku, David Deutsch, Leonard Susskind, Alexander Vilenkin, Yasunori Nomura, Raj Pathria, Laura Mersini-Houghton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sean Carroll and Stephen Hawking. Scientists who are generally skeptical of the multiverse hypothesis include: David Gross, Paul Steinhardt, Anna Ijjas, Abraham Loeb, David Spergel, Neil Turok, Viatcheslav Mukhanov, Michael S. Turner, Roger Penrose, George Ellis, Joe Silk, Carlo Rovelli, Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, Jim Baggott and Paul Davies. Arguments against multiverse theories In his 2003 New York Times opinion piece, "A Brief History of the Multiverse", author and cosmologist Paul Davies offered a variety of arguments that multiverse theories are non-scientific: George Ellis, writing in August 2011, provided a criticism of the multiverse, and pointed out that it is not a traditional scientific theory. He accepts that the multiverse is thought to exist far beyond the cosmological horizon. He emphasized that it is theorized to be so far away that it is unlikely any evidence will ever be found. Ellis also explained that some theorists do not believe the lack of empirical testability and falsifiability is a major concern, but he is opposed to that line of thinking: Ellis says that scientists have proposed the idea of the multiverse as a way of explaining the nature of existence. He points out that it ultimately leaves those questions unresolved because it is a metaphysical issue that cannot be resolved by empirical science. He argues that observational testing is at the core of science and should not be abandoned: Classification schemes Max Tegmark and Brian Greene have devised classification schemes for the various theoretical types of multiverses and universes that they might comprise. Max Tegmark's four levels Cosmologist Max Tegmark has provided a taxonomy of universes beyond the familiar observable universe. The four levels of Tegmark's classification are arranged such that subsequent levels can be understood to encompass and expand upon previous levels. They are briefly described below. Level I: An extension of our universe A prediction of cosmic inflation is the existence of an infinite ergodic universe, which, being infinite, must contain Hubble volumes realizing all initial conditions. Accordingly, an infinite universe will contain an infinite number of Hubble volumes, all having the same physical laws and physical constants. In regard to configurations such as the distribution of matter, almost all will differ from our Hubble volume. However, because there are infinitely many, far beyond the cosmological horizon, there will eventually be Hubble volumes with similar, and even identical, configurations. Tegmark estimates that an identical volume to ours should be about 1010115 meters away from us. Given infinite space, there would, in fact, be an infinite number of Hubble volumes identical to ours in the universe. This follows directly from the cosmological principle, wherein it is assumed that our Hubble volume is not special or unique. Level II: Universes with different physical constants In the eternal inflation theory, which is a variant of the cosmic inflation theory, the multiverse or space as a whole is stretching and will continue doing so forever, but some regions of space stop stretching and form distinct bubbles (like gas pockets in a loaf of rising bread). Such bubbles are embryonic level I multiverses. Different bubbles may experience different spontaneous symmetry breaking, which results in different properties, such as different physical constants. Level II also includes John Archibald Wheeler's oscillatory universe theory and Lee Smolin's fecund universes theory. Level III: Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics Hugh Everett III's many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is one of several mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics. In brief, one aspect of quantum mechanics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible observations, each with a different probability. According to the MWI, each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe. Suppose a six-sided die is thrown and that the result of the throw corresponds to quantum mechanics observable. All six possible ways the dice can fall correspond to six different universes. Tegmark argues that a Level III multiverse does not contain more possibilities in the Hubble volume than a Level I or Level II multiverse. In effect, all the different "worlds" created by "splits" in a Level III multiverse with the same physical constants can be found in some Hubble volume in a Level I multiverse. Tegmark writes that, "The only difference between Level I and Level III is where your doppelgängers reside. In Level I they live elsewhere in good old three-dimensional space. In Level III they live on another quantum branch in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space." Similarly, all Level II bubble universes with different physical constants can, in effect, be found as "worlds" created by "splits" at the moment of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a Level III multiverse. According to Yasunori Nomura, Raphael Bousso, and Leonard Susskind, this is because global spacetime appearing in the (eternally) inflating multiverse is a redundant concept. This implies that the multiverses of Levels | special or unique. Level II: Universes with different physical constants In the eternal inflation theory, which is a variant of the cosmic inflation theory, the multiverse or space as a whole is stretching and will continue doing so forever, but some regions of space stop stretching and form distinct bubbles (like gas pockets in a loaf of rising bread). Such bubbles are embryonic level I multiverses. Different bubbles may experience different spontaneous symmetry breaking, which results in different properties, such as different physical constants. Level II also includes John Archibald Wheeler's oscillatory universe theory and Lee Smolin's fecund universes theory. Level III: Many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics Hugh Everett III's many-worlds interpretation (MWI) is one of several mainstream interpretations of quantum mechanics. In brief, one aspect of quantum mechanics is that certain observations cannot be predicted absolutely. Instead, there is a range of possible observations, each with a different probability. According to the MWI, each of these possible observations corresponds to a different universe. Suppose a six-sided die is thrown and that the result of the throw corresponds to quantum mechanics observable. All six possible ways the dice can fall correspond to six different universes. Tegmark argues that a Level III multiverse does not contain more possibilities in the Hubble volume than a Level I or Level II multiverse. In effect, all the different "worlds" created by "splits" in a Level III multiverse with the same physical constants can be found in some Hubble volume in a Level I multiverse. Tegmark writes that, "The only difference between Level I and Level III is where your doppelgängers reside. In Level I they live elsewhere in good old three-dimensional space. In Level III they live on another quantum branch in infinite-dimensional Hilbert space." Similarly, all Level II bubble universes with different physical constants can, in effect, be found as "worlds" created by "splits" at the moment of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a Level III multiverse. According to Yasunori Nomura, Raphael Bousso, and Leonard Susskind, this is because global spacetime appearing in the (eternally) inflating multiverse is a redundant concept. This implies that the multiverses of Levels I, II, and III are, in fact, the same thing. This hypothesis is referred to as "Multiverse = Quantum Many Worlds". According to Yasunori Nomura, this quantum multiverse is static, and time is a simple illusion. Another version of the many-worlds idea is H. Dieter Zeh's many-minds interpretation. Level IV: Ultimate ensemble The ultimate mathematical universe hypothesis is Tegmark's own hypothesis. This level considers all universes to be equally real which can be described by different mathematical structures. Tegmark writes: He argues that this "implies that any conceivable parallel universe theory can be described at Level IV" and "subsumes all other ensembles, therefore brings closure to the hierarchy of multiverses, and there cannot be, say, a Level V." Jürgen Schmidhuber, however, says that the set of mathematical structures is not even well-defined and that it admits only universe representations describable by constructive mathematics—that is, computer programs. Schmidhuber explicitly includes universe representations describable by non-halting programs whose output bits converge after a finite time, although the convergence time itself may not be predictable by a halting program, due to the undecidability of the halting problem. He also explicitly discusses the more restricted ensemble of quickly computable universes. Brian Greene's nine types The American theoretical physicist and string theorist Brian Greene discussed nine types of multiverses: Quilted The quilted multiverse works only in an infinite universe. With an infinite amount of space, every possible event will occur an infinite number of times. However, the speed of light prevents us from being aware of these other identical areas. Inflationary The inflationary multiverse is composed of various pockets in which inflation fields collapse and form new universes. Brane The brane multiverse version postulates that our entire universe exists on a membrane (brane) which floats in a higher dimension or "bulk". In this bulk, there are other membranes with their own universes. These universes can interact with one another, and when they collide, the violence and energy produced is more than enough to give rise to a big bang. The branes float or drift near each other in the bulk, and every few trillion years, attracted by gravity or some other force we do not understand, collide and bang into each other. This repeated contact gives rise to multiple or "cyclic" big bangs. This particular hypothesis falls under the string theory umbrella as it requires extra spatial dimensions. Cyclic The cyclic multiverse has multiple branes that have collided, causing Big Bangs. The universes bounce back and pass through time until they are pulled back together and again collide, destroying the old contents and creating them anew. Landscape The landscape multiverse relies on string theory's Calabi–Yau spaces. Quantum fluctuations drop the shapes to a lower energy level, creating a pocket with a set of laws different from that of the surrounding space. Quantum The quantum multiverse creates a new universe when a diversion in events occurs, as in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Holographic The holographic multiverse is derived from the theory that the surface area of a space can encode the contents of the volume of the region. Simulated The simulated multiverse exists on complex computer systems that simulate entire universes. Ultimate The ultimate multiverse contains every mathematically possible universe under different laws of physics. Cyclic theories In several theories, there is a series of infinite, self-sustaining cycles (for example, an eternity of Big Bangs, Big Crunches, and/or Big Freezes). M-theory A multiverse of a somewhat different kind has been envisaged within string theory and its higher-dimensional extension, M-theory. These theories require the presence of 10 or 11 spacetime dimensions respectively. The extra six or seven dimensions may either be compactified on a very small scale, or our universe may simply be localized on a dynamical (3+1)-dimensional object, a D3-brane. This opens up the possibility that there are other branes which could support other universes. Black-hole cosmology Black-hole cosmology is a cosmological model in which the observable universe is the interior of a black hole existing as one of possibly many universes inside a larger universe. This includes the theory of white holes, which are on the opposite side of space-time. Anthropic principle The concept of other universes has been proposed to explain how our own universe appears to be fine-tuned for conscious life as we experience it. If there were a large (possibly infinite) number of universes, each with possibly different physical laws (or different fundamental physical constants), then some of these universes (even if very few) |
MBR may refer to: Management and Business Management and Business Review Journal Science and technology Master boot record, the first sector of a partitioned data storage device, used for booting Membrane bioreactor Memory buffer register Microwave background radiation Minimum bend radius, for installation of cables and pipes Minimum bounding rectangle Minimum bit rate Military Main battle rifle Morskoi Blizhniy Razvedchik, (Russian for "Naval Short Range Reconnaissance"), a | station, England Mountain Bike Rider, a UK based magazine about mountain bike riding Maximum base rent, as used in rent control in New York Minerações Brasileiras Reunidas, a division of Caemi Malaysian Book of Records Mohammed Bin Rashid Library, a large library in Dubai, UAE See also Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario 200 (MBR-200), a leftist political movement founded |
Hampshire, a census-designated place within the town Milton (town), New York, in Saratoga County Milton (CDP), Saratoga County, New York, a census-designated place within the town Milton, Ulster County, New York, a census-designated place and hamlet in Ulster County Milton, North Carolina Milton, North Dakota Milton Township, Ashland County, Ohio Milton Township, Wood County, Ohio Milton, Pennsylvania Milton, Tennessee Milton, Texas Milton, Vermont, a town Milton (CDP), Vermont, a census-designated place within the town Milton, Washington Milton, West Virginia Milton, Buffalo County, Wisconsin, a town Milton, Wisconsin, a city in Rock County Milton College, a former private college in Milton, Wisconsin Milton, Rock County, Wisconsin, a town surrounding the city Other uses Milton: A Poem in Two Books, an epic poem by William Blake Milton (album), a 1976 album by Milton Nascimento Milton (cartoon), a series of cartoons for Saturday Night Live and the film Office Space Milton (crater), a crater on Mercury Milton (game), an electronic game made in 1980 by Milton Bradley Milton (horse), a show jumping horse ridden by John Whitaker Milton (opera), by Gaspare Spontini Milton Abbey School, Dorset, England Milton Corporation, Australian investment | Milton, Derbyshire, a village in south Derbyshire Milton, Dorset, a former town Milton on Stour, Dorset Milton, a former hamlet in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex Milton, Nottinghamshire Milton, Cherwell, Oxfordshire Milton, Vale of White Horse, Oxfordshire Milton Park, a business park Milton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire Milton, Portsmouth Milton, Somerset Milton, an area of Weston-super-Mare, Somerset Milton, Staffordshire Milton, Wiltshire, a hamlet near East Knoyle Scotland Milton (South Uist), in the Outer Hebrides Milton of Finavon, Angus Milton of Ogilvie, Angus Milton of Campsie, East Dunbartonshire Milton, Easter Ross, a village near Kildary Milton of Balgonie, Fife Milton, Glasgow Milton, Glenurquhart, a village near Drumnadrochit Milton, Stirling, a hamlet near Aberfoyle Milton of Buchanan, Stirling Milton, West Dunbartonshire, a village near Dumbarton United States Milton, California Milton, Delaware Milton, Florida Milton, Georgia Milton County, Georgia, a former county Milton, Illinois Milton, Indiana Milton, Ohio County, Indiana Milton, Iowa Milton, Kansas Milton, Kentucky Milton, Louisiana Milton, Maine Milton, Massachusetts Milton Academy, a preparatory school in Milton, Massachusetts Milton Township, Antrim County, Michigan Milton Township, Cass County, Michigan Milton Township, Dodge County, Minnesota Milton, Atchison County, Missouri Milton, Kansas City, Missouri Milton, Randolph County, Missouri Milton, New Hampshire Milton (CDP), New Hampshire, a census-designated place within the town Milton (town), New York, in Saratoga County Milton (CDP), Saratoga County, New York, a census-designated place within the town Milton, Ulster County, New York, a census-designated |
final king of the Kassite dynasty that had ruled over Babylon, was defeated by Kutir-Nahhunte of Elam, the successor of Shutruk-Nakhunte Fourth Babylonian Dynasty c. 1125 BC – 1104 BC (Short chronology) Nebuchadnezzar I of Isin's War with Elam Israelite Campaigns Later Israelite Campaigns 1000 BC Siege of Jebus Assyrian campaigns 853 BC Battle of Qarqar 721 BC Assyrian conquest of Israel Second Assyrian invasion to Southern Levant 701 BC Siege of Lachish 701 BC Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib 693 BC Battle of Diyala River (Pyrrhic Assyrian victory) 693 BC Siege of Babylon 626 BC Revolt of Babylon (Decisive Babylonian victory; eviction of Assyrian troops) Neo-Babylonian campaigns 612 BC Battle of Nineveh 605 BC Battle of Carchemish – a battle between the Kingdom of Egypt and Assyrian allies against the Neo-Babylonian Empire Jewish–Babylonian war 597 BC Siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II 587 BC Siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar II Median campaigns 28 May 585 BC Battle of Halys Achaemenid conquests of Cyrus the Great 552 BC Persian Revolt 552 BC Battle of Hyrba 551 BC Battle of the Persian Border 550 BC Battle of Pasargadae 547 BC Battle of Pteria 547 BC Battle of Thymbra 547 BC Siege of Sardis 539 BC Battle of Opis Classical antiquity Greco-Persian domination Ionian Revolt 499–493 BC First Persian invasion of Greece 492–490 BC Egyptian Revolt 486 BC Second Persian invasion of Greece 480–478 BC Wars of Delian League 477–449 BC Wars of the Diadochi 322–275 BC Syrian Wars 274–168 BC First Syrian War (274–271 BC) Second Syrian War (260–253 BC) Third Syrian War (246–241 BC) Fourth Syrian War (219–217 BC) Fifth Syrian War (202–195 BC) Sixth Syrian War (170–168 BC) Seleucid–Parthian wars 238–129 BC Roman–Syrian War 192–188 BC Maccabean Revolt 167–160 BC Roman, Parthian and Sassanid domination Mithridatic Wars 88–63 BC First Mithridatic War 88–84 BC Second Mithridatic War 83–81 BC Third Mithridatic War 75–63 BC Hasmonean Civil War Siege of Jerusalem (63 BC) Roman–Parthian Wars Crassus invasion to Mesopotamia 53 BCE Battle of Carrhae Antony's Parthian War Battle of Mount Gindarus Siege of Jerusalem 37 BC Antropatene campaign Armenian campaign Roman–Parthian War of 58–63 AD Battle of Nisibis (217) Aelius Gallus campaign in Arabia 24 BC Alexandria pogroms 38 AD Jewish–Roman wars 66–136 AD Great Revolt of Judea 67–70 AD Kitos War 117–119 AD Bar Kokhba Revolt 132–136 AD Roman-Sassanid Wars Battle of Antioch (218) Ardashir's raid of Mesopotamia 230–232 AD Ardashir's second raid of Mesopotamia 237–240 AD Battle of Resaena 243 AD Battle of Misiche 244 AD Battle of Barbalissos Battle of Edessa 259 Siege of Singara 344 Siege of Amida 359 Battle of Ctesiphon (363) Battle of Samarra 363 AD Uprising of Syrian Legion 232 AD Palmyrene revolt 272 Battle of Immae Battle of Emesa Battle of Callinicum 296 Jewish revolt against Gallus 351–352 Isauria rebellion of 404 Byzantine–Sasanian wars 421–628 Roman–Sasanian War (421–422) Anastasian War (502–506) Iberian War (526–532) Battle of Callinicum 531 Roman–Persian War of 572–591 Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 Antioch riots 610 Battle of Antioch (613) Jewish revolt against Heraclius 610-28 Siege of Jerusalem (614) Shahin's invasion of Asia Minor (615) Sassanid conquest of Egypt 618–621 Battle of Issus Byzantine assault on Persia 624-25 Siege of Constantinople (626) Third Perso-Turkic War Battle of Nineveh (627) Samaritan Revolts Samaritan revolt against Zeno 484 Revolt against Anastasius I Third Samaritan revolt 529–531 Fourth Samaritan Revolt 555–572 Mazdak revolt in Persia 524 (or 528) Nika riots in Constantinople 532 Battle of Dhi Qar – tribal rebellion in Sasanian Persia Medieval times Muslim conquests Ridda wars 632–633 Muslim conquest of the Levant Battle of Yarmouk 636 Arab conquest of Armenia Muslim conquest of Egypt Umayyad conquest of North Africa Muslim conquest of Persia First invasion of Mesopotamia Second invasion of Mesopotamia Battle of al-Qādisiyyah Battle of Nahāvand Persian Rebellion 649-51 Arab- Turgesh wars Day of Thirst in 724 Battle of the Defile in 731 Arab–Khazar wars Abbasid Caliphate conflicts Abbasid revolt Battle of the Zab 750 Arab–Byzantine wars 780–1180 Battle of Krasos 804/5 Battle of Anzen 838 Sack of Amorium 838 Sack of Damietta (853) Battle of Lalakaon 863 John Kourkouas' campaigns First Melitene campaign and conquest of Kalikala 926–930 Second Malitene campaign 931–934 Sayf al-Dawla campaigns Conquest of Aleppo 944 Battle of Marash (953) Battle of Raban 958 Battle of Andrasos 960 Siege of Aleppo 962 Siege of Aleppo 964 Mudhar-Yamani conflict 793-96 Byzantine-Paulician Wars Battle of Bathys Ryax 872 (878?) Persian Zoroastrian Revolts 8th–9th centuries Behavarid revolt in Persia 8th century Babak's revolt 816-37 Ahmad ibn al Junayd's campaign 823-24 Muhammad ibn Humayd Tusi's campaign 827-29 Afshin's campaign 835-837/838 Maziar revolt 839 Byzantine–Seljuq wars 1048–1308 Battle of Manzikert 1071 Nizari Ismaili uprising in Persia and Syria Nizari–Seljuk conflicts 1090–1194 Crusades People's Crusade 1095–96 First Crusade 1099 Battle of Ascalon 1099 Crusade of 1101 Battle of Ager Sanguinis 1119 Battle of Azaz 1125 Second Crusade 1145–49 Battle of Inab 1149 Baldwin's campaigns Siege of Ascalon (1153) Crusader invasions of Egypt 1154–69 Battle of al-Babein Third Crusade 1189–92 Siege of Acre (1189–91) Livonian Crusade German Crusade Fourth Crusade Children's Crusade Fifth Crusade Sixth Crusade Seventh Crusade Shepherds' Crusade (1251) Eighth Crusade Ninth Crusade Shepherds' Crusade (1320) Saladin's campaigns Egyptian revolt 1169 Darum Siege 1170 Yemen conquest 1174 Battle of Hama 1175 Capture of Damascus 1174 Battle of Jacob's Ford 1179 Fight for Mosul 1182 Battle of Al-Fule (1183) Siege of Kerak 1183 Battle of Cresson 1187 Battle of Hattin 1187 Siege of Jerusalem (1187) Mongol invasions to Middle East 13th century. Battle of Köse Dağ 1243 Siege of Baghdad (1258) Hulagu Khan's conquest of Syria 1260 Sack of Sidon 1260 Siege of Aleppo (1260) Battle of Ain Jalut 1260 First Battle of Homs 1260 Battle of Albistan 1277 Second Battle of Homs 1281 Mongol raids into Bilad al-Sham 1299–1300 Battle of Wadi al-Khazandar 1299 Timur Conquests Battle of Ankara (Battle of Angora) 1402 Ottoman Interregnum 1402–1413 Sheikh Bedreddin revolt 1416 Byzantine–Ottoman Wars 1265–1453 Rise of the Ottomans 1265–1328 Byzantium counter: 1328–1341 Siege of Nicaea (1328–31) Siege of Nicomedia 1333–1337 Balkan invasion and civil war: 1341–1371 Byzantine civil war | assassinations, regicides, riots, rebellions, revolutions, and civil wars (as well as wars of succession and/or independence). The list might also contain episodes of human sacrifice, mass suicide, and ethnic cleansing/genocide. Ancient times Bronze Age Egypt Early Dynastic Period of Egypt c. 3100 BC Unification of Upper and Lower Egypt Second Intermediate Period of Egypt 1580–1550 BC Hyksos-Seventeenth Dynasty of Egypt wars in Lower Egypt New Kingdom of Egypt 1550/1549-1531 BC Conquest of Hyksos-ruled Lower Egypt by Ahmose I of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt c.1537 BCE Ahmose I's campaigns to Syria and Nubia. 16 April 1457 BCE Battle of Megiddo – a battle between Ancient Egyptian forces under the pharaoh Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition. Battle of Kadesh, fought in May 1247 BCE between Ramses II and the Hittite Empire. Mesopotamia Early Dynastic Period of Mesopotamia c. 2500 BC Enmebaragesi of Kish subdued Elam c. 2500 BC Aga of Kish, the son of Enmebaragesi of Kish, besieged Uruk c. 2500 BC Enmerkar of Uruk's year-long siege of Aratta c. 2500 BC Dumuzid of Uruk captured Enmebaragesi of Kish single-handed c. 2500 BC Enshakushanna of Uruk conquered Hamazi, Akkad, Kish, and Nippur, claiming hegemony over all of Sumer. Enshakushanna was succeeded in Uruk by Lugal-kinishe-dudu, but the hegemony seems to have passed to Eannatum of Lagash for a time c. 2500 BC Eannatum of Lagash conquered all of Sumer, including Ur, Nippur, Akshak, Larsa, and Uruk (controlled by Enshakushanna) c. 2500 BC En-anna-tum I of Lagash succeeded his brother Eannatum and defended Lagash against Ur-Lumma of Umma c. 2500 BC Entemena of Lagash succeeded his father En-anna-tum I and re-established Lagash as a power in Sumer. He defeated Illi of Umma, with the aid of Lugal-kinishe-dudu of Uruk (the successor to Enshakushanna) c. 2500 BC Lugal-Anne-Mundu of Adab subjected the "Four-Quarters" of the world – i.e., the entire Fertile Crescent region, from the Mediterranean to the Zagros Mountains c. 2355 BC – 2334 BC (middle chronology) Lugal-zage-si of Umma conquered several of the Sumerian city-states – including Kish, where he overthrew Ur-Zababa; Lagash, where he overthrew Urukagina; Ur, Nippur, and Larsa; as well as Uruk Akkadian Period c. 2334 – 2270 BC Sargon of Akkad established a vast empire which is thought to have included large parts of Mesopotamia, and included parts of modern-day Iran, Asia Minor and Syria Conquest of Elam c. 2271 BC Battle of Uruk Syria and Canaan campaigns Akkadian conquest of Ebla Magan revolt Lullubi campaign of Naram-sin Gutian period c. 2193 – c. 2123 BC Gutian attacks on the Akkadian Empire c. 2123 BC – 2112 BC After defeating the Gutian ruler Tirigan in Sumer with the aid of other cities, Utu-hengal of Uruk established himself as the king of Sumer Ur III period c. 2112 BC – 2094 BC (Short chronology) Ur-Nammu of Ur conquered Lagash c. 2004 BC (Short chronology) Elamite Sack of Ur Isin-Larsa period c. 1830 BC – 1817 BC (Short chronology) The Amorite chieftain Sumu-abum won independence from the city-state Kazallu c. 1752 BC – 1730 BC (Short chronology) Damiq-ilishu of Isin, the last king mentioned in the Sumerian King List, is defeated by Sin-Muballit of Babylon Old Babylonian period c. 1792 BC – 1750 BC (Short chronology) Hammurabi of Babylon extended Babylon's control over Mesopotamia by winning a series of wars against neighboring kingdoms Kassite dynasty c. 1595 BC Fall of Babylon c. 1507 BC (Short chronology) Kassite attacks on Babylon Levant c. 2492 BC Battle between Haik and Nimrod c. 2300 BC Mari-Ebla's Hundred Years War c. 2300 BC Battle of Terqa c. 2000 BC Battle of Siddim c. 1900 BC Qatna-Yamhad conflict c. 1770 BC Yamhad kingdom conquests c. 1650 BC - 1600 BC Hittite-Syrian Wars Israelite Campaigns Early Israelite campaigns 1400 BC Battle of Ai (legendary) Battle of Hazor (legendary) Battle of Jericho (legendary) Lachish Battle of the Waters of Merom (legendary) c. 14th century BC "Syrian Wars" c. 1247 BC Battle of Kadesh Anatolia c. 1650 BC – 1600 BC Conquests of Hattusili I and Mursili I c. 1430 BC – 1350 BC Kaska invasions of Hatti Early Iron Age Note: This section is covering Iron Age I and II, Iron Age III is related as Classic Period Ancient Egypt conflicts 1279 BC – 1213 BC Ramesses II campaigns in the Near East First Syrian campaign Second Syrian campaign 1274 BC Battle of Kadesh Third Syrian campaign Third Intermediate Period of Egypt 925 BC Sack of Jerusalem 727 BC Kushite Invasion to Egypt 609 BC Battle of Megiddo – a battle between the Kingdom of Egypt and the Kingdom of Judah Ancient Anatolia conflicts 1260 BC – 1240 BC Trojan War Ancient Mesopotamia conflicts Kassite period c. 1232 BC – 1225 BC (Short chronology) Tukulti-Ninurta I of Assyria defeated Kashtiliash IV, the Kassite king of Babylon and captured the city of Babylon to ensure full Assyrian supremacy over Mesopotamia c. 1157 BC – 1155 BC (Short chronology) Enlil-nadin-ahi, the final king of the Kassite dynasty that had ruled over Babylon, was defeated by Kutir-Nahhunte of Elam, the successor of Shutruk-Nakhunte Fourth Babylonian Dynasty c. 1125 BC – 1104 BC (Short chronology) Nebuchadnezzar I of Isin's War with Elam Israelite Campaigns Later Israelite Campaigns 1000 BC Siege of Jebus Assyrian campaigns 853 BC Battle of Qarqar 721 BC Assyrian conquest of Israel Second Assyrian invasion to Southern Levant 701 BC Siege of Lachish 701 BC Assyrian Siege of Jerusalem by Sennacherib 693 BC Battle of Diyala River (Pyrrhic Assyrian victory) 693 BC Siege of Babylon 626 BC Revolt of Babylon (Decisive Babylonian victory; eviction of Assyrian troops) Neo-Babylonian campaigns 612 BC Battle of Nineveh 605 BC Battle of Carchemish – a battle between the Kingdom of Egypt and Assyrian allies against the Neo-Babylonian |
These include bleach, chlorine, hydrogen cyanide, various strong acids, and pesticides. Development and use in war Spanish Civil War Improvised incendiary devices of this type were used in warfare for the first time in the Spanish Civil War between July 1936 and April 1939, before they became known as "Molotov cocktails". In 1936, General Francisco Franco ordered Spanish Nationalist forces to use the weapon against Soviet T-26 tanks supporting the Spanish Republicans in a failed assault on the Nationalist stronghold of Seseña, near Toledo, south of Madrid. After that, both sides used simple petrol bombs flame with toxic gas or petrol-soaked blankets with some success. Tom Wintringham, a veteran of the International Brigades, later publicised his recommended method of using them: Khalkhin Gol The Battle of Khalkhin Gol, a border conflict of 1939 ostensibly between Mongolia and Manchukuo, saw heavy fighting between Japanese and Soviet forces. Short of anti-tank equipment, Japanese infantry attacked Soviet tanks with gasoline-filled bottles. Japanese infantrymen claimed that several hundred Soviet tanks had been destroyed this way, though Soviet loss records do not support this assessment. Finland On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland, starting what came to be known as the Winter War. The Finnish perfected the design and tactical use of the petrol bomb. The fuel for the Molotov cocktail was refined to a slightly sticky mixture of alcohol, kerosene, tar, and potassium chlorate. Further refinements included the attachment of wind-proof matches or a phial of chemicals that would ignite on breakage, thereby removing the need to pre-ignite the bottle, and leaving the bottle about one-third empty was found to make breaking more likely. A British War Office report dated June 1940 noted that: Molotov cocktails were eventually mass-produced by the Alko corporation at its Rajamäki distillery, bundled with matches to light them. Production totalled 450,000 during the Winter War. The original recipe of the Molotov cocktail was a mixture of ethanol, tar and gasoline in a bottle. The bottle had two long pyrotechnic storm matches attached to either side. Before use, one or both of the matches was lit; when the bottle broke on impact, the mixture ignited. The storm matches were found to be safer to use than a burning rag on the mouth of the bottle. Great Britain Early in 1940, with the prospect of immediate invasion, the possibilities of the petrol bomb gripped the imagination of the British public. For laypersons, the petrol bomb had the benefit of using entirely familiar and available materials, and they were quickly improvised in large numbers, with the intention of using them against enemy tanks. The Finns had found that they were effective when used in the right way and in sufficient numbers. Although the experience of the Spanish Civil War received more publicity, the more sophisticated petroleum warfare tactics of the Finns were not lost on British commanders. In his 5 June address to LDV leaders, General Ironside said: Wintringham advised that a tank that was isolated from supporting infantry was potentially vulnerable to men who had the required determination and cunning to get close. Rifles or even a shotgun would be sufficient to persuade the crew to close all the hatches, and then the view from the tank is very limited; a turret-mounted machine gun has a very slow traverse and cannot hope to fend off attackers coming from all directions. Once sufficiently close, it is possible to hide where the tank's gunner cannot see: "The most dangerous distance away from a tank is 200 yards; the safest distance is six inches." Petrol bombs will soon produce a pall of blinding smoke, and a well-placed explosive package or even a stout iron bar in the tracks can immobilise the vehicle, leaving it at the mercy of further petrol bombs – which will suffocate the engine and possibly the crew – or an explosive charge or anti-tank mine. By August 1940, the War Office produced training instructions for the creation and use of Molotov cocktails. The instructions suggested scoring the bottles vertically with a diamond to ensure breakage and providing fuel-soaked rag, windproof matches or a length of cinema film (then composed of highly flammable nitrocellulose) as a source of ignition. On 29 July 1940, manufacturers Albright & Wilson of Oldbury demonstrated to the RAF how their white phosphorus could be used to ignite incendiary bombs. The demonstration involved throwing glass bottles containing a mixture of petrol and phosphorus at pieces of wood and into a hut. On breaking, the phosphorus was exposed to the air and spontaneously ignited; the petrol also burned, resulting in a fierce fire. Because of safety concerns, the RAF was not interested in white phosphorus as a source of ignition, but the idea of a self-igniting petrol bomb took hold. Initially known as an A.W. bomb, it was officially named the No. 76 Grenade, but more commonly known as the SIP (Self-Igniting Phosphorus) grenade. The perfected list of ingredients was white phosphorus, benzene, water and a two-inch strip of raw rubber; all in a half-pint bottle sealed with a crown stopper. Over time, the rubber would slowly dissolve, making the contents slightly sticky, and the mixture would separate into two layers – this was intentional, and the grenade should not be shaken to mix the layers, as this would only delay ignition. When thrown against a hard surface, the glass would shatter and the contents would instantly ignite, liberating choking fumes of phosphorus pentoxide and sulfur dioxide as well as producing a great deal of heat. Strict instructions were issued to store the grenades safely, preferably underwater and certainly never in a house. Mainly issued to the Home Guard as an anti-tank weapon, it was produced in vast numbers; by August 1941 well over 6,000,000 had been manufactured. There were many who were skeptical about the efficacy of Molotov cocktails and SIPs grenades against the more modern German tanks. Weapon designer Stuart Macrae witnessed a trial of the SIPs grenade at Farnborough: "There was some concern that, if the tank drivers could not pull up quickly enough and hop out, they were likely to be frizzled to death, but after looking at the bottles they said they would be happy to take a chance." The drivers were proved right, trials on modern British tanks confirmed that Molotov and SIP grenades caused the occupants of the tanks "no inconvenience whatsoever." Wintringham, though enthusiastic about improvised | a breakable glass bottle containing a flammable substance such as petrol, alcohol, or a napalm-like mixture, with some motor oil added, and usually a source of ignition such as a burning cloth wick held in place by the bottle's stopper. The wick is usually soaked in alcohol or kerosene, rather than petrol. In action, the wick is lit and the bottle hurled at a target such as a vehicle or fortification. When the bottle smashes on impact, the ensuing cloud of fuel droplets and vapour is ignited by the attached wick, causing an immediate fireball followed by spreading flames as the remainder of the fuel is consumed. Other flammable liquids, such as diesel fuel, methanol, turpentine, jet fuel, and isopropyl alcohol, have been used in place of, or combined with, petrol. Thickening agents, such as solvents, extruded polystyrene (XPS) foam (known colloquially as styrofoam), baking soda, petroleum jelly, tar, strips of tyre tubing, nitrocellulose, motor oil, rubber cement, detergent and dish soap, have been added to promote adhesion of the burning liquid and to create clouds of thick, choking smoke. The contents of the bottle may be pressurized to create a stronger explosion, potentially dispersing the broken glass as a shrapnel. This is usually done by closing the bottle with an airtight closure and heating them before attaching the cloth wick. In addition, highly toxic substances are also known to be added to the fuel, to create a suffocating or poisonous smoke on the resulting explosion, effectively turning the Molotov cocktail into a makeshift chemical weapon. These include bleach, chlorine, hydrogen cyanide, various strong acids, and pesticides. Development and use in war Spanish Civil War Improvised incendiary devices of this type were used in warfare for the first time in the Spanish Civil War between July 1936 and April 1939, before they became known as "Molotov cocktails". In 1936, General Francisco Franco ordered Spanish Nationalist forces to use the weapon against Soviet T-26 tanks supporting the Spanish Republicans in a failed assault on the Nationalist stronghold of Seseña, near Toledo, south of Madrid. After that, both sides used simple petrol bombs flame with toxic gas or petrol-soaked blankets with some success. Tom Wintringham, a veteran of the International Brigades, later publicised his recommended method of using them: Khalkhin Gol The Battle of Khalkhin Gol, a border conflict of 1939 ostensibly between Mongolia and Manchukuo, saw heavy fighting between Japanese and Soviet forces. Short of anti-tank equipment, Japanese infantry attacked Soviet tanks with gasoline-filled bottles. Japanese infantrymen claimed that several hundred Soviet tanks had been destroyed this way, though Soviet loss records do not support this assessment. Finland On 30 November 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland, starting what came to be known as the Winter War. The Finnish perfected the design and tactical use of the petrol bomb. The fuel for the Molotov cocktail was refined to a slightly sticky mixture of alcohol, kerosene, tar, and potassium chlorate. Further refinements included the attachment of wind-proof matches or a phial of chemicals that would ignite on breakage, thereby removing the need to pre-ignite the bottle, and leaving the bottle about one-third empty was found to make breaking more likely. A British War Office report dated June 1940 noted that: Molotov cocktails were eventually mass-produced by the Alko corporation at its Rajamäki distillery, bundled with matches to light them. Production totalled 450,000 during the Winter War. The original recipe of the Molotov cocktail was a mixture of ethanol, tar and gasoline in a bottle. The bottle had two long pyrotechnic storm matches attached to either side. Before use, one or both of the matches was lit; when the bottle broke on impact, the mixture ignited. The storm matches were found to be safer to use than a burning rag on the mouth of the bottle. Great Britain Early in 1940, with the prospect of immediate invasion, the possibilities of the petrol bomb gripped the imagination of the British public. For laypersons, the petrol bomb had the benefit of using entirely familiar and available materials, and they were quickly improvised in large numbers, with the intention of using them against enemy tanks. The Finns had found that they were effective when used in the right way and in sufficient numbers. Although the experience of the Spanish Civil War received more publicity, the more sophisticated petroleum warfare tactics of the Finns were not lost on British commanders. In his 5 June address to LDV leaders, General Ironside said: Wintringham advised that a tank that was isolated from supporting infantry was potentially vulnerable to men who had the required determination and cunning to get close. Rifles or even a shotgun would be sufficient to persuade the crew to close all the hatches, and then the view from the tank is very limited; a turret-mounted machine gun has a very slow traverse and cannot hope to fend off attackers coming from all directions. Once sufficiently close, it is possible to hide where the tank's gunner cannot see: "The most |
be formed into either handmade or machine-made matzo, while non-shĕmura wheat is only used for machine-made matzo. It is possible to hand-bake matzo in shĕmura style from non-shmurah flour—this is a matter of style, it is not actually in any way shĕmura—but such matzo has rarely been produced since the introduction of machine-made matzo.) Haredi Judaism is scrupulous about the supervision of matzo and have the custom of baking their own or at least participating in some stage of the baking process. Rabbi Haim Halberstam of Sanz ruled that machine-made matzo were chametz. According to that opinion, handmade non-shmurah matzo may be used on the eighth day of Passover outside of the Holy Land. However the non-Hasidic Haredi community of Jerusalem follows the custom that machine-made matzo may be used, with preference to the use of shĕmurah flour, in accordance with the ruling of Rabbi Yosef Haim Sonnenfeld, who ruled that machine-made matzo may be preferable to hand made in some cases. The commentators to the Shulhan `Aruch record that it is the custom of some of Diaspora Jewry to be scrupulous in giving Hallah from the dough used for baking "Matzot Mitzvah" (the Shĕmurah matzo eaten during Passover) to a Kohen child to eat. Egg matzo In Ashkenazi tradition, the requirement for eating Matzo at the Seder cannot be fulfilled "with [egg] matza." Egg matzo at the seder is not a problem in Sephardic tradition, if it is customary in the community. "Egg (sometimes enriched) matzo" are matzot usually made with fruit juice, often grape juice or apple juice, instead of water, but not necessarily with eggs themselves. There is a custom among some Ashkenazi Jews not to eat them during Passover, except for the elderly, infirm, or children, who cannot digest plain matzo; these matzot are considered to be kosher for Passover if prepared otherwise properly. The issue of whether egg matzo is allowed for Passover comes down to whether there is a difference between the various liquids that can be used. Water facilitates a fermentation of grain flour specifically into what is defined as chametz, but the question is whether fruit juice, eggs, honey, oil or milk are also deemed to do so within the strict definitions of Jewish laws regarding chametz. The Talmud, Pesachim 35a, states that liquid food extracts do not cause flour to leaven the way that water does. According to this view, flour mixed with other liquids would not need to be treated with the same care as flour mixed with water. The Tosafot (commentaries) explain that such liquids only produce a leavening reaction within flour if they themselves have had water added to them and otherwise the dough they produce is completely permissible for consumption during Passover, whether or not made according to the laws applying to matzot. As a result, Joseph ben Ephraim Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch or "Code of Jewish Law" (Orach Chayim 462:4) granted blanket permission for the use of any matzo made from non-water-based dough, including egg matzo, on Passover. Many egg matzo boxes no longer include the message, "Ashkenazi custom is that egg matzo is only allowed for children, elderly and the infirm during Passover." Even amongst those who consider that enriched matzot may not be eaten during Passover, it is permissible to retain it in the home. Chocolate-covered matzo Chocolate-covered matzo was sold in boxes as a standard product, alongside boxes of egg matzo. The matzo itself is not Hamotzi (meaning that it is Mezonot). Cooking with matzo Matzo may be used whole, broken, chopped ("matzo farfel"), or finely ground ("matzo meal") to make numerous matzo-based cooked dishes. These include matzo balls, which are traditionally served in chicken soup; matzo brei, a dish of Ashkenazi origin made from matzo soaked in water, mixed with beaten egg, and fried; helzel, poultry neck skin stuffed with matzo meal; matzo pizza, in which the piece of matzo takes the place of pizza crust and is topped with melted cheese and sauce; and kosher for Passover cakes and cookies, which are made with matzo meal or a finer variety called "cake meal" that gives them a denser texture than ordinary baked foods made with flour. Hasidic Jews do not cook with matzo, believing that mixing it with water may allow leavening; this stringency is known as gebrochts. However, Jews who avoid eating gebrochts will eat cooked matzo dishes on the eighth day of Passover outside the Land of Israel, as the eighth day is of rabbinic and not Torah origin. Sephardim use matzo soaked in water or stock to make pies or lasagne, known as mina, méguena, mayena or . In Christianity Communion wafers used by the Roman Catholic Church as well as in some Protestant traditions for the Eucharist are flat, unleavened bread. The main reason for the use of this bread is the belief that, because the last supper was described in the Synoptic Gospels as a Passover meal, the unleavened matzo bread was used by Jesus when he held it up and said "this is my body". All Byzantine Rite churches use leavened bread for the Eucharist as this symbolizes the risen Christ. Some Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Christians use leavened bread, as in the east there is the tradition, based upon the gospel of John, that leavened bread was on the table of the Last Supper. In the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church, unleavened bread called qǝddus qurban in Ge'ez, the liturgical language of the Eritreans and Ethiopians, is used for communion. Saint Thomas Christians living on the Malabar coast of Kerala, India have the customary celebration of Pesaha in their homes. On the evening before Good Friday, Pesaha bread is made at home. It is made with unleavened flour and they consume a sweet drink made up of coconut milk and jaggery along with this bread. On the Pesaha night, the bread is baked (steamed) immediately after rice flour is mixed with water and they pierce it many times with handle of the spoon to let out steam so that the bread will not rise (this custom is called "juthante kannu kuthal" in the Malayalam language meaning "piercing the bread according to the custom of Jews"). This | process of making matzo takes only a few minutes in efficient modern matzo bakeries. After baking, matzo may be ground into fine crumbs, known as matzo meal. Matzo meal can be used like flour during the week of Passover when flour can otherwise be used only to make matzo. Variations There are two major forms of matzo. In many western countries the most common form is the hard form of matzo which is cracker-like in appearance and taste and is used in all Ashkenazic and most Sephardic communities. Yemenite and Iraqi Jews traditionally made a form of soft matzo which looks like Greek pita or like a tortilla. Soft matzo is made only by hand, and generally with shmurah flour. Flavored varieties of matzo are produced commercially, such as poppy seed- or onion-flavored. Oat and spelt matzo with kosher certification are produced. Oat matzo is generally suitable for those who cannot eat gluten. Whole wheat, bran and organic matzo are also available. Chocolate-covered matzo is a favorite among children, although some consider it "enriched matzo" and will not eat it during the Passover holiday. A quite different flat confection of chocolate and nuts that resembles matzo is sometimes called "chocolate matzo". Matzo contains typically 111 calories per 1-ounce/28g (USDA Nutrient Database), about the same as rye crispbread. Shmurah matzo Shĕmura ("guarded") matzo ( matsa shĕmura) is made from grain that has been under special supervision from the time it was harvested to ensure that no fermentation has occurred, and that it is suitable for eating on the first night of Passover. (Shĕmura wheat may be formed into either handmade or machine-made matzo, while non-shĕmura wheat is only used for machine-made matzo. It is possible to hand-bake matzo in shĕmura style from non-shmurah flour—this is a matter of style, it is not actually in any way shĕmura—but such matzo has rarely been produced since the introduction of machine-made matzo.) Haredi Judaism is scrupulous about the supervision of matzo and have the custom of baking their own or at least participating in some stage of the baking process. Rabbi Haim Halberstam of Sanz ruled that machine-made matzo were chametz. According to that opinion, handmade non-shmurah matzo may be used on the eighth day of Passover outside of the Holy Land. However the non-Hasidic Haredi community of Jerusalem follows the custom that machine-made matzo may be used, with preference to the use of shĕmurah flour, in accordance with the ruling of Rabbi Yosef Haim Sonnenfeld, who ruled that machine-made matzo may be preferable to hand made in some cases. The commentators to the Shulhan `Aruch record that it is the custom of some of Diaspora Jewry to be scrupulous in giving Hallah from the dough used for baking "Matzot Mitzvah" (the Shĕmurah matzo eaten during Passover) to a Kohen child to eat. Egg matzo In Ashkenazi tradition, the requirement for eating Matzo at the Seder cannot be fulfilled "with [egg] matza." Egg matzo at the seder is not a problem in Sephardic tradition, if it is customary in the community. "Egg (sometimes enriched) matzo" are matzot usually made with fruit juice, often grape juice or apple juice, instead of water, but not necessarily with eggs themselves. There is a custom among some Ashkenazi Jews not to eat them during Passover, except for the elderly, infirm, or children, who cannot digest plain matzo; these matzot are considered to be kosher for Passover if prepared otherwise properly. The issue of whether egg matzo is allowed for Passover comes down to whether there is a difference between the various liquids that can be used. Water facilitates a fermentation of grain flour specifically into what is defined as chametz, but the question is whether fruit juice, eggs, honey, oil or milk are also deemed to do so within the strict definitions of Jewish laws regarding chametz. The Talmud, Pesachim 35a, states that liquid food extracts do not cause flour to leaven the way that water does. According to this view, flour mixed with other liquids would not need to be treated with the same care as flour mixed with water. The Tosafot (commentaries) explain that such liquids only produce a leavening reaction within flour if they themselves have had water added to them and otherwise the dough they produce is completely permissible for consumption during Passover, whether or not made according to the laws applying to matzot. As a result, Joseph ben Ephraim Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch or "Code of Jewish Law" (Orach Chayim 462:4) granted blanket permission for the use of any matzo made from non-water-based dough, including egg matzo, on Passover. Many egg matzo boxes no longer include the message, "Ashkenazi custom is that egg matzo is only allowed for children, elderly and the infirm during Passover." Even amongst those who consider that enriched matzot may not be eaten during Passover, it is permissible |
Guid-Sisters ("guid-sister" being Scots for "sister-in-law"). His work has been translated into many languages, including Yiddish, and including such works as Sainte-Carmen de la Main, Ç'ta ton tour, Laura Cadieux, and Forever Yours, Marilou (À toi pour toujours, ta Marie-Lou). He has been openly gay throughout his public life, and he has written many novels (The Duchess and the Commoner, La nuit des princes charmants, Le Coeur découvert, Le Coeur éclaté) and plays (Hosanna, La duchesse de Langeais, Fragments de mensonges inutiles) centred on gay characters. In a 1987 interview with Shelagh Rogers for CBC Radio's The Arts Tonight, he remarked that he has always avoided behaviours he has considered masculine; for example, he does not smoke and he noted that he was 45 years old and did not know how to drive a car. "I think I am a rare breed," he said, "A homosexual who doesn't like men." He claims one of his biggest regrets in life was not telling his mother that he was gay before she died. His latest play to receive wide acclaim is For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, a comedic and nostalgic play, centred on the memories of his mother. He later published the Plateau Mont-Royal Chronicles, a cycle of six novels including The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant (La grosse femme d'à côté est enceinte, 1978) and The Duchess and the Commoner (La duchesse et le roturier, 1982). The second novel of this series, Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel (Thérèse et Pierrette à l'école des Saints-Anges, 1980), was one of the novels chosen for inclusion in the French version of Canada Reads, Le combat des livres, broadcast on Radio-Canada in 2005, where it was championed by union activist Monique Simard. Tremblay also worked on a television series entitled Le Cœur découvert (The Heart Laid Bare), about the lives of a gay couple in Quebec, for the French-language TV network Radio-Canada. In 2005 he completed another novel cycle, the Cahiers (Le Cahier noir (translated as The Black Notebook), Le Cahier rouge, Le Cahier bleu), dealing with the changes that occurred in 1960s Montreal during the Quiet Revolution. In 2009 The Fat Woman Next Door was a finalist in CBC's prestigious Canada Reads competition. Political views For many years, Tremblay has believed that the only reasonable solution for Quebec is to separate from Canada. Once the Parti Québécois was elected in Quebec, he softened his views on allowing his plays to be produced in English there. He made it clear, however, that that did not mean that he agreed with bilingualism, calling it "stupid" and stating that he thought it ridiculous to expect a housewife in Vancouver to be fluent in both English and French. Despite his often outspoken views in public, Tremblay's treatment of politics in his plays is subtle. Speaking of politics and the theatre in an CBC interview in 1978, Tremblay said: "I know what I want in the theatre. I want a real political theatre, but I know that political theatre is dull. I write fables." In April 2006 he declared that he did not support the arguments put forward for the separation of Quebec. But he clarified his thoughts some time later by saying he was still a supporter of Quebec sovereignty, though critical of the actual state of the debate, which in his opinion was too much focused on economic issues. In response to this, the columnist Marc Cassivi of La Presse wrote that "there was only one closet a Quebec artist could never exit and that was the federalist one." Awards and honours Tremblay has received numerous awards in recognition of his work. These include the Prix Victor-Morin (1974), the Prix France-Québec (1984), the Chalmers Award (1986) and the | car. "I think I am a rare breed," he said, "A homosexual who doesn't like men." He claims one of his biggest regrets in life was not telling his mother that he was gay before she died. His latest play to receive wide acclaim is For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again, a comedic and nostalgic play, centred on the memories of his mother. He later published the Plateau Mont-Royal Chronicles, a cycle of six novels including The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant (La grosse femme d'à côté est enceinte, 1978) and The Duchess and the Commoner (La duchesse et le roturier, 1982). The second novel of this series, Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel (Thérèse et Pierrette à l'école des Saints-Anges, 1980), was one of the novels chosen for inclusion in the French version of Canada Reads, Le combat des livres, broadcast on Radio-Canada in 2005, where it was championed by union activist Monique Simard. Tremblay also worked on a television series entitled Le Cœur découvert (The Heart Laid Bare), about the lives of a gay couple in Quebec, for the French-language TV network Radio-Canada. In 2005 he completed another novel cycle, the Cahiers (Le Cahier noir (translated as The Black Notebook), Le Cahier rouge, Le Cahier bleu), dealing with the changes that occurred in 1960s Montreal during the Quiet Revolution. In 2009 The Fat Woman Next Door was a finalist in CBC's prestigious Canada Reads competition. Political views For many years, Tremblay has believed that the only reasonable solution for Quebec is to separate from Canada. Once the Parti Québécois was elected in Quebec, he softened his views on allowing his plays to be produced in English there. He made it clear, however, that that did not mean that he agreed with bilingualism, calling it "stupid" and stating that he thought it ridiculous to expect a housewife in Vancouver to be fluent in both English and French. Despite his often outspoken views in public, Tremblay's treatment of politics in his plays is subtle. Speaking of politics and the theatre in an CBC interview in 1978, Tremblay said: "I know what I want in the theatre. I want a real political theatre, but I know that political theatre is dull. I write fables." In April 2006 he declared that he did not support the arguments put forward for the separation of Quebec. But he clarified his thoughts some time later by saying he was still a supporter of Quebec sovereignty, though critical of the actual state of the debate, which in his opinion was too much focused on economic issues. In response to this, the columnist Marc Cassivi of La Presse wrote that "there was only one closet a Quebec artist could never exit and that was the federalist one." Awards and honours Tremblay has received numerous awards in recognition of his work. These include the Prix Victor-Morin (1974), the Prix France-Québec (1984), the Chalmers Award (1986) and the Molson Prize (1994). He received the Lieutenant-Governor's award for Ontario in 1976 and 1977. Tremblay was named the "Montréalais le plus remarquable des deux dernières décennies dans le domaine du théâtre" (the most remarkable Montrealer of |
issue is the degree of noise in the desired output values (the supervisory target variables). If the desired output values are often incorrect (because of human error or sensor errors), then the learning algorithm should not attempt to find a function that exactly matches the training examples. Attempting to fit the data too carefully leads to overfitting. You can overfit even when there are no measurement errors (stochastic noise) if the function you are trying to learn is too complex for your learning model. In such a situation, the part of the target function that cannot be modeled "corrupts" your training data - this phenomenon has been called deterministic noise. When either type of noise is present, it is better to go with a higher bias, lower variance estimator. In practice, there are several approaches to alleviate noise in the output values such as early stopping to prevent overfitting as well as detecting and removing the noisy training examples prior to training the supervised learning algorithm. There are several algorithms that identify noisy training examples and removing the suspected noisy training examples prior to training has decreased generalization error with statistical significance. Other factors to consider Other factors to consider when choosing and applying a learning algorithm include the following: Heterogeneity of the data. If the feature vectors include features of many different kinds (discrete, discrete ordered, counts, continuous values), some algorithms are easier to apply than others. Many algorithms, including support-vector machines, linear regression, logistic regression, neural networks, and nearest neighbor methods, require that the input features be numerical and scaled to similar ranges (e.g., to the [-1,1] interval). Methods that employ a distance function, such as nearest neighbor methods and support-vector machines with Gaussian kernels, are particularly sensitive to this. An advantage of decision trees is that they easily handle heterogeneous data. Redundancy in the data. If the input features contain redundant information (e.g., highly correlated features), some learning algorithms (e.g., linear regression, logistic regression, and distance based methods) will perform poorly because of numerical instabilities. These problems can often be solved by imposing some form of regularization. Presence of interactions and non-linearities. If each of the features makes an independent contribution to the output, then algorithms based on linear functions (e.g., linear regression, logistic regression, support-vector machines, naive Bayes) and distance functions (e.g., nearest neighbor methods, support-vector machines with Gaussian kernels) generally perform well. However, if there are complex interactions among features, then algorithms such as decision trees and neural networks work better, because they are specifically designed to discover these interactions. Linear methods can also be applied, but the engineer must manually specify the interactions when using them. When considering a new application, the engineer can compare multiple learning algorithms and experimentally determine which one works best on the problem at hand (see cross validation). Tuning the performance of a learning algorithm can be very time-consuming. Given fixed resources, it is often better to spend more time collecting additional training data and more informative features than it is to spend extra time tuning the learning algorithms. Algorithms The most widely used learning algorithms are: Support-vector machines Linear regression Logistic regression Naive Bayes Linear discriminant analysis Decision trees K-nearest neighbor algorithm Neural networks (Multilayer perceptron) Similarity learning How supervised learning algorithms work Given a set of training examples of the form such that is the feature vector of the -th example and is its label (i.e., class), a learning algorithm seeks a function , where is the input space and is the output space. The function is an element of some space of possible functions , usually called the hypothesis space. It is sometimes convenient to represent using a scoring function such that is defined as returning the value that gives the highest score: . Let denote the space of scoring functions. Although and can be any space of functions, many learning algorithms are probabilistic models where takes the form of a conditional probability model , or takes the form of a joint probability model . For example, naive Bayes and linear discriminant analysis are joint probability models, whereas logistic regression is a conditional probability model. There are two basic approaches to choosing or : empirical risk minimization and structural risk minimization. Empirical risk minimization seeks the function that best fits the training data. Structural risk minimization includes a penalty function that controls the bias/variance tradeoff. In both cases, it is assumed that the training set consists of a sample of independent and identically distributed pairs, . In order to measure how well a function fits the training data, a loss function is defined. For training example , the loss of predicting the value is . The risk of function is defined as the expected loss of . This can be estimated from the training data as . Empirical | variance. Hence, high input dimensional typically requires tuning the classifier to have low variance and high bias. In practice, if the engineer can manually remove irrelevant features from the input data, this is likely to improve the accuracy of the learned function. In addition, there are many algorithms for feature selection that seek to identify the relevant features and discard the irrelevant ones. This is an instance of the more general strategy of dimensionality reduction, which seeks to map the input data into a lower-dimensional space prior to running the supervised learning algorithm. Noise in the output values A fourth issue is the degree of noise in the desired output values (the supervisory target variables). If the desired output values are often incorrect (because of human error or sensor errors), then the learning algorithm should not attempt to find a function that exactly matches the training examples. Attempting to fit the data too carefully leads to overfitting. You can overfit even when there are no measurement errors (stochastic noise) if the function you are trying to learn is too complex for your learning model. In such a situation, the part of the target function that cannot be modeled "corrupts" your training data - this phenomenon has been called deterministic noise. When either type of noise is present, it is better to go with a higher bias, lower variance estimator. In practice, there are several approaches to alleviate noise in the output values such as early stopping to prevent overfitting as well as detecting and removing the noisy training examples prior to training the supervised learning algorithm. There are several algorithms that identify noisy training examples and removing the suspected noisy training examples prior to training has decreased generalization error with statistical significance. Other factors to consider Other factors to consider when choosing and applying a learning algorithm include the following: Heterogeneity of the data. If the feature vectors include features of many different kinds (discrete, discrete ordered, counts, continuous values), some algorithms are easier to apply than others. Many algorithms, including support-vector machines, linear regression, logistic regression, neural networks, and nearest neighbor methods, require that the input features be numerical and scaled to similar ranges (e.g., to the [-1,1] interval). Methods that employ a distance function, such as nearest neighbor methods and support-vector machines with Gaussian kernels, are particularly sensitive to this. An advantage of decision trees is that they easily handle heterogeneous data. Redundancy in the data. If the input features contain redundant information (e.g., highly correlated features), some learning algorithms (e.g., linear regression, logistic regression, and distance based methods) will perform poorly because of numerical instabilities. These problems can often be solved by imposing some form of regularization. Presence of interactions and non-linearities. If each of the features makes an independent contribution to the output, then algorithms based on linear functions (e.g., linear regression, logistic regression, support-vector machines, naive Bayes) and distance functions (e.g., nearest neighbor methods, support-vector machines with Gaussian kernels) generally perform well. However, if there are complex interactions among features, then algorithms such as decision trees and neural networks work better, because they are specifically designed to discover these interactions. Linear methods can also be applied, but the engineer must manually specify the interactions when using them. When considering a new application, the engineer can compare multiple learning algorithms and experimentally determine which one works best on the problem at hand (see cross validation). Tuning the performance of a learning algorithm can be very time-consuming. Given fixed resources, it is often better to spend more time collecting additional training data and more informative features than it is to spend extra time tuning the learning algorithms. Algorithms The most widely used learning algorithms are: Support-vector machines Linear regression Logistic regression Naive Bayes Linear discriminant analysis Decision trees K-nearest neighbor algorithm Neural networks (Multilayer perceptron) Similarity learning How supervised learning algorithms work Given a set of training examples of the form such that is the feature vector of the -th example and is its label (i.e., class), a learning algorithm seeks a function , where is the input space and is the output space. The function is an element of some space of possible functions , usually called the hypothesis space. It is sometimes convenient to represent using a scoring function such that is defined as returning the value that gives the highest score: . Let denote the space of scoring functions. Although and can be any space of functions, many learning algorithms are probabilistic models where takes the form of a conditional probability model , or takes the form of a joint probability model . For example, naive Bayes and linear discriminant analysis are joint probability models, whereas logistic regression is a conditional probability model. There are two basic approaches to choosing or : empirical risk minimization and structural risk minimization. Empirical risk minimization seeks the function that best fits the training data. Structural risk minimization includes a penalty function that controls the bias/variance tradeoff. In both cases, it is assumed that the training set consists of a sample of independent and identically distributed pairs, . In order to measure how well a function fits the training data, a loss function is defined. For training example , the loss of predicting the value is . The risk of function is defined as the expected loss of . This can be estimated from the training data as . Empirical risk minimization In empirical risk minimization, the supervised learning algorithm seeks the function that minimizes . Hence, a supervised learning algorithm can be constructed by applying an optimization algorithm to find . When is a conditional probability distribution and the loss function is the negative log likelihood: , then empirical risk minimization is equivalent to maximum likelihood estimation. When contains many candidate functions or the training set is not sufficiently large, empirical risk minimization leads to high variance and poor generalization. The learning algorithm is able to memorize the training examples without generalizing well. This is called overfitting. Structural risk minimization Structural risk minimization seeks to prevent overfitting by incorporating a regularization penalty into the optimization. The regularization penalty can be viewed as implementing a form of Occam's razor that prefers simpler functions over more complex ones. A wide variety of penalties have been employed that correspond to different definitions of complexity. For example, consider the case where the function is a linear function of the form . A popular regularization penalty is , which is the squared Euclidean norm of the weights, also known as the norm. Other norms include the norm, , and the "norm", which is the number of non-zero s. The penalty will be denoted by . The supervised learning optimization problem is to find the function that minimizes The parameter controls the bias-variance tradeoff. When , this gives empirical risk minimization with low bias and high variance. When is large, the learning algorithm will have high bias and low variance. The value of can be chosen empirically via cross validation. The complexity penalty has a Bayesian interpretation as the negative log prior probability of , , in which case is the posterior probability of . Generative training The training methods described above are discriminative training methods, because they seek to find a function that discriminates well between the different output values (see discriminative model). For the special case where is a joint probability distribution and the loss function is the negative log likelihood a risk minimization algorithm is said to perform generative training, because can be regarded |
at the University of Wittenberg, and was later republished in several versions of Abraham Ortelius's pioneering world atlas, "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum". The first map of Silesia by Martin Helwig constituted until the middle of the 18th century the main model and source of information for the cartographical presentation of this region of Europe on the maps of the most famous cartographers and publishers of those times. Notes and references External links Breslau, Silesia, Germany map c 1600 German cartographers 1516 births 1574 deaths | he earned the academic degree of Magister. In 1552, he became Rector of St. Maria Magdalena School in Breslau (now Wrocław, in Poland). Equally proficient in mathematics and geography as well as classical languages, he produced the first woodcut map of Silesia made on the basis of surveys and data collected from local inhabitants, which he published in 1561 under the title "Silesiae Typus", and dedicated to Nicolaus II. Rehdiger, a wealthy Silesian merchant, banker, philanthropist, governor and |
Macro viruses have been used as a method of installing software on a system without the user's consent, as they can be used to download and install software from the internet through the use of automated key-presses. However, this is uncommon as it is usually not fruitful for the virus coder since the installed software is usually noticed and uninstalled by the user. Since a macro virus depends on the application rather than the operating system, it can infect a computer running any operating system to which the targeted application has been ported. In particular, since Microsoft Word is available on Macintosh computers, word macro viruses can attack some Macs in addition to Windows platforms. An example of a macro virus is the Melissa virus which appeared in March 1999. When a user opens a Microsoft Word document containing the Melissa virus, their computer becomes infected. The virus then sends itself by email to the first 50 people in the person's address book. This made the virus replicate at a fast rate. Not all macro viruses are detected by antivirus software. Caution when opening email attachments and other documents decreases the chance of becoming infected. Due to the prevalence of macro viruses, starting with Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft assigned a separate set of file extensions ending in "m" to Office files containing macros in order to prevent users from opening macro virus-infected files that were not intended to contain macros in the first place. On the 9th of February, Microsoft announced that Office files originating from the internet will have their macros blocked by default, starting from April of 2022. See also Malware – software intended to break computers or steal private information Computer virus Computer worm | spreads. Macro viruses have been used as a method of installing software on a system without the user's consent, as they can be used to download and install software from the internet through the use of automated key-presses. However, this is uncommon as it is usually not fruitful for the virus coder since the installed software is usually noticed and uninstalled by the user. Since a macro virus depends on the application rather than the operating system, it can infect a computer running any operating system to which the targeted application has been ported. In particular, since Microsoft Word is available on Macintosh computers, word macro viruses can attack some Macs in addition to Windows platforms. An example of a macro virus is the Melissa virus which appeared in March 1999. When a user opens a Microsoft Word document containing the Melissa virus, their computer becomes infected. The virus then sends itself by email to the first 50 people in the person's address book. This made the virus replicate at a fast rate. Not all macro viruses are detected by antivirus software. Caution when opening email attachments and other documents decreases the chance of becoming infected. Due to the prevalence of macro viruses, starting with Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft assigned a separate set of file extensions ending in "m" to Office files containing macros in order to prevent users from opening macro virus-infected files that were not intended to contain macros in the first place. On the 9th of February, Microsoft announced that Office files originating from the internet will have their macros blocked by default, starting from April of 2022. See also Malware – software intended to break computers or steal private information Computer virus Computer worm Trojan horse (computing) – malware hidden inside anti-virus software or other apps Ransomware (malware) Spyware Technical support scam – unsolicited |
Access quickly became the dominant database for Windows—effectively eliminating the competition which failed to transition from the MS-DOS world. Project Omega Microsoft's first attempt to sell a relational database product was during the mid 1980s, when Microsoft obtained the license to sell R:Base. In the late 1980s Microsoft developed its own solution codenamed Omega. It was confirmed in 1988 that a database product for Windows and OS/2 was in development. It was going to include the "EB" Embedded Basic language, which was going to be the language for writing macros in all Microsoft applications, but the unification of macro languages did not happen until the introduction of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Omega was also expected to provide a front end to the Microsoft SQL Server. The application was very resource-hungry, and there were reports that it was working slowly on the 386 processors that were available at the time. It was scheduled to be released in the 1st quarter of 1990, but in 1989 the development of the product was reset and it was rescheduled to be delivered no sooner than in January 1991. Parts of the project were later used for other Microsoft projects: Cirrus (codename for Access) and Thunder (codename for Visual Basic, where the Embedded Basic engine was used). After Access's premiere, the Omega project was demonstrated in 1992 to several journalists and included features that were not available in Access. Project Cirrus After the Omega project was scrapped, some of its developers were assigned to the Cirrus project (most were assigned to the team which created Visual Basic). Its goal was to create a competitor for applications like Paradox or dBase that would work on Windows. After Microsoft acquired FoxPro, there were rumors that the Microsoft project might get replaced with it, but the company decided to develop them in parallel. It was assumed that the project would make use of Extensible Storage Engine (Jet Blue) but, in the end, only support for Jet Database Engine (Jet Red) was provided. The project used some of the code from both the Omega project and a pre-release version of Visual Basic. In July 1992, betas of Cirrus shipped to developers and the name Access became the official name of the product. "Access" was originally used for an older terminal emulation program from Microsoft. Years after the program was abandoned, they decided to reuse the name here. Timeline 1992: Microsoft released Access version 1.0 on November 13, 1992, and an Access 1.1 release in May 1993 to improve compatibility with other Microsoft products and to include the Access Basic programming language. 1994: Microsoft specified the minimum hardware requirements for Access v2.0 as: Microsoft Windows v3.1 with 4 MB of RAM required, 6 MB RAM recommended; 8 MB of available hard disk space required, 14 MB hard disk space recommended. The product shipped on seven 1.44 MB diskettes. The manual shows a 1994 copyright date. As a part of the Microsoft Office 4.3 Professional with Book Shelf, Microsoft Access 2.0 was included with first sample databases "NorthWind Trader" which covered every possible aspect of programming your own database. The Northwind Traders sample first introduced the Main Switchboard features new to Access 2.0 for 1994. The photo of Andrew Fuller, record #2 of that sample database was the individual that presented and worked with Microsoft to provide such an outstanding example database. With Office 95, Microsoft Access 7.0 (a.k.a. "Access 95") became part of the Microsoft Office Professional Suite, joining Microsoft Excel, Word, and PowerPoint and transitioning from Access Basic to VBA. Since then, Microsoft has released new versions of Microsoft Access with each release of Microsoft Office. This includes Access 97 (version 8.0), Access 2000 (version 9.0), Access 2002 (version 10.0), Access 2003 (version 11.5), Access 2007 (version 12.0), Access 2010 (version 14.0), and Access 2013 (version 15.0). Versions 3.0 and 3.5 of Jet Database Engine (used by Access 7.0 and the later-released Access 97 respectively) had a critical issue which made these versions of Access unusable on a computer with more than 1 GB of memory. While Microsoft fixed this problem for Jet 3.5/Access 97 post-release, it never fixed the issue with Jet 3.0/Access 95. The native Access database format (the Jet MDB Database) has also evolved over the years. Formats include Access 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 7.0, 97, 2000, 2002, and 2007. The most significant transition was from the Access 97 to the Access 2000 format; which is not backward compatible with earlier versions of Access. all newer versions of Access support the Access 2000 format. New features were added to the Access 2002 format which can be used by Access 2002, 2003, 2007, and 2010. Microsoft Access 2000 increased the maximum database size to 2 GB from 1 GB in Access 97. Microsoft Access 2007 introduced a new database format: ACCDB. It supports links to SharePoint lists and complex data types such as multivalue and attachment fields. These new field types are essentially recordsets in fields and allow the storage of multiple values or files in one field. Microsoft Access 2007 also introduced File Attachment field, which stored data more efficiently than the OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) field. Microsoft Access 2010 introduced a new version of the ACCDB format supported hosting Access Web services on a SharePoint 2010 server. For the first time, this allowed Access applications to be run without having to install Access on their PC and was the first support of Mac users. Any user on the SharePoint site with sufficient rights could use the Access Web service. A copy of Access was still required for the developer to create the Access Web service, and the desktop version of Access remained part of Access 2010. The Access Web services were not the same as the desktop applications. Automation was only through the macro language (not VBA) which Access automatically converted to JavaScript. The data was no longer in an Access database but SharePoint lists. An Access desktop database could link to the SharePoint data, so hybrid applications were possible so that SharePoint users needing basic views and edits could be supported while the more sophisticated, traditional applications could remain in the desktop Access database. Microsoft Access 2013 offers traditional Access desktop applications plus a significantly updated SharePoint 2013 web service. The Access Web model in Access 2010 was replaced by a new architecture that stores its data in actual SQL Server databases. Unlike SharePoint lists, this offers true relational database design with referential integrity, scalability, extensibility and performance one would expect from SQL Server. The database solutions that can be created on SharePoint 2013 offer a modern user interface designed to display multiple levels of relationships that can be viewed and edited, along with resizing for different devices and support for touch. The Access 2013 desktop is similar to Access 2010 but several features were discontinued including support for Access Data Projects (ADPs), pivot tables, pivot charts, Access data collections, source code control, replication, and other legacy features. Access desktop database maximum size remained 2 GB (as it has been since the 2000 version). Uses In addition to using its own database storage file, Microsoft Access also may be used as the 'front-end' of a program while other products act as the 'back-end' tables, such as Microsoft SQL Server and non-Microsoft products such as Oracle and Sybase. Multiple backend sources can be used by a Microsoft Access Jet Database (ACCDB and MDB formats). Similarly, some applications such as Visual Basic, ASP.NET, or Visual Studio .NET will use the Microsoft Access database format for its tables and queries. Microsoft Access may also be part of a more complex solution, where it may be integrated with other technologies such as Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint and ActiveX controls. Access tables support a variety of standard field types, indices, and referential integrity including cascading updates and deletes. Access also includes a query interface, forms to display and enter data, and reports for printing. The underlying Access database, which contains these objects, is multi-user and handles record-locking. Repetitive tasks can be automated through macros with point-and-click options. It is also easy to place a database on a network and have multiple users share and update data without overwriting each other's work. Data is locked at the record level which is significantly different from Excel which locks the entire spreadsheet. There are template databases within the program and for download from Microsoft's website. These options are available upon starting Access and allow users to enhance a database with predefined tables, queries, forms, reports, and macros. Database templates support VBA code but Microsoft's templates do not include VBA code. Programmers can create solutions using VBA, which is similar to Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6) and used throughout the Microsoft Office programs such as Excel, Word, Outlook and PowerPoint. Most VB6 code, including the use of Windows API calls, can be used in VBA. Power users and developers can extend basic end-user solutions to a professional solution with advanced automation, data validation, error trapping, and multi-user support. The number of simultaneous users that can be supported depends on the amount of data, the tasks being performed, level of use, and application design. Generally accepted limits are solutions with 1 GB or less of data (Access supports up to 2 GB) and it performs quite well with 100 or fewer simultaneous connections (255 concurrent users are supported). This capability is often a good fit for department solutions. If using an Access database solution in a multi-user scenario, the application should be "split". This means that the tables are in one file called the back end (typically stored on a shared network folder) and the application components (forms, reports, queries, code, macros, linked tables) are in another file called the front end. The linked tables in the front end point to the back end file. Each user of the Access application would then receive his or her own copy of the front end file. Applications that run complex queries or analysis across large datasets would naturally require greater bandwidth and memory. Microsoft Access is designed to scale to support more data and users by linking to multiple Access databases or using a back-end database like Microsoft SQL Server. With the latter design, the amount of data and users can scale to enterprise-level solutions. Microsoft Access's role in web development prior to version 2010 is limited. User interface features of Access, such as forms and reports, only work in Windows. In versions 2000 through 2003 an Access object type called Data Access Pages created publishable web pages. Data Access Pages are no longer supported. The Jet Database Engine, core to Access, can be accessed through technologies such as ODBC or OLE DB. The data (i.e., tables and queries) can be accessed by web-based applications developed in ASP.NET, PHP, or Java. With the use of Microsoft's Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Application in Windows Server 2008 R2, organizations can host Access applications so they can be run over the web. This technique does not scale the way a web application would but is appropriate for a limited number of users depending on the configuration of the host. Access 2010 allows databases to be published to SharePoint 2010 web sites running Access Services. These web-based forms and reports run in any modern web browser. The resulting web forms and reports, when accessed via a web browser, don't require any add-ins or extensions (e.g. ActiveX, Silverlight). Access 2013 can create web applications directly in SharePoint 2013 sites running Access Services. Access 2013 web solutions store its data in an underlying SQL Server database which is much more scalable and robust than the Access 2010 version which used SharePoint lists to store its data. Access Services in SharePoint has since been retired. A compiled version of an Access database (File extensions: .MDE /ACCDE or .ADE; ACCDE only works with Access 2007 or later) can be created to prevent users from accessing the design surfaces to modify module code, forms, and reports. An MDE or ADE file is a Microsoft Access database file with all modules compiled and all editable source code removed. Both the .MDE and .ADE versions of an Access database are used when end-user modifications are not allowed or when the application's source code should be kept confidential. Microsoft also offers developer extensions for download to help distribute Access 2007 applications, create database templates, and integrate source code control with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. Features Users can create tables, queries, forms and reports, and connect them together with macros. Advanced users can use VBA to write rich solutions with advanced data manipulation and user control. Access also has report creation features that can work with any data source that Access can access. The original concept of Access was for end users to be able to access data from any source. Other features include: the import and export of data to many formats including Excel, Outlook, ASCII, dBase, Paradox, FoxPro, SQL Server and Oracle. It also has the ability to link to data in its existing location and use it for viewing, querying, editing, and reporting. This allows the existing data to change while ensuring that Access uses the latest data. It can perform heterogeneous joins between data sets stored across different platforms. Access is often used by people downloading data from enterprise level databases for manipulation, analysis, and reporting locally. There is also the Access Database (ACE and formerly Jet) format (MDB or ACCDB in Access 2007) which can contain the application and data in one file. This makes it very convenient to distribute the entire application to another user, who can run it in disconnected environments. One of the benefits of Access from a programmer's perspective is its relative compatibility with SQL (structured query language)—queries can be viewed graphically or edited as SQL statements, and SQL statements can be used directly in Macros and VBA Modules to manipulate Access tables. Users can mix and use both VBA and "Macros" for programming forms and logic and offers object-oriented possibilities. VBA can also be included in queries. Microsoft Access offers parameterized queries. These queries and Access tables can be referenced from other programs like VB6 and .NET through DAO or ADO. From Microsoft Access, VBA can reference parameterized stored procedures via ADO. The desktop editions of Microsoft SQL Server can be used with Access as an alternative to the Jet Database Engine. This support started with MSDE (Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine), a scaled down version of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and continues with the SQL Server Express versions of SQL Server 2005 | multi-user and handles record-locking. Repetitive tasks can be automated through macros with point-and-click options. It is also easy to place a database on a network and have multiple users share and update data without overwriting each other's work. Data is locked at the record level which is significantly different from Excel which locks the entire spreadsheet. There are template databases within the program and for download from Microsoft's website. These options are available upon starting Access and allow users to enhance a database with predefined tables, queries, forms, reports, and macros. Database templates support VBA code but Microsoft's templates do not include VBA code. Programmers can create solutions using VBA, which is similar to Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6) and used throughout the Microsoft Office programs such as Excel, Word, Outlook and PowerPoint. Most VB6 code, including the use of Windows API calls, can be used in VBA. Power users and developers can extend basic end-user solutions to a professional solution with advanced automation, data validation, error trapping, and multi-user support. The number of simultaneous users that can be supported depends on the amount of data, the tasks being performed, level of use, and application design. Generally accepted limits are solutions with 1 GB or less of data (Access supports up to 2 GB) and it performs quite well with 100 or fewer simultaneous connections (255 concurrent users are supported). This capability is often a good fit for department solutions. If using an Access database solution in a multi-user scenario, the application should be "split". This means that the tables are in one file called the back end (typically stored on a shared network folder) and the application components (forms, reports, queries, code, macros, linked tables) are in another file called the front end. The linked tables in the front end point to the back end file. Each user of the Access application would then receive his or her own copy of the front end file. Applications that run complex queries or analysis across large datasets would naturally require greater bandwidth and memory. Microsoft Access is designed to scale to support more data and users by linking to multiple Access databases or using a back-end database like Microsoft SQL Server. With the latter design, the amount of data and users can scale to enterprise-level solutions. Microsoft Access's role in web development prior to version 2010 is limited. User interface features of Access, such as forms and reports, only work in Windows. In versions 2000 through 2003 an Access object type called Data Access Pages created publishable web pages. Data Access Pages are no longer supported. The Jet Database Engine, core to Access, can be accessed through technologies such as ODBC or OLE DB. The data (i.e., tables and queries) can be accessed by web-based applications developed in ASP.NET, PHP, or Java. With the use of Microsoft's Terminal Services and Remote Desktop Application in Windows Server 2008 R2, organizations can host Access applications so they can be run over the web. This technique does not scale the way a web application would but is appropriate for a limited number of users depending on the configuration of the host. Access 2010 allows databases to be published to SharePoint 2010 web sites running Access Services. These web-based forms and reports run in any modern web browser. The resulting web forms and reports, when accessed via a web browser, don't require any add-ins or extensions (e.g. ActiveX, Silverlight). Access 2013 can create web applications directly in SharePoint 2013 sites running Access Services. Access 2013 web solutions store its data in an underlying SQL Server database which is much more scalable and robust than the Access 2010 version which used SharePoint lists to store its data. Access Services in SharePoint has since been retired. A compiled version of an Access database (File extensions: .MDE /ACCDE or .ADE; ACCDE only works with Access 2007 or later) can be created to prevent users from accessing the design surfaces to modify module code, forms, and reports. An MDE or ADE file is a Microsoft Access database file with all modules compiled and all editable source code removed. Both the .MDE and .ADE versions of an Access database are used when end-user modifications are not allowed or when the application's source code should be kept confidential. Microsoft also offers developer extensions for download to help distribute Access 2007 applications, create database templates, and integrate source code control with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe. Features Users can create tables, queries, forms and reports, and connect them together with macros. Advanced users can use VBA to write rich solutions with advanced data manipulation and user control. Access also has report creation features that can work with any data source that Access can access. The original concept of Access was for end users to be able to access data from any source. Other features include: the import and export of data to many formats including Excel, Outlook, ASCII, dBase, Paradox, FoxPro, SQL Server and Oracle. It also has the ability to link to data in its existing location and use it for viewing, querying, editing, and reporting. This allows the existing data to change while ensuring that Access uses the latest data. It can perform heterogeneous joins between data sets stored across different platforms. Access is often used by people downloading data from enterprise level databases for manipulation, analysis, and reporting locally. There is also the Access Database (ACE and formerly Jet) format (MDB or ACCDB in Access 2007) which can contain the application and data in one file. This makes it very convenient to distribute the entire application to another user, who can run it in disconnected environments. One of the benefits of Access from a programmer's perspective is its relative compatibility with SQL (structured query language)—queries can be viewed graphically or edited as SQL statements, and SQL statements can be used directly in Macros and VBA Modules to manipulate Access tables. Users can mix and use both VBA and "Macros" for programming forms and logic and offers object-oriented possibilities. VBA can also be included in queries. Microsoft Access offers parameterized queries. These queries and Access tables can be referenced from other programs like VB6 and .NET through DAO or ADO. From Microsoft Access, VBA can reference parameterized stored procedures via ADO. The desktop editions of Microsoft SQL Server can be used with Access as an alternative to the Jet Database Engine. This support started with MSDE (Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine), a scaled down version of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, and continues with the SQL Server Express versions of SQL Server 2005 and 2008. Microsoft Access is a file server-based database. Unlike client–server relational database management systems (RDBMS), Microsoft Access does not implement database triggers, stored procedures, or transaction logging. Access 2010 includes table-level triggers and stored procedures built into the ACE data engine. Thus a Client-server database system is not a requirement for using stored procedures or table triggers with Access 2010. Tables, queries, forms, reports and macros can now be developed specifically for web based applications in Access 2010. Integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is also highly improved. The 2013 edition of Microsoft Access introduced a mostly flat design and the ability to install apps from the Office Store, but it did not introduce new features. The theme was partially updated again for 2016, but no dark theme was created for Access. Access Services and Web database ASP.NET web forms can query a Microsoft Access database, retrieve records and display them on the browser. SharePoint Server 2010 via Access Services allows for Access 2010 databases to be published to SharePoint, thus enabling multiple users to interact with the database application from any standards-compliant Web browser. Access Web databases published to SharePoint Server can use standard objects such as tables, queries, forms, macros, and reports. Access Services stores those objects in SharePoint. Access 2013 offers the ability to publish Access web solutions on SharePoint 2013. Rather than using SharePoint lists as its data source, Access 2013 uses an actual SQL Server database hosted by SharePoint or SQL Azure. This offers a true relational database with referential integrity, scalability, maintainability, and extensibility compared to the SharePoint views Access 2010 used. The macro language is enhanced to support more sophisticated programming logic and database level automation. Import or link sources Microsoft Access can also import or link directly to data stored in other applications and databases. Microsoft Office Access 2007 and newer can import from or link to: Microsoft Access Excel SharePoint lists Plain text XML Outlook HTML dBase (dropped in Access 2013; restored in Access 2016) Paradox (with Access 2007; dropped in Access 2010) Lotus 1-2-3 (dropped in Access 2010) ODBC-compliant data containers, including: Microsoft SQL Server Oracle MySQL PostgreSQL IBM Lotus Notes IBM i DB2 Microsoft Access Runtime Microsoft offers free runtime versions of Microsoft Access which allow users to run an Access desktop application without needing to purchase or install a retail version of Microsoft Access. This actually allows Access developers to create databases that can be freely distributed to an unlimited number of end-users. These runtime versions of Access 2007 and later can be downloaded for free from Microsoft. The runtime versions for Access 2003 and earlier were part of the Office Developer Extensions/Toolkit and required a separate purchase. The runtime version allows users to view, edit and delete data, along with running queries, forms, reports, macros and VBA module code. The runtime version does not allow users to change the design of Microsoft Access tables, queries, forms, reports, macros or module code. The runtime versions are similar to their corresponding full version of Access and usually compatible with earlier versions; for example Access Runtime 2010 allows a user to run an Access application made with the 2010 version as well as 2007 through 2000. Due to deprecated features in Access 2013, its runtime version is also unable to support those older features. During development one can simulate the runtime environment from the fully functional version by using the /runtime command line option. Development Access stores all database tables, queries, forms, reports, macros, and modules in the Access Jet database as a single file. For query development, Access offers a "Query Designer", a graphical user interface that allows users to build queries without knowledge of structured query language. In the Query Designer, users can "show" the datasources of the query (which can be tables or queries) and select the fields they want returned by clicking and dragging them into the grid. One can set up joins by clicking and dragging fields in tables to fields in other tables. Access allows users to view and manipulate the SQL code if desired. Any Access table, including linked tables from different data sources, can be used in a query. Access also supports the creation of "pass-through queries". These snippets of SQL code can address external data sources through the use of ODBC connections on the local machine. This enables users to interact with data stored outside the Access program without using linked tables or Jet. Users construct the pass-through queries using the SQL syntax supported by the external data source. When developing reports (in "Design View") additions or changes to controls cause any linked queries to execute in the background and the designer is forced to wait for records to be returned before being able to make another change. This feature cannot be turned off. Non-programmers can use the macro feature to automate simple tasks through a series of drop-down selections. Macros allow users to easily chain commands together such as running queries, importing or exporting data, opening and closing forms, previewing and printing reports, etc. Macros support basic logic (IF-conditions) and the ability to call other macros. Macros can also contain sub-macros which are similar to subroutines. In Access 2007, enhanced macros included error-handling and support for temporary variables. Access 2007 also introduced embedded macros that are essentially properties of an object's event. This eliminated the need to store macros as individual objects. However, macros were limited in their functionality by a lack of programming loops and advanced coding logic until Access 2013. With significant further enhancements introduced in Access 2013, the capabilities of macros became fully comparable to VBA. They made feature rich web-based application deployments practical, via a greatly enhanced Microsoft SharePoint interface and tools, as well as on traditional Windows desktops. In common with other products in the Microsoft Office suite, the other programming language used in Access is Microsoft VBA. It is similar to Visual Basic 6.0 (VB6) and code can be stored in modules, classes, and code behind forms and reports. To create a richer, more efficient and maintainable finished product with good error handling, most professional Access applications are developed using the VBA programming language rather than macros, except where web deployment is a business requirement. To manipulate data in tables and queries in VBA or macros, Microsoft provides two database access libraries of COM components: Data Access Objects (DAO) (32-bit only), which is included in Access and Windows and evolved to ACE in Microsoft Access 2007 for the ACCDE database format ActiveX Data Objects ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions) As well as DAO and ADO, developers can also use OLE DB and ODBC for developing native C/C++ programs for Access. For ADPs and the direct manipulation of SQL Server data, ADO is required. DAO is most appropriate for managing data in Access/Jet databases, and the only way to manipulate the complex field types in ACCDB tables. In the database container or navigation pane in Access 2007 and later versions, the system automatically categorizes each object by type (e.g., table, query, macro). Many Access developers use the Leszynski naming convention, though this is not universal; it is a programming convention, not a DBMS-enforced rule. It is particularly helpful in VBA where references to object names may not indicate its data type (e.g. tbl for tables, qry for queries). Developers deploy Microsoft Access most often for individual and workgroup projects (the Access 97 speed characterization was done for 32 users). Since Access 97, and with Access 2003 and 2007, Microsoft Access and hardware have evolved significantly. Databases under 1 GB in size (which can now fit entirely in RAM) and 200 simultaneous users are well within the capabilities of Microsoft Access. Of course, performance depends on the database design and tasks. Disk-intensive work such as complex searching and querying take the most time. As data from a Microsoft Access database can be cached in RAM, processing speed may substantially improve when there is only a single user or if the data is not changing. In the past, the effect of packet latency on the record-locking system caused Access databases to run slowly on a virtual private network (VPN) or a wide area network (WAN) against a Jet database. broadband connections have mitigated this issue. Performance can also be enhanced if a continuous connection is maintained to the back-end database throughout the session rather than opening and closing it for each table access. In July 2011, Microsoft acknowledged an intermittent query performance problem with all versions of Access and Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 due to the nature of resource management being vastly different in newer |
The net reaction is, therefore, thermodynamically favorable, for it results in a lower free energy for the final products. A catabolic pathway is an exergonic system that produces chemical energy in the form of ATP, GTP, NADH, NADPH, FADH2, etc. from energy containing sources such as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. The end products are often carbon dioxide, water, and ammonia. Coupled with an endergonic reaction of anabolism, the cell can synthesize new macromolecules using the original precursors of the anabolic pathway. An example of a coupled reaction is the phosphorylation of fructose-6-phosphate to form the intermediate fructose-1,6-bisphosphate by the enzyme phosphofructokinase accompanied by the hydrolysis of ATP in the pathway of glycolysis. The resulting chemical reaction within the metabolic pathway is highly thermodynamically favorable and, as a result, irreversible in the cell. Fructose-6-Phosphate + ATP -> Fructose-1,6-Bisphosphate + ADP Cellular respiration A core set of energy-producing catabolic pathways occur within all living organisms in some form. These pathways transfer the energy released by breakdown of nutrients into ATP and other small molecules used for energy (e.g. GTP, NADPH, FADH). All cells can perform anaerobic respiration by glycolysis. Additionally, most organisms can perform more efficient aerobic respiration through the citric acid cycle and oxidative phosphorylation. Additionally plants, algae and cyanobacteria are able to use sunlight to anabolically synthesize compounds from non-living matter by photosynthesis. Anabolic pathway (anabolism) In contrast to catabolic pathways, anabolic pathways require an energy input to construct macromolecules such as polypeptides, nucleic acids, proteins, polysaccharides, and lipids. The isolated reaction of anabolism is unfavorable in a cell due to a positive Gibbs Free Energy (+ΔG). Thus, an input of chemical energy through a coupling with an exergonic reaction is necessary. The coupled reaction of the catabolic pathway affects the thermodynamics of the reaction by lowering the overall activation energy of an anabolic pathway and allowing the reaction to take place. Otherwise, an endergonic reaction is non-spontaneous. An anabolic pathway is a biosynthetic pathway, meaning that it combines smaller molecules to form larger and more complex ones. An example is the reversed pathway of glycolysis, otherwise known as gluconeogenesis, which occurs in the liver and sometimes in the kidney to maintain proper glucose concentration in the blood and supply the brain and muscle tissues with adequate amount of glucose. Although gluconeogenesis is similar to the reverse pathway of glycolysis, it contains three distinct enzymes from glycolysis that allow the pathway to occur spontaneously. An example of the pathway for gluconeogenesis is illustrated in the image titled "Gluconeogenesis Mechanism". Amphibolic pathway An amphibolic pathway is one that can be either catabolic or anabolic based on the availability of or the need for energy. The currency of energy in a biological cell is adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which stores its energy in the phosphoanhydride bonds. The energy is utilized to conduct biosynthesis, facilitate movement, and regulate active transport inside of the cell. Examples of amphibolic pathways are the citric acid cycle and the glyoxylate cycle. These sets of chemical reactions contain both energy producing and utilizing pathways. To the right is an illustration of the amphibolic properties of the TCA cycle. The glyoxylate shunt pathway is an alternative to the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, | is the amphibolic pathway, which can be either catabolic or anabolic based on the need for or the availability of energy. Pathways are required for the maintenance of homeostasis within an organism and the flux of metabolites through a pathway is regulated depending on the needs of the cell and the availability of the substrate. The end product of a pathway may be used immediately, initiate another metabolic pathway or be stored for later use. The metabolism of a cell consists of an elaborate network of interconnected pathways that enable the synthesis and breakdown of molecules (anabolism and catabolism). Overview Each metabolic pathway consists of a series of biochemical reactions that are connected by their intermediates: the products of one reaction are the substrates for subsequent reactions, and so on. Metabolic pathways are often considered to flow in one direction. Although all chemical reactions are technically reversible, conditions in the cell are often such that it is thermodynamically more favorable for flux to proceed in one direction of a reaction. For example, one pathway may be responsible for the synthesis of a particular amino acid, but the breakdown of that amino acid may occur via a separate and distinct pathway. One example of an exception to this "rule" is the metabolism of glucose. Glycolysis results in the breakdown of glucose, but several reactions in the glycolysis pathway are reversible and participate in the re-synthesis of glucose (gluconeogenesis). Glycolysis was the first metabolic pathway discovered: As glucose enters a cell, it is immediately phosphorylated by ATP to glucose 6-phosphate in the irreversible first step. In times of excess lipid or protein energy sources, certain reactions in the glycolysis pathway may run in reverse to produce glucose 6-phosphate, which is then used for storage as glycogen or starch. Metabolic pathways are often regulated by feedback inhibition. Some metabolic pathways flow in a 'cycle' wherein each component of the cycle is a substrate for the subsequent reaction in the cycle, such as in the Krebs Cycle (see below). Anabolic and catabolic pathways in eukaryotes often occur independently of each other, separated either physically by compartmentalization within organelles or separated biochemically by the requirement of different enzymes and co-factors. Major metabolic pathways Catabolic pathway (catabolism) A catabolic pathway is a series of reactions that bring about a net release of energy in the form of a high energy phosphate bond formed with the energy carriers adenosine diphosphate (ADP) and guanosine diphosphate (GDP) to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and guanosine triphosphate (GTP), respectively. The net reaction is, therefore, thermodynamically favorable, for it results in a lower free energy for the final products. A catabolic pathway is an exergonic system that produces chemical energy in the form of ATP, GTP, NADH, NADPH, FADH2, etc. from energy containing sources such as carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. The end products are often carbon dioxide, water, and ammonia. Coupled with an endergonic reaction of anabolism, the cell can synthesize new macromolecules using the original precursors of the anabolic pathway. An example of a coupled reaction is the phosphorylation of fructose-6-phosphate to form the intermediate fructose-1,6-bisphosphate by the enzyme phosphofructokinase accompanied by the hydrolysis of ATP in the pathway of glycolysis. The resulting chemical reaction within the metabolic pathway is highly thermodynamically favorable and, as a result, irreversible in the cell. Fructose-6-Phosphate + ATP -> Fructose-1,6-Bisphosphate + ADP Cellular respiration A core set of energy-producing catabolic pathways occur within all living organisms in some form. These pathways transfer the energy released by breakdown of nutrients into ATP and other small molecules used for energy (e.g. GTP, NADPH, FADH). All cells can perform anaerobic respiration by glycolysis. Additionally, most organisms can perform more efficient aerobic respiration through the citric acid cycle and oxidative phosphorylation. Additionally plants, algae and cyanobacteria are able to use sunlight to anabolically synthesize compounds from non-living matter by photosynthesis. Anabolic pathway (anabolism) In contrast to catabolic pathways, anabolic pathways require an energy input to construct macromolecules such as polypeptides, nucleic acids, proteins, polysaccharides, and lipids. The isolated reaction of anabolism is unfavorable in a cell due to a positive Gibbs Free Energy (+ΔG). Thus, an input of chemical energy through a coupling with an exergonic reaction is necessary. The coupled reaction of the catabolic pathway affects the thermodynamics of the reaction by lowering the overall activation energy of an anabolic pathway and allowing the reaction to take place. Otherwise, an endergonic reaction is non-spontaneous. An anabolic pathway is a biosynthetic pathway, meaning that it combines smaller molecules to form larger and more complex ones. An example is the reversed pathway of glycolysis, otherwise known as gluconeogenesis, which occurs in the liver and sometimes in the kidney to maintain proper glucose concentration in the blood and supply the brain and muscle tissues with adequate amount of glucose. Although gluconeogenesis is similar to the reverse pathway of glycolysis, it contains three distinct enzymes from glycolysis that allow the pathway to occur spontaneously. An example of the pathway for gluconeogenesis is illustrated in the image titled "Gluconeogenesis Mechanism". Amphibolic pathway An amphibolic pathway is one that can be either catabolic or anabolic based on the availability of or the need for energy. The currency of energy in a biological cell is adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which stores its energy in the phosphoanhydride bonds. The energy is utilized to conduct biosynthesis, facilitate movement, and regulate active transport inside of the cell. Examples of amphibolic pathways are the citric acid cycle and the glyoxylate cycle. These sets of chemical reactions contain both energy producing and utilizing pathways. To the right is an illustration of the amphibolic properties of the TCA cycle. The glyoxylate shunt pathway is an alternative to the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) cycle, for it redirects the pathway of TCA to prevent full oxidation of carbon compounds, and to preserve high energy carbon sources as future energy sources. This pathway occurs only in plants and bacteria and transpires in the absence of glucose molecules. Regulation The flux of the entire pathway is regulated by the rate-determining steps. These are the slowest steps in a network of reactions. The rate-limiting step occurs near the beginning of the pathway |
as time progresses. Nazism The most controversial interpretation of the Three Ages philosophy and of millennialism in general involves Adolf Hitler's "Third Reich" ("Drittes Reich"), which in his vision would last for a thousand years to come ("Tausendjähriges Reich") but ultimately lasted for only 12 years (1933–1945). The German thinker Arthur Moeller van den Bruck coined the phrase "Third Reich" and in 1923 published a book titled Das Dritte Reich. Looking back at German history, he distinguished two separate periods, and identified them with the ages of the 12th-century Italian theologian Joachim of Fiore: the Holy Roman Empire (beginning with Charlemagne in AD 800): the "First Reich", The Age of the Father and the German Empire, under the Hohenzollern dynasty (1871–1918): the "Second Reich", The Age of the Son. After the interval of the Weimar Republic (1918 onwards), during which constitutionalism, parliamentarianism and even pacifism dominated, these were then to be followed by: the "Third Reich", The Age of the Holy Spirit. Although van den Bruck was unimpressed by Hitler when he met him in 1922 and did not join the Nazi Party, nevertheless the Nazis adopted the term "Third Reich" to label the totalitarian state they wanted to set up when they gained power, which they succeeded in doing in 1933. Later, however, the Nazi authorities banned the informal use of "Third Reich" throughout the German press in the summer of 1939, instructing it to use more official terms such as "German Reich", "Greater German Reich", and "National Socialist Germany" exclusively. During the early part of the Third Reich many Germans also referred to Hitler as being the German Messiah, especially when he conducted the Nuremberg Rallies, which came to be held annually (1933-1938) at a date somewhat before the Autumn Equinox in Nuremberg, Germany. In a speech held on 27 November 1937, Hitler commented on his plans to have major parts of Berlin torn down and rebuilt: [...] einem tausendjährigen Volk mit tausendjähriger geschichtlicher und kultureller Vergangenheit für die vor ihm liegende unabsehbare Zukunft eine ebenbürtige tausendjährige Stadt zu bauen [...]. [...] to build a millennial city adequate [in splendour] to a thousand-year-old people with a thousand-year-old historical and cultural past, for its never-ending [glorious] future [...] After Adolf Hitler's unsuccessful attempt to implement a thousand-year-reign, the Vatican issued an official statement that millennial claims could not be safely taught and that the related scriptures in Revelation (also called the Apocalypse) should be understood spiritually. Catholic author Bernard LeFrois wrote: : [...] Since the Holy Office decreed (July 21, 1944) that it cannot be safely taught that Christ at His Second Coming will reign visibly with only some of His saints (risen from the dead) for a period of time before the final and universal judgment, a spiritual millenium is to be seen in Apoc. 20:4–6. St. John gives a recapitulation of the activity of Satan, and the spiritual reign of the saints with Christ in heaven and in His Church on earth. Utopianism The early Christian concepts of millennialism had ramifications far beyond strictly religious concerns during the centuries to come, as various theorists blended and enhanced them with ideas of utopia. In the wake of early millennial thinking, the Three Ages philosophy developed. The Italian monk and theologian Joachim of Fiore (died 1202) saw all of human history as a succession of three ages: the Age of the Father (the Old Testament) the Age of the Son (the New Testament) the Age of the Holy Spirit (the age begun when Christ ascended into heaven, leaving the Paraclete, the third person of the Holy Trinity, to guide the faithful) It was believed that the Age of the Holy Spirit would begin at around 1260, and that from then on all believers would live as monks, mystically transfigured and full of praise for God, for a thousand years until Judgment Day would put an end to the history of our planet. Joachim of Fiore's divisions of historical time also highly influenced the New Age movement, which transformed the Three Ages philosophy into astrological terminology, relating the Northern-hemisphere vernal equinox to different constellations of the zodiac. In this scenario the Age of the Father was recast as the Age of Aries, the Age of the Son became the Age of Pisces, and the Age of the Holy Spirit was called the Aquarian New Age. The current so-called "Age of Aquarius" will supposedly witness the development of a number of great changes for humankind, reflecting the typical features of some manifestations of millennialism. See also Christian eschatology Christian Zionism Council of Ephesus Cult of the Holy Spirit Immanentize the eschaton Millenarianism Millennial Day Theory Preterism The Pursuit of the Millennium Year 1000 Year 6000 References Bibliography Barkun, Michael. Disaster and the Millennium (Yale University Press, 1974) () Case, Shirley J. The Millennial Hope, The University of Chicago Press, 1918. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, (2nd ed. Yale U.P., 1970). Desroches, Henri, Dieux d'hommes. Dictionnaire des messianismes et millénarismes de l'ère chrétienne, The Hague: Mouton, 1969, Ellwood, Robert. "Nazism as a Millennialist Movement", in Catherine Wessinger (ed.), Millennialism, Persecution, and Violence: Historical Cases (Syracuse University Press, 2000). ( or ) Fenn, Richard K. The End of Time: Religion, Ritual, and the Forging of the Soul (Pilgrim Press, 1997). ( or ) Hall, John R. Apocalypse: From Antiquity to the Empire of Modernity, (Cambridge, UK: Polity 2009). ( [pb] and ) Kaplan, Jeffrey. Radical Religion in America: Millenarian Movements from the Far Right to the Children of Noah (Syracuse University Press, 1997). ( or ) Landes, Richard. Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, (Oxford University Press 2011) Pentecost, J. Dwight. Things to Come: A study in Biblical Eschatology(Zondervan, 1958) and . Redles, David. Hitler's Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation (New York University Press, 2005). ( or ) Stone, Jon R., ed. Expecting Armageddon: Essential | the creatures again pure, and the resurrection and future existence occur" (Zand-i Vohuman Yasht 3:62). Scholars have also linked various other social and political movements, both religious and secular, to millennialist metaphors. Baha'i Faith Bahá'u'lláh mentioned in the Kitáb-i-Íqán that God will renew the "City of God" about every thousand years, and specifically mentioned that a new Manifestation of God would not appear within 1,000 years (1893–2893) of Bahá'u'lláh's message, but that the authority of Bahá'u'lláh's message could last up to 500,000 years. Christianity Christian millennialist thinking is based upon the Book of Revelation, specifically Revelation 20, which describes the vision of an angel who descended from heaven with a large chain and a key to a bottomless pit, and captured Satan, imprisoning him for a thousand years: The Book of Revelation then describes a series of judges who are seated on thrones, as well as John's vision of the souls of those who were beheaded for their testimony in favor of Jesus and their rejection of the mark of the beast. These souls: Early church During the first centuries after Christ, various forms of chiliasm (millennialism) were to be found in the Church, both East and West. It was a decidedly majority view at that time, as admitted by Eusebius, himself an opponent of the doctrine: Nevertheless, strong opposition later developed from some quarters, most notably from Augustine of Hippo. The Church never took a formal position on the issue at any of the ecumenical councils, and thus both pro and con positions remained consistent with orthodoxy. The addition to the Nicene Creed was intended to refute the perceived Sabellianism of Marcellus of Ancyra and others, a doctrine which includes an end to Christ's reign and which is explicitly singled out for condemnation by the council [Canon #1]. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that the 2nd century proponents of various Gnostic beliefs (themselves considered heresies) also rejected millenarianism. Millennialism was taught by various earlier writers such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Commodian, Lactantius, Methodius, and Apollinaris of Laodicea in a form now called premillennialism. According to religious scholar Rev. Dr. Francis Nigel Lee, "Justin's 'Occasional Chiliasm' sui generis which was strongly anti-pretribulationistic was followed possibly by Pothinus in A.D. 175 and more probably (around 185) by Irenaeus". Justin Martyr, discussing his own premillennial beliefs in his Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Chapter 110, observed that they were not necessary to Christians: Melito of Sardis is frequently listed as a second century proponent of premillennialism. The support usually given for the supposition is that "Jerome [Comm. on Ezek. 36] and Gennadius [De Dogm. Eccl., Ch. 52] both affirm that he was a decided millenarian." In the early third century, Hippolytus of Rome wrote: Around 220, there were some similar influences on Tertullian, although only with very important and extremely optimistic (if not perhaps even postmillennial) modifications and implications. On the other hand, "Christian Chiliastic" ideas were indeed advocated in 240 by Commodian; in 250 by the Egyptian Bishop Nepos in his Refutation of Allegorists; in 260 by the almost unknown Coracion; and in 310 by Lactantius. Into the late fourth century, Bishop Ambrose of Milan had millennial leanings (Ambrose of Milan. Book II. On the Belief in the Resurrection, verse 108). Lactantius is the last great literary defender of chiliasm in the early Christian church. Jerome and Augustine vigorously opposed chiliasm by teaching the symbolic interpretation of the Revelation of St. John, especially chapter 20. In a letter to Queen Gerberga of France around 950, Adso of Montier-en-Der established the idea of a "last World Emperor" who would conquer non-Christians before the arrival of the Antichrist. Reformation and beyond Christian views on the future order of events diversified after the Protestant reformation (c.1517). In particular, new emphasis was placed on the passages in the Book of Revelation which seemed to say that as Christ would return to judge the living and the dead, Satan would be locked away for 1000 years, but then released on the world to instigate a final battle against God and his Saints. Previous Catholic and Orthodox theologians had no clear or consensus view on what this actually meant (only the concept of the end of the world coming unexpectedly, "like a thief in a night", and the concept of "the antichrist" were almost universally held). Millennialist theories try to explain what this "1000 years of Satan bound in chains" would be like. Various types of millennialism exist with regard to Christian eschatology, especially within Protestantism, such as Premillennialism, Postmillennialism, and Amillennialism. The first two refer to different views of the relationship between the "millennial Kingdom" and Christ's second coming. Premillennialism sees Christ's second advent as preceding the millennium, thereby separating the second coming from the final judgment. In this view, "Christ's reign" will be physically on the earth. Postmillennialism sees Christ's second coming as subsequent to the millennium and concurrent with the final judgment. In this view "Christ's reign" (during the millennium) will be spiritual in and through the church. Amillennialism basically denies a future literal 1000 year kingdom and sees the church age metaphorically described in Rev. 20:1–6 in which "Christ's reign" is current in and through the church. The Catholic Church strongly condemns millennialism as the following shows: 19th and 20th centuries Bible Student movement The Bible Student movement is a millennialist movement based on views expressed in "The Divine Plan of the Ages," in 1886, in Volume One of the Studies in the Scriptures series, by Pastor Charles Taze Russell. (This series is still being published, since 1927, by the Dawn Bible Students Association.) Bible Students believe that there will be a universal opportunity for every person, past and present, not previously recipients of a heavenly calling, to gain everlasting life on Earth during the Millennium. Jehovah's Witnesses Jehovah's Witnesses believe that Christ will rule from heaven for 1,000 years as king over the earth, assisted by the 144,000 ascended humans. The Church of Almighty God Also known as Eastern Lightning, The Church of Almighty God mentions in its teachings the Age of Millennial Kingdom, which will follow the catastrophes prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Judaism Millennialist thinking first emerged in Jewish apocryphal literature of the tumultuous Second Temple period, Gerschom Scholem profiles medieval and early modern Jewish millennialist teachings in his book Sabbatai Sevi, the mystical messiah, which focuses on the 17th-century movement centered on |
tend to be well-known fantasy staples such as giant rats, werewolf curses, dragon flights and zombie hordes, rather than original creations. Isles of Terra and the Xeen games featured a more distinct environment, blending fantasy and science fiction elements in a unique way. The Might and Magic games have some replay value as the player can choose their party composition, develop different skills, choose sides, do quests in a different order, hunt for hidden secrets and easter eggs, and/or change difficulty level. Plot Although most of the gameplay reflects a distinctly fantasy genre, the overarching plot of the first nine games has something of a science fiction background. The series is set in a fictional galaxy as part of an alternative universe, where planets are overseen by a powerful race of space travelers known as Ancients who seeded them with humans, elves, dwarves and others. In each of the games, a party of characters fights monsters and completes quests on one of these planets, until they eventually become involved in the affairs of the Ancients. Might and Magic could as such be considered an example of science fantasy. The producer of the series was Jon Van Caneghem. Van Caneghem has stated in interview that the Might and Magic setting is inspired by his love for both science fiction and fantasy. He cites The Twilight Zone and the Star Trek episode For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky as having inspired Might and Magic lore. The first five games in the series concern the renegade guardian of the planet Terra, named Sheltem, who becomes irrevocably corrupted, developing a penchant for throwing planets into their suns. Sheltem establishes himself on a series of flat worlds known as nacelles (which are implied to be giant spaceships) and Corak, a second guardian and creation of the Ancients, with the assistance of the player characters, pursues him across the Void. Eventually both Corak and Sheltem are destroyed in a climactic battle on the nacelle of Xeen. The sixth, seventh and eighth games take place on Enroth, a single planet partially ruled by the Ironfist dynasty, and chronicle the events and aftermath of an invasion by the Kreegan (colloquially referred to as Devils), the demonlike arch-enemies of the Ancients. It is also revealed that the destruction wrought by the Ancients' wars with the Kreegan is the reason why the worlds of Might & Magic exist as medieval fantasy settings despite once being seeded with futuristic technology – the worlds have been 'cut off' from the Ancients and descended into barbarism. The first through third games in the Heroes of Might and Magic series traces the fortunes of the Ironfists in more detail. None of the science fiction elements appear in the Heroes series besides the appearance of Kreegan characters in Heroes of Might and Magic III and IV. Might & Magic IX and Heroes IV take place on Axeoth, another planet which the survivors of Enroth were brought to through portals after it was destroyed in an event called the Reckoning. The Ubisoft release Might & Magic X: Legacy departs from this continuity and is set in the world of Ashan. Ashan is a high fantasy setting with no science fiction elements in its lore. Reception Might and Magic is considered one of the defining examples of early role-playing video games, along with The Bard's Tale, Ultima and Wizardry series. By March 1994, combined sales of the Might and Magic series totaled 1 million units. The number rose to 2.5 million sales by November 1996. and | which can consist of members of various character classes. The game world is presented to the player in first person perspective. In the earlier games the interface is very similar to that of Bard's Tale, but from Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven onward, the interface features a three-dimensional environment. Combat is turn-based, though the later games allowed the player to choose to conduct combat in real time. The game worlds in all of the Might and Magic games are quite large, and a player can expect each game to provide several dozen hours of gameplay. It is usually quite combat-intensive and often involves large groups of enemy creatures. Monsters and situations encountered throughout the series tend to be well-known fantasy staples such as giant rats, werewolf curses, dragon flights and zombie hordes, rather than original creations. Isles of Terra and the Xeen games featured a more distinct environment, blending fantasy and science fiction elements in a unique way. The Might and Magic games have some replay value as the player can choose their party composition, develop different skills, choose sides, do quests in a different order, hunt for hidden secrets and easter eggs, and/or change difficulty level. Plot Although most of the gameplay reflects a distinctly fantasy genre, the overarching plot of the first nine games has something of a science fiction background. The series is set in a fictional galaxy as part of an alternative universe, where planets are overseen by a powerful race of space travelers known as Ancients who seeded them with humans, elves, dwarves and others. In each of the games, a party of characters fights monsters and completes quests on one of these planets, until they eventually become involved in the affairs of the Ancients. Might and Magic could as such be considered an example of science fantasy. The producer of the series was Jon Van Caneghem. Van Caneghem has stated in interview that the Might and Magic setting is inspired by his love for both science fiction and fantasy. He cites The Twilight Zone and the Star Trek episode For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky as having inspired Might and Magic lore. The first five games in the series concern the renegade guardian of the planet Terra, named Sheltem, who becomes irrevocably corrupted, developing a penchant for throwing planets into their suns. Sheltem establishes himself on a series of flat worlds known as nacelles (which are implied to be giant spaceships) and Corak, a second guardian and creation of the Ancients, with the assistance of the player characters, pursues him across the Void. Eventually both Corak and Sheltem are destroyed in a climactic battle on the nacelle of Xeen. The sixth, seventh and eighth games take place on Enroth, a single planet partially ruled by the Ironfist dynasty, and chronicle the events and aftermath of an invasion by the Kreegan (colloquially referred to as Devils), the demonlike arch-enemies of the Ancients. It is also revealed that the destruction wrought by the Ancients' wars with the Kreegan is the reason why the worlds of Might & Magic exist as medieval fantasy settings despite once being seeded with futuristic technology – the worlds have been 'cut off' from the Ancients and descended into barbarism. The first through third games in the Heroes of Might and Magic |
market. Flex introduced new user interface components, advanced data visualization components, data remoting, and a modern IDE (Flash Builder). Flex competed with Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and Microsoft Silverlight during its tenure. Flex was upgraded to support integration with remote data sources, using AMF, BlazeDS, Adobe LiveCycle, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and others. Between 2006 and 2016, the Speedtest.net web service conducted over 9.0 billion speed tests with a utility built with Adobe Flash. In 2016, the service shifted to HTML5 due to the decreasing availability of Adobe Flash Player on PCs. Developers could create Flash web applications and rich web applications in ActionScript 3.0 programming language with IDEs, including Adobe Flash Builder, FlashDevelop and Powerflasher FDT. Flex applications were typically built using Flex frameworks such as PureMVC. Video games Flash video games were popular on the Internet, with portals like Newgrounds, Kongregate, and Armor Games dedicated to hosting Flash-based games. Many Flash games were developed by individuals or groups of friends due to the simplicity of the software. Popular Flash games include Farmville, Alien Hominid, QWOP and Club Penguin. Adobe introduced various technologies to help build video games, including Adobe AIR (to release games for desktop or mobile platforms), Adobe Scout (to improve performance), CrossBridge (to convert C++-based games to run in Flash), and Stage3D (to support GPU-accelerated video games). 3D frameworks like Away3D and Flare3D simplified creation of 3D content for Flash. Adobe AIR allows the creation of Flash-based mobile games, which may be published to the Google Play and Apple app stores. Flash is also used to build interfaces and HUDs for 3D video games using Scaleform GFx, a technology that renders Flash content within non-Flash video games. Scaleform is supported by more than 10 major video game engines including Unreal Engine and UDK, CryEngine, and PhyreEngine, and has been used to provide 3D interfaces for more than 150 major video game titles since its launch in 2003. Film and animation Adobe Animate is one of the common animation programs for low-cost 2D television and commercial animation, in competition with Anime Studio and Toon Boom Animation. Notable users of Flash include DHX Media Vancouver for productions including Pound Puppies, Littlest Pet Shop and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Fresh TV for Total Drama, Nelvana for 6teen and Clone High, Williams Street for Metalocalypse and Squidbillies, Nickelodeon Animation Studio for El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera, Starz Media for Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!, among others. Several popular online series are currently produced in Flash, such as the Emmy Award-winning Off-Mikes, produced by ESPN and Animax Entertainment; Happy Tree Friends; Gotham Girls, produced by Warner Bros.; Crime Time, produced by Future Thought Productions; and Homestar Runner produced by Mike and Matt Chapman. Various third-party software packages designed for traditionally trained cartoonists and animators can publish animations in the SWF format. History FutureWave The precursor to Flash was SmartSketch, a product published by FutureWave Software in 1993. The company was founded by Charlie Jackson, Jonathan Gay, and Michelle Welsh. SmartSketch was a vector drawing application for pen computers running the PenPoint OS. When PenPoint failed in the marketplace, SmartSketch was ported to Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. As the Internet became more popular, FutureWave realized the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might challenge Macromedia Shockwave technology. In 1995, FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and released this new product as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC. FutureWave approached Adobe Systems with an offer to sell them FutureSplash in 1995, but Adobe turned down the offer at that time. Microsoft wanted to create an "online TV network" (MSN 2.0) and adopted FutureSplash animated content as a central part of it. Disney Online used FutureSplash animations for their subscription-based service Disney's Daily Blast. Fox Broadcasting Company launched The Simpsons using FutureSplash. Macromedia In November 1996, FutureSplash was acquired by Macromedia, and Macromedia re-branded and released FutureSplash Animator as Macromedia Flash 1.0. Flash was a two-part system, a graphics and animation editor known as Macromedia Flash, and a player known as Macromedia Flash Player. FutureSplash Animator was an animation tool originally developed for pen-based computing devices. Due to the small size of the FutureSplash Viewer, it was particularly suited for download on the Web. Macromedia distributed Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share. By 2005, more computers worldwide had Flash Player installed than any other Web media format, including Java, QuickTime, RealNetworks, and Windows Media Player. Macromedia upgraded the Flash system between 1996 and 1999 adding MovieClips, Actions (the precursor to ActionScript), Alpha transparency, and other features. As Flash matured, Macromedia's focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics and media tool to promoting it as a Web application platform, adding scripting and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its small footprint. In 2000, the first major version of ActionScript was developed, and released with Flash 5. Actionscript 2.0 was released with Flash MX 2004 and supported object-oriented programming, improved UI components and other programming features. The last version of Flash released by Macromedia was Flash 8, which focused on graphical upgrades such as filters (blur, drop shadow, etc.), blend modes (similar to Adobe Photoshop), and advanced features for FLV video. Adobe On December 3, 2005, Adobe Systems acquired Macromedia along with the entire Macromedia product line including Flash, Dreamweaver, Director/Shockwave, Fireworks, and Authorware. In 2007, Adobe's first version release was Adobe Flash CS3 Professional, the ninth major version of Flash. It introduced the ActionScript 3.0 programming language, which supported modern programming practices and enabled business applications to be developed with Flash. Adobe Flex Builder (built on Eclipse) targeted the enterprise application development market, and was also released the same year. Flex Builder included the Flex SDK, a set of components that included charting, advanced UI, and data services (Flex Data Services). In 2008, Adobe released the tenth version of Flash, Adobe Flash CS4. Flash 10 improved animation capabilities within the Flash editor, adding a motion editor panel (similar to Adobe After Effects), inverse kinematics (bones), basic 3D object animation, object-based animation, and other text and graphics features. Flash Player 10 included an in-built 3D engine (without GPU acceleration) that allowed basic object transformations in 3D space (position, rotation, scaling). Also in 2008, Adobe released the first version of Adobe Integrated Runtime (later re-branded as Adobe AIR), a runtime engine that replaced Flash Player, and provided additional capabilities to the ActionScript 3.0 language to build desktop and mobile applications. With AIR, developers could access the file system (the user's files and folders), and connected devices such as a joystick, gamepad, and sensors for the first time. In 2011, Adobe Flash Player 11 was released, and with it the first version of Stage3D, allowing GPU-accelerated 3D rendering for Flash applications and games on desktop platforms such as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Adobe further improved 3D capabilities from 2011 to 2013, adding support for 3D rendering on Android and iOS platforms, alpha-channels, compressed textures, texture atlases, and other features. Adobe AIR was upgraded to support 64-bit computers, and to allow developers to add additional functionality to the AIR runtime using AIR Native Extensions (ANE). In May 2014, Adobe announced that Adobe AIR was used in over 100,000 unique applications and had over 1 billion installations logged worldwide. Adobe AIR was voted the Best Mobile Application Development product at the Consumer Electronics Show on two consecutive years (CES 2014 and CES 2015). In 2016, Adobe renamed Flash Professional, the primary authoring software for Flash content, to Adobe Animate to reflect its growing use for authoring HTML5 content in favor of Flash content. Open Source Adobe has taken steps to reduce or eliminate Flash licensing costs. For instance, the SWF file format documentation is provided free of charge after they relaxed the requirement of accepting a non-disclosure agreement to view it in 2008. Adobe also created the Open Screen Project which removes licensing fees and opens data protocols for Flash. Adobe has also open-sourced many components relating to Flash. In 2006, the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) which implements ActionScript 3 was donated as open-source to Mozilla Foundation, to begin work on the Tamarin virtual machine that would implement the ECMAScript 4 language standard with the help of the Mozilla community. It was released under the terms of a MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license and includes the specification for the ActionScript bytecode format; Tamarin Project jointly managed by Mozilla and Adobe Systems It is now considered obsolete by Mozilla. In 2011, the Adobe Flex Framework was donated as open-source to the Apache Software Foundation and rebranded as Apache Flex. Some saw this move as Adobe abandoning Flex, and stepping away from the Flash Platform as a whole. Sources from Apache say that "Enterprise application development is no longer a focus at Adobe. At least as Flash is concerned, Adobe is concentrating on games and video.", and they conclude that "Flex Innovation is Exploding!". The donated source code included a partly developed AS3 compiler (dubbed "Falcon") and the BlazeDS set of technologies. In 2013, the CrossBridge C++ cross-compilation toolset was open sourced by Adobe and released on GitHub. The project was formerly termed "Alchemy" and "Flash Runtime C++ Compiler", and targeted the game development market to enable C++ video games to run in Adobe Flash Player. Adobe has not been willing to make complete source code of the Flash Player available for free software development and even though free and open source alternatives such as Shumway and Gnash have been built, they are no longer under active development. The only fully functional third-party Flash Player is the commercially available Scaleform GFx Player, which is game development middleware designed for integration into non-Flash video games. Open Screen Project On May 1, 2008, Adobe announced the Open Screen Project, with the intent of providing a consistent application interface across devices such as personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. When the project was announced, seven goals were outlined: the abolition of licensing fees for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR, the removal of restrictions on the use of the Shockwave Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV) file formats, the publishing of application programming interfaces for porting Flash to new devices, and the publishing of The Flash Cast protocol and Action Message Format (AMF), which let Flash applications receive information from remote databases. , the specifications removing the restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV/F4V specs have been published. The Flash Cast protocol—now known as the Mobile Content Delivery Protocol—and AMF protocols have also been made available, with AMF available as an open source implementation, BlazeDS. The list of mobile device providers who have joined the project includes Palm, Motorola, and Nokia, who, together with Adobe, have announced a $10 million Open Screen Project fund. , the Open Screen Project is no longer accepting new applications according to partner BSQuare. However, paid licensing is still an option for device makers who want to use Adobe software. End of life One of Flash's primary uses on the Internet when it was first released was for building fully immersive, interactive websites. These were typically highly creative site designs that provided more flexibility over what the current HTML standards could provide as well as operate over dial-up connections. However, these sites limited accessibility by "breaking the Back Button", dumping visitors out of the Flash experience entirely by returning them to whatever page they had been on prior to first arriving at the site. Fully Flash-run sites fell out of favor for more strategic use of Flash plugins for video and other interactive features among standard HTML conventions, corresponding with the availability of HTML features like cascading style-sheets in the mid-00's. At the same time, this also led to Flash being used for new apps, including video games and animations. Precursors to YouTube but featuring user-generated Flash animations and games such as Newgrounds became popular destinations, further helping to spread the use of Flash. Toward the end of the millennium, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was released, corresponding with development of Dynamic HTML. Fifteen years later, WAP had largely been replaced by full-capability implementations and the HTML5 standard included more support for interactive and video elements. Support for Flash in these mobile browsers was not included. In 2010, Apple's Steve Jobs famously wrote Thoughts on Flash, an open letter to Adobe criticizing the closed nature of the Flash platform and the inherent security problems with the application to explain why Flash was not supported on iOS. Adobe created the Adobe AIR environment as a means to appease Apple's concerns, and spent time legally fighting Apple over terms of its App Store to allow AIR to be used on the iOS. While Adobe eventually won, allowing for other third-party development environments to get access to the iOS, Apple's decision to block Flash itself was considered the "death blow" to the Flash application. In November 2011, about a year after Jobs' open letter, Adobe announced it would no longer be developing Flash and advised developers to switch to HTML5. In 2011, Adobe ended support for Flash on Android. Adobe stated that Flash platform was transitioning to Adobe AIR and OpenFL, a multi-target open-source implementation of the Flash API. In 2015, Adobe rebranded Flash Professional, the main Flash authoring environment, as Adobe Animate to emphasize its expanded support for HTML5 authoring, and stated that it would "encourage content creators to build with new web standards" rather than use Flash. In July 2017, Adobe deprecated Flash, and announced its End-Of-Life (EOL) at the end of 2020, and will cease support, distribution, and security updates for Flash Player. With Flash's EOL announced, many browsers took steps to gradually restrict Flash content (caution users before launching it, eventually blocking all content without an option to play it). By January 2021, all major browsers were blocking all Flash content unconditionally. Only IE11, niche browser forks, and some browsers built for China plan to continue support. Furthermore, excluding the China variant of Flash, Flash execution software has a built-in kill switch which prevents it from playing Flash after January 12, 2021. In January 2021, Microsoft released an optional update KB4577586 which removes Flash Player from Windows; in July 2021 this update was pushed out as a security update and applied automatically to all remaining systems. Post EOL support Adobe Flash will still be supported in China and worldwide on some specialized enterprise platforms beyond 2020. Content preservation projects As early as 2014, around the same time that Adobe began encouraging Flash developers to transition their works to HTML5 standards, others began efforts to preserve existing Flash content through emulation of Flash in open standards. While some Flash applications were utilitarian, several applications had been shown to be experimental art, while others had laid the foundation of the independent video game development. An early project was Mozilla's Shumway, an open source project that attempted to emulate the Flash standard in HTML5, but the project was shuttered as the team found that more developers were switching to HTML5 than seeking to keep their content in Flash, coupled with the difficulties in assuring full compatibility. Google had developed the Swiffy application, released in 2014, to convert Flash applications to HTML5-compatible scripts for viewing on mobile devices, but it was shut down in 2016. Closer to Flash's EOL date in 2020, there were more concentrated efforts simply to preserve existing Flash applications, including websites, video games, and animations beyond Flash's EOL. The Internet Archive introduced Ruffle and Emularity Flash emulators to emulate Flash games and animations without the security holes in November 2020, opening a new collection for creators and users to save and preserve Flash content. By January 2020, the Flashpoint project collected more than 38,000 Flash applications, excluding those that were commercial products, and offered as a large freely available archive for users to download. Kongregate, one of the larger sites that offered Flash games, has been working with the Strong Museum of Play to preserve its games. Format FLA Flash source files are in the FLA format and contain graphics and animation, as well as embedded assets such as bitmap images, audio files, and FLV video files. The Flash source file format was a proprietary format and Adobe Animate and Adobe Flash Pro were the only available authoring tools capable of editing such files. Flash source files (.fla) may be compiled into Flash movie files (.swf) using Adobe Animate. Note that FLA files can be edited, but output (.swf) files cannot. SWF Flash movie files were in the SWF format, traditionally called "ShockWave Flash" movies, "Flash movies", or "Flash applications", usually have a .swf file extension, and may be used in the form of a web page plug-in, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a self-executing Projector movie (with the .exe extension in Microsoft Windows). Flash Video files have a .flv file extension and are either used from within .swf files or played through a flv-aware player, such as VLC, or QuickTime and Windows Media Player with external codecs added. The use of vector graphics combined with program code allows Flash files to be smaller—and thus allows streams to use less bandwidth—than the corresponding bitmaps or video clips. For content in a single format (such as just text, video, or audio), other alternatives may provide better performance and consume less CPU power than the corresponding Flash movie, for example, when using transparency or making large screen updates such as photographic or text fades. In addition to a vector-rendering engine, the Flash Player includes a virtual machine called the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) for scripting interactivity at run-time, with video, MP3-based audio, and bitmap graphics. As of Flash Player 8, it offered two video codecs: On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark, and run-time JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF capability. 3D Flash Player 11 introduced a full 3D shader API, called Stage3D, which is fairly similar to WebGL. Stage3D enables GPU-accelerated rendering of 3D graphics within Flash games and applications, and has been used to build Angry Birds, and a couple of other notable games. Various 3D frameworks have been built for Flash using Stage3D, such as Away3D 4, CopperCube, Flare3D, and Starling. Professional game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity also export Flash versions which use Stage3D to render 3D graphics. Flash Video Virtually all browser plugins for video are free of charge and cross-platform, including Adobe's offering of Flash Video, which was introduced with Flash version 6. Flash Video had been a popular choice for websites due to the large installed user base and programmability of Flash. In 2010, Apple publicly criticized Adobe Flash, including its implementation of video playback for not taking advantage of hardware acceleration, one reason Flash was not to be found on Apple's mobile devices. Soon after Apple's criticism, Adobe demoed and released a beta version of Flash 10.1, which used available GPU hardware acceleration even on a Mac. Flash 10.2 beta, released December 2010, added hardware acceleration for the whole video rendering pipeline. Flash Player supports two distinct modes of video playback, and hardware accelerated video decoding may not be used for older video content. Such content causes excessive CPU usage compared to comparable content played with other players. Software Rendered Video Flash Player supports software rendered video since version 6. Such video supports vector animations displayed above the video content. This obligation may, depending on graphic APIs exposed by the operating system, prohibit using a video overlay, like a traditional multimedia player would use, with the consequence that color space conversion and scaling must happen in software. Hardware Accelerated Video Flash Player supports hardware accelerated video playback since version 10.2, for H.264, F4V, and FLV video formats. Such video is displayed above all Flash content and takes advantage of video codec chipsets installed on the user's device. Developers must specifically use the "StageVideo" technology within Flash Player in order for hardware decoding to be enabled. Flash Player internally uses technologies such as DirectX Video Acceleration and OpenGL to do so. In tests done by Ars Technica in 2008 and 2009, Adobe Flash Player performed better on Windows than Mac OS X and Linux with the same hardware. Performance has later improved for the latter two, on Mac OS X with Flash Player 10.1, and on Linux with Flash Player 11. Flash Audio Flash Audio is most commonly encoded in MP3 or AAC (Advanced Audio Coding); however, it can also use ADPCM, Nellymoser (Nellymoser Asao Codec) and Speex audio codecs. Flash allows sample rates of 11, 22 and 44.1 kHz. It cannot have a 48 kHz audio sample rate, which is the standard TV and DVD sample rate. On August 20, 2007, Adobe announced on its blog that with Update 3 of Flash Player 9, Flash Video will also implement some parts of the MPEG-4 international standards. Specifically, Flash Player will work with video compressed in H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10), audio compressed using AAC (MPEG-4 Part 3), the F4V, MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), M4V, M4A, 3GP, and MOV multimedia container formats, 3GPP Timed Text specification (MPEG-4 Part 17), which is a standardized subtitle format and partial parsing capability for the "ilst" atom, which is the ID3 equivalent iTunes uses to store metadata. MPEG-4 | instance, the SWF file format documentation is provided free of charge after they relaxed the requirement of accepting a non-disclosure agreement to view it in 2008. Adobe also created the Open Screen Project which removes licensing fees and opens data protocols for Flash. Adobe has also open-sourced many components relating to Flash. In 2006, the ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2) which implements ActionScript 3 was donated as open-source to Mozilla Foundation, to begin work on the Tamarin virtual machine that would implement the ECMAScript 4 language standard with the help of the Mozilla community. It was released under the terms of a MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license and includes the specification for the ActionScript bytecode format; Tamarin Project jointly managed by Mozilla and Adobe Systems It is now considered obsolete by Mozilla. In 2011, the Adobe Flex Framework was donated as open-source to the Apache Software Foundation and rebranded as Apache Flex. Some saw this move as Adobe abandoning Flex, and stepping away from the Flash Platform as a whole. Sources from Apache say that "Enterprise application development is no longer a focus at Adobe. At least as Flash is concerned, Adobe is concentrating on games and video.", and they conclude that "Flex Innovation is Exploding!". The donated source code included a partly developed AS3 compiler (dubbed "Falcon") and the BlazeDS set of technologies. In 2013, the CrossBridge C++ cross-compilation toolset was open sourced by Adobe and released on GitHub. The project was formerly termed "Alchemy" and "Flash Runtime C++ Compiler", and targeted the game development market to enable C++ video games to run in Adobe Flash Player. Adobe has not been willing to make complete source code of the Flash Player available for free software development and even though free and open source alternatives such as Shumway and Gnash have been built, they are no longer under active development. The only fully functional third-party Flash Player is the commercially available Scaleform GFx Player, which is game development middleware designed for integration into non-Flash video games. Open Screen Project On May 1, 2008, Adobe announced the Open Screen Project, with the intent of providing a consistent application interface across devices such as personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. When the project was announced, seven goals were outlined: the abolition of licensing fees for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR, the removal of restrictions on the use of the Shockwave Flash (SWF) and Flash Video (FLV) file formats, the publishing of application programming interfaces for porting Flash to new devices, and the publishing of The Flash Cast protocol and Action Message Format (AMF), which let Flash applications receive information from remote databases. , the specifications removing the restrictions on the use of SWF and FLV/F4V specs have been published. The Flash Cast protocol—now known as the Mobile Content Delivery Protocol—and AMF protocols have also been made available, with AMF available as an open source implementation, BlazeDS. The list of mobile device providers who have joined the project includes Palm, Motorola, and Nokia, who, together with Adobe, have announced a $10 million Open Screen Project fund. , the Open Screen Project is no longer accepting new applications according to partner BSQuare. However, paid licensing is still an option for device makers who want to use Adobe software. End of life One of Flash's primary uses on the Internet when it was first released was for building fully immersive, interactive websites. These were typically highly creative site designs that provided more flexibility over what the current HTML standards could provide as well as operate over dial-up connections. However, these sites limited accessibility by "breaking the Back Button", dumping visitors out of the Flash experience entirely by returning them to whatever page they had been on prior to first arriving at the site. Fully Flash-run sites fell out of favor for more strategic use of Flash plugins for video and other interactive features among standard HTML conventions, corresponding with the availability of HTML features like cascading style-sheets in the mid-00's. At the same time, this also led to Flash being used for new apps, including video games and animations. Precursors to YouTube but featuring user-generated Flash animations and games such as Newgrounds became popular destinations, further helping to spread the use of Flash. Toward the end of the millennium, the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) was released, corresponding with development of Dynamic HTML. Fifteen years later, WAP had largely been replaced by full-capability implementations and the HTML5 standard included more support for interactive and video elements. Support for Flash in these mobile browsers was not included. In 2010, Apple's Steve Jobs famously wrote Thoughts on Flash, an open letter to Adobe criticizing the closed nature of the Flash platform and the inherent security problems with the application to explain why Flash was not supported on iOS. Adobe created the Adobe AIR environment as a means to appease Apple's concerns, and spent time legally fighting Apple over terms of its App Store to allow AIR to be used on the iOS. While Adobe eventually won, allowing for other third-party development environments to get access to the iOS, Apple's decision to block Flash itself was considered the "death blow" to the Flash application. In November 2011, about a year after Jobs' open letter, Adobe announced it would no longer be developing Flash and advised developers to switch to HTML5. In 2011, Adobe ended support for Flash on Android. Adobe stated that Flash platform was transitioning to Adobe AIR and OpenFL, a multi-target open-source implementation of the Flash API. In 2015, Adobe rebranded Flash Professional, the main Flash authoring environment, as Adobe Animate to emphasize its expanded support for HTML5 authoring, and stated that it would "encourage content creators to build with new web standards" rather than use Flash. In July 2017, Adobe deprecated Flash, and announced its End-Of-Life (EOL) at the end of 2020, and will cease support, distribution, and security updates for Flash Player. With Flash's EOL announced, many browsers took steps to gradually restrict Flash content (caution users before launching it, eventually blocking all content without an option to play it). By January 2021, all major browsers were blocking all Flash content unconditionally. Only IE11, niche browser forks, and some browsers built for China plan to continue support. Furthermore, excluding the China variant of Flash, Flash execution software has a built-in kill switch which prevents it from playing Flash after January 12, 2021. In January 2021, Microsoft released an optional update KB4577586 which removes Flash Player from Windows; in July 2021 this update was pushed out as a security update and applied automatically to all remaining systems. Post EOL support Adobe Flash will still be supported in China and worldwide on some specialized enterprise platforms beyond 2020. Content preservation projects As early as 2014, around the same time that Adobe began encouraging Flash developers to transition their works to HTML5 standards, others began efforts to preserve existing Flash content through emulation of Flash in open standards. While some Flash applications were utilitarian, several applications had been shown to be experimental art, while others had laid the foundation of the independent video game development. An early project was Mozilla's Shumway, an open source project that attempted to emulate the Flash standard in HTML5, but the project was shuttered as the team found that more developers were switching to HTML5 than seeking to keep their content in Flash, coupled with the difficulties in assuring full compatibility. Google had developed the Swiffy application, released in 2014, to convert Flash applications to HTML5-compatible scripts for viewing on mobile devices, but it was shut down in 2016. Closer to Flash's EOL date in 2020, there were more concentrated efforts simply to preserve existing Flash applications, including websites, video games, and animations beyond Flash's EOL. The Internet Archive introduced Ruffle and Emularity Flash emulators to emulate Flash games and animations without the security holes in November 2020, opening a new collection for creators and users to save and preserve Flash content. By January 2020, the Flashpoint project collected more than 38,000 Flash applications, excluding those that were commercial products, and offered as a large freely available archive for users to download. Kongregate, one of the larger sites that offered Flash games, has been working with the Strong Museum of Play to preserve its games. Format FLA Flash source files are in the FLA format and contain graphics and animation, as well as embedded assets such as bitmap images, audio files, and FLV video files. The Flash source file format was a proprietary format and Adobe Animate and Adobe Flash Pro were the only available authoring tools capable of editing such files. Flash source files (.fla) may be compiled into Flash movie files (.swf) using Adobe Animate. Note that FLA files can be edited, but output (.swf) files cannot. SWF Flash movie files were in the SWF format, traditionally called "ShockWave Flash" movies, "Flash movies", or "Flash applications", usually have a .swf file extension, and may be used in the form of a web page plug-in, strictly "played" in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a self-executing Projector movie (with the .exe extension in Microsoft Windows). Flash Video files have a .flv file extension and are either used from within .swf files or played through a flv-aware player, such as VLC, or QuickTime and Windows Media Player with external codecs added. The use of vector graphics combined with program code allows Flash files to be smaller—and thus allows streams to use less bandwidth—than the corresponding bitmaps or video clips. For content in a single format (such as just text, video, or audio), other alternatives may provide better performance and consume less CPU power than the corresponding Flash movie, for example, when using transparency or making large screen updates such as photographic or text fades. In addition to a vector-rendering engine, the Flash Player includes a virtual machine called the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM) for scripting interactivity at run-time, with video, MP3-based audio, and bitmap graphics. As of Flash Player 8, it offered two video codecs: On2 Technologies VP6 and Sorenson Spark, and run-time JPEG, Progressive JPEG, PNG, and GIF capability. 3D Flash Player 11 introduced a full 3D shader API, called Stage3D, which is fairly similar to WebGL. Stage3D enables GPU-accelerated rendering of 3D graphics within Flash games and applications, and has been used to build Angry Birds, and a couple of other notable games. Various 3D frameworks have been built for Flash using Stage3D, such as Away3D 4, CopperCube, Flare3D, and Starling. Professional game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity also export Flash versions which use Stage3D to render 3D graphics. Flash Video Virtually all browser plugins for video are free of charge and cross-platform, including Adobe's offering of Flash Video, which was introduced with Flash version 6. Flash Video had been a popular choice for websites due to the large installed user base and programmability of Flash. In 2010, Apple publicly criticized Adobe Flash, including its implementation of video playback for not taking advantage of hardware acceleration, one reason Flash was not to be found on Apple's mobile devices. Soon after Apple's criticism, Adobe demoed and released a beta version of Flash 10.1, which used available GPU hardware acceleration even on a Mac. Flash 10.2 beta, released December 2010, added hardware acceleration for the whole video rendering pipeline. Flash Player supports two distinct modes of video playback, and hardware accelerated video decoding may not be used for older video content. Such content causes excessive CPU usage compared to comparable content played with other players. Software Rendered Video Flash Player supports software rendered video since version 6. Such video supports vector animations displayed above the video content. This obligation may, depending on graphic APIs exposed by the operating system, prohibit using a video overlay, like a traditional multimedia player would use, with the consequence that color space conversion and scaling must happen in software. Hardware Accelerated Video Flash Player supports hardware accelerated video playback since version 10.2, for H.264, F4V, and FLV video formats. Such video is displayed above all Flash content and takes advantage of video codec chipsets installed on the user's device. Developers must specifically use the "StageVideo" technology within Flash Player in order for hardware decoding to be enabled. Flash Player internally uses technologies such as DirectX Video Acceleration and OpenGL to do so. In tests done by Ars Technica in 2008 and 2009, Adobe Flash Player performed better on Windows than Mac OS X and Linux with the same hardware. Performance has later improved for the latter two, on Mac OS X with Flash Player 10.1, and on Linux with Flash Player 11. Flash Audio Flash Audio is most commonly encoded in MP3 or AAC (Advanced Audio Coding); however, it can also use ADPCM, Nellymoser (Nellymoser Asao Codec) and Speex audio codecs. Flash allows sample rates of 11, 22 and 44.1 kHz. It cannot have a 48 kHz audio sample rate, which is the standard TV and DVD sample rate. On August 20, 2007, Adobe announced on its blog that with Update 3 of Flash Player 9, Flash Video will also implement some parts of the MPEG-4 international standards. Specifically, Flash Player will work with video compressed in H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10), audio compressed using AAC (MPEG-4 Part 3), the F4V, MP4 (MPEG-4 Part 14), M4V, M4A, 3GP, and MOV multimedia container formats, 3GPP Timed Text specification (MPEG-4 Part 17), which is a standardized subtitle format and partial parsing capability for the "ilst" atom, which is the ID3 equivalent iTunes uses to store metadata. MPEG-4 Part 2 and H.263 will not work in F4V file format. Adobe also announced that it will be gradually moving away from the FLV format to the standard ISO base media file format (MPEG-4 Part 12) owing to functional limits with the FLV structure when streaming H.264. The final release of the Flash Player implementing some parts of MPEG-4 standards had become available in Fall 2007. Adobe Flash Player 10.1 does not have acoustic echo cancellation, unlike the VoIP offerings of Skype and Google Voice, making this and earlier versions of Flash less suitable for group calling or meetings. Flash Player 10.3 Beta incorporates acoustic echo cancellation. ActionScript Flash programs use ActionScript programming language. It is an enhanced superset of the ECMAScript programming language, with a classical Java-style class model, rather than JavaScript's prototype model. Specifications In October 1998, Macromedia disclosed the Flash Version 3 Specification on its website. It did this in response to many new and often semi-open formats competing with SWF, such as Xara's Flare and Sharp's Extended Vector Animation formats. Several developers quickly created a C library for producing SWF. In February 1999, MorphInk 99 was introduced, the first third-party program to create SWF files. Macromedia also hired Middlesoft to create a freely available developers' kit for the SWF file format versions 3 to 5. Macromedia made the Flash Files specifications for versions 6 and later available only under a non-disclosure agreement, but they are widely available from various sites. In April 2006, the Flash SWF file format specification was released with details on the then newest version format (Flash 8). Although still lacking specific information on the incorporated video compression formats (On2, Sorenson Spark, etc.), this new documentation covered all the new features offered in Flash v8 including new ActionScript commands, expressive filter controls, and so on. The file format specification document is offered only to developers who agree to a license agreement that permits them to use the specifications only to develop programs that can export to the Flash file format. The license does not allow the use of the specifications to create programs that can be used for playback of Flash files. The Flash 9 specification was made available under similar restrictions. In June 2009, Adobe launched the Open Screen Project (Adobe link), which made the SWF specification available without restrictions. Previously, developers could not use the specification for making SWF-compatible players, but only for making SWF-exporting authoring software. The specification still omits information on codecs such as Sorenson Spark, however. Animation tools Official tools The Adobe Animate authoring program is primarily used to design graphics and animation and publish the same for websites, web applications, and video games. The program also offers limited support for audio and video embedding and ActionScript scripting. Adobe released Adobe LiveMotion, designed to create interactive animation content and export it to a variety of formats, including SWF. LiveMotion failed to gain any notable user base. In February 2003, Macromedia purchased Presedia, which had developed a Flash authoring tool that automatically converted PowerPoint files into Flash. Macromedia subsequently released the new product as Breeze, which included many new enhancements. Third-party tools Various free and commercial software packages can output animations into the Flash SWF format including: Ajax Animator aims to create a Flash development environment Alligator Flash Designer Amara Web Apple Keynote allows users to export presentations to Flash SWF animations CelAction2D Clash Express Animator KoolMoves KToon can edit vectors and generate SWF, but its interface is very different from Macromedia's Anime Studio is a 2D animation software package specialized for character animation, that creates Flash animations OpenOffice Impress Question Writer publishes its quizzes to Flash animations Salasaga Screencast and Screencam, produces demos or tutorials by capturing the screen and generating a Flash animation of the same SWiSH Max is an animation editor with preset animation, developed by an ex-employee of Macromedia, that can output Flash animations Synfig Toon Boom is a traditional animation tool that can output Flash animations Toufee Vyond is a software as a service tool to create animated videos. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer can output Flash animations The Flash 4 Linux project was an initiative to develop an open source Linux application as an alternative to Adobe Animate. Development plans included authoring capacity for 2D animation, and tweening, as well as outputting SWF file formats. F4L evolved into an editor that was capable of authoring 2D animation and publishing of SWF files. Flash 4 Linux was renamed UIRA. UIRA intended to combine the resources and knowledge of the F4L project and the Qflash project, both of which were Open Source applications that aimed to provide an alternative to the proprietary Adobe Flash. Programming tools Official tools Adobe provides a series of tools to develop software applications and video games for Flash: Apache Flex SDK – a free, open source SDK to compile Flash-based rich web applications from source code. The Apache Flex ActionScript 3.0 compiler generates SWF files from ActionScript 3 files. Flex was the primary ActionScript 3 compiler and was actively developed by Adobe before it was donated to Apache Software Foundation in 2011. Adobe Animate – primarily used to design graphics and animation, but supports ActionScript scripting and debugging. Adobe Flash Builder – enterprise application development & debugging, contains the Flex SDK with UI and charting components. Adobe Scout – a visual profiler to optimize the performance of Flash content. CrossBridge – a free SDK to cross-compile C++ code to run in Flash Player. Third-party tools Third-party development tools have been created to assist developers in creating software applications and video games with Flash. FlashDevelop is a free and open source Flash ActionScript IDE, which includes a project manager and debugger for building applications on Flash Player and Adobe AIR. Powerflasher FDT is a commercial ActionScript IDE similar to FlashDevelop. Haxe is an open source, high-level object-oriented programming language geared towards web-content creation that can compile SWF files from Haxe programs. As of 2012, Haxe can build programs for Flash Player that perform faster than the same application built with the Adobe Flex SDK compiler, due to additional compiler optimizations supported in Haxe. SWFTools (specifically, swfc) is an open-source ActionScript 3.0 compiler which generates SWF files from script files, which includes SVG tags. swfmill and MTASC also provide tools to create SWF files by compiling text, ActionScript or XML files into Flash animations Ming library, to create SWF files programmatically, has interfaces for C, PHP, C++, Perl, Python, and Ruby. It is able to import and export graphics from XML into SWF. Players Proprietary Adobe Flash Player is the multimedia and application player originally developed by Macromedia and acquired by Adobe Systems. It plays SWF files, which can be created by Adobe Animate, Apache Flex, or a number of other Adobe Systems and 3rd party tools. It has support for a scripting language called ActionScript, which can be used to display Flash Video from an SWF file. Scaleform GFx is a commercial alternative Flash player that features fully hardware-accelerated 2D graphics rendering using the GPU. Scaleform has high conformance with both Flash 10 ActionScript 3 and Flash 8 ActionScript 2. Scaleform GFx is a game development middleware solution that helps create graphical user interfaces or HUDs within 3D video games. It does not work with web browsers. IrfanView, an image viewer, uses Flash Player to display SWF files. Open source OpenFL, a cross-platform open-source implementation of the Adobe Flash API, supports importing SWF assets. Lightspark is a free and open-source SWF player that supports most of ActionScript 3.0 and has a Mozilla-compatible plug-in. It will fall back on Gnash, a free SWF player supporting ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0 (AVM1) code. Lightspark supports OpenGL-based rendering for 3D content. The player is also compatible with H.264 Flash videos on YouTube. Gnash aimed to create a software player and browser plugin replacement for the Adobe Flash Player. Gnash can play SWF files up to version 7, and 80% of ActionScript 2.0. Gnash runs on Windows, Linux and other platforms for the 32-bit, 64-bit, and other operating systems, but development has slowed significantly in recent years. Shumway was an open source Flash Player released by Mozilla in November 2012. It was built in JavaScript and is thus compatible with modern web browsers. In early October 2013, Shumway was included by default in the Firefox nightly branch. Shumway rendered Flash contents by translating contents inside Flash files to HTML5 elements, and running an ActionScript interpreter in JavaScript. It supported both AVM1 and AVM2, and ActionScript versions 1, 2, and 3. Development of Shumway ceased in early 2016. In the same year that Shumway was abandoned, work began on Ruffle, a flash emulator written in Rust. It also runs in web browsers, by compiling down to WebAssembly and using HTML5 Canvas. In 2020, the Internet Archive added support for emulating SWF by adding Ruffle to its emulation scheme. Availability Desktop computers Adobe Flash Player Adobe Flash has been deprecated, outside of China. On Linux the PPAPI plug-in is available; the NPAPI version wasn't updated to new major versions for a while until Adobe changed its mind on stopping |
their minds, as well as to change their attitudes, values and beliefs. The term "brainwashing" was first used in English by Edward Hunter in 1950 to describe how the Chinese government appeared to make people cooperate with them. Research into the concept also looked at Nazi Germany, at some criminal cases in the United States, and at the actions of human traffickers. In the late 1960s and 1970s, there was considerable scientific and legal debate, as well as media attention, about the possibility of brainwashing being a factor when Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) was used or in the conversion of young people to some new religious movements, which were often referred to as cults at the time. The concept of brainwashing is sometimes involved in lawsuits, especially regarding child custody. It can also be a theme in science fiction and in political and corporate culture, but is not generally accepted as a scientific term. China and the Korean War The Chinese term xǐnăo (洗腦,"wash brain") was originally used to describe the coercive persuasion used under the Maoist government in China, which aimed to transform "reactionary" people into "right-thinking" members of the new Chinese social system. The term punned on the Taoist custom of "cleansing / washing the heart / mind" (xǐxīn,洗心) before conducting ceremonies or entering holy places. The Oxford English Dictionary records the earliest known English-language usage of the word "brainwashing" in an article by a journalist Edward Hunter, in Miami News, published on 24 September 1950. Hunter was an outspoken anticommunist and was alleged to be a CIA agent working undercover as a journalist. Hunter and others used the Chinese term to explain why, during the Korean War (1950-1953), some American prisoners of war (POWs) cooperated with their Chinese captors, and even in a few cases defected to their side. British radio operator Robert W. Ford and British army Colonel James Carne also claimed that the Chinese subjected them to brainwashing techniques during their imprisonment. The U.S. military and government laid charges of brainwashing in an effort to undermine confessions made by POWs to war crimes, including biological warfare. After Chinese radio broadcasts claimed to quote Frank Schwable, Chief of Staff of the First Marine Air Wing admitting to participating in germ warfare, United Nations commander Gen. Mark W. Clark asserted: Whether these statements ever passed the lips of these unfortunate men is doubtful. If they did, however, too familiar are the mind-annihilating methods of these Communists in extorting whatever words they want... The men themselves are not to blame, and they have my deepest sympathy for having been used in this abominable way. Beginning in 1953, Robert Jay Lifton interviewed American servicemen who had been POWs during the Korean War as well as priests, students, and teachers who had been held in prison in China after 1951. In addition to interviews with 25 Americans and Europeans, Lifton interviewed 15 Chinese citizens who had fled after having been subjected to indoctrination in Chinese universities. (Lifton's 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China, was based on this research.) Lifton found that when the POWs returned to the United States their thinking soon returned to normal, contrary to the popular image of "brainwashing." In 1956, after reexamining the concept of brainwashing following the Korean War, the U.S. Army published a report entitled Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination, and Exploitation of Prisoners of War, which called brainwashing a "popular misconception". The report concludes that "exhaustive research of several government agencies failed to reveal even one conclusively documented case of 'brainwashing' of an American prisoner of war in Korea." In popular culture In George Orwell's 1949 dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the main character is subjected to imprisonment, isolation, and torture in order to conform his thoughts and emotions to the wishes of the rulers of Orwell's fictional future totalitarian society. Orwell's vision influenced Hunter and is still reflected in the popular understanding of the concept of brainwashing. In the 1950s, some American films were made that featured brainwashing of POWs, including The Rack, The Bamboo Prison, Toward the Unknown, and The Fearmakers. Forbidden Area told the story of Soviet secret agents who had been brainwashed through classical conditioning by their own government so they wouldn't reveal their identities. In 1962, The Manchurian Candidate (based on the 1959 novel by Richard Condon) "put brainwashing front and center" by featuring a plot by the Soviet government to take over the United States by using a brainwashed sleeper agent for political assassination. The concept of brainwashing became popularly associated with the research of Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov, which mostly involved dogs as subjects. In The Manchurian Candidate, the head brainwasher is "Dr. Yen Lo, of the Pavlov Institute." The science fiction stories of Cordwainer Smith (pen name of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913-1966), a US Army officer who specialized in military intelligence and psychological warfare during the Second World War and the Korean War) depict brainwashing to remove memories of traumatic events as a normal and benign part of future medical practice. In 1971, the film A Clockwork Orange positions institutional brainwashing as an option for violent convicts looking to shorten their sentences and in 1997's film Conspiracy Theory, a mentally unstable, government-brainwashed assassin seeks to prove that some very powerful people have been tampering with his mind. A comedy film which includes brainwashing is the 1985 film Volunteers with Tom Hanks and John Candy. The latter's character is brainwashed by Communist guerillas while serving in the Peace Corps. Mind control remains an important theme in science fiction. A subgenre is corporate mind control, in which a future society is run by one or more business corporations that dominate society, using advertising and mass media to control the population's thoughts and feelings. Terry O'Brien commented: "Mind control is such a powerful image that if hypnotism did not exist, then something similar would have to have been invented: The plot device is too useful for any writer to ignore. The fear of mind control is equally as powerful an image." Legal cases and the "brainwashing defense" The concept of brainwashing has been raised in the defense of criminal charges. It has also been raised in child custody cases. The 1969 to 1971 case of Charles Manson, who was said to have brainwashed his followers to commit murder and other crimes, brought the issue to renewed public attention. In 1974, Patty Hearst, a member of the wealthy Hearst family, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a left-wing militant organization. After several weeks of captivity she agreed to join the group and took part in their activities. In 1975, she was arrested and charged with bank robbery and use of a gun in committing a felony. Her attorney, F. Lee Bailey, argued in her trial that she should not be held responsible for her actions since her treatment by her captors was the equivalent of the alleged brainwashing of Korean War POWs (see also Diminished responsibility). Bailey developed his case in conjunction with psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West and psychologist Margaret Singer. They had both studied the experiences of Korean War POWs. (In 1996 Singer published her theories in her best-selling book Cults in Our Midst.) Despite this defense Hearst was found guilty. In 1990 Steven Fishman, who was a member of the Church of Scientology, was charged with mail fraud for conducting a scheme to sue large corporations via conspiring with minority stockholders in shareholder class action lawsuits. Afterwards, he would sign settlements that left those stockholders empty-handed. Fishman's attorneys notified the court that they intended to rely on an insanity defense, using the theories of brainwashing and the expert witnesses of Singer and Richard Ofshe to claim that Scientology had practiced brainwashing on him which left him unsuitable to make independent decisions. The court ruled that the use of brainwashing theories is inadmissible in expert witnesses, citing the Frye standard, which states that scientific theories utilized by expert witnesses must be generally accepted in their respective fields. In 2003, the brainwashing defense was used unsuccessfully in the defense of Lee Boyd Malvo, who was charged with murder for his part in the D.C. sniper attacks. Some legal scholars have argued that the brainwashing defense undermines the law's fundamental premise of free will. In 2003, forensic psychologist Dick Anthony said that "no reasonable person would question that there are situations where people can be influenced against their best interests, but those arguments are evaluated on the basis of fact, not bogus expert testimony." Anti-cult movement In the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-cult movement applied the concept of brainwashing to explain seemingly sudden and dramatic religious conversions to various new religious movements (NRMs) and other groups that they considered cults. News media reports tended to support the brainwashing view and social scientists sympathetic to the anti-cult movement, who were usually psychologists, developed revised models of mind control. While some psychologists were receptive to the concept, sociologists were for the most part skeptical of its ability to explain conversion to NRMs. Philip Zimbardo defined mind control as "the process by which individual or collective freedom of choice and action is compromised by agents or agencies that modify or | concept and the fear surrounding it was used as a tool for the anti-cult movement to rationalize the persecution of minority religious groups. In 2016, Israeli anthropologist of religion and fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute Adam Klin-Oron said about then-proposed "anti-cult" legislation: {{Quote|In the 1980s there was a wave of ‘brainwashing’ claims, and then parliaments around the world examined the issue, courts around the world examined the issue, and reached a clear ruling: That there is no such thing as cults…that the people making these claims are often not experts on the issue. And in the end courts, including in Israel, rejected expert witnesses who claimed there is "brainwashing."}} Scientific research American Psychological Association task force In 1983, the American Psychological Association (APA) asked Singer to chair a taskforce called the APA Task Force on Deceptive and Indirect Techniques of Persuasion and Control (DIMPAC) to investigate whether brainwashing or coercive persuasion did indeed play a role in recruitment by NRMs. It came to the following conclusion: Cults and large group awareness trainings have generated considerable controversy because of their widespread use of deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control. These techniques can compromise individual freedom, and their use has resulted in serious harm to thousands of individuals and families. This report reviews the literature on this subject, proposes a new way of conceptualizing influence techniques, explores the ethical ramifications of deceptive and indirect techniques of persuasion and control, and makes recommendations addressing the problems described in the report. On 11 May 1987, the APA's Board of Social and Ethical Responsibility for Psychology (BSERP) rejected the DIMPAC report because the report "lacks the scientific rigor and evenhanded critical approach necessary for APA imprimatur", and concluded that "after much consideration, BSERP does not believe that we have sufficient information available to guide us in taking a position on this issue." Research by the US government For 20 years starting in the early 1950s, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the United States Department of Defense conducted secret research, including Project MKUltra, in an attempt to develop practical brainwashing techniques; These experiments ranged "from electroshock to high doses of LSD". The full extent of the results are unknown. The director Sidney Gottlieb and his team, however, were apparently able to "blast away the existing mind" of a human being by using torture techniques – reprogramming, however, in terms of finding "a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void" was not so successful at least at the time. "MKUltra, began in 1950 and was motivated largely in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean uses of mind-control techniques on U.S. prisoners of war in Korea." Some scholars such as the controversial psychiatrist Colin A. Ross claim, however, that the CIA was successful in creating programmable so-called "Manchurian Candidates" even at the time. The CIA experiments using various psychedelic drugs such as LSD and Mescaline drew from previous Nazi human experimentation. A bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report, released in part in December 2008 and in full in April 2009, reported that US military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 had based an interrogation class on a chart copied from a 1957 Air Force study of "Chinese Communist" brainwashing techniques. The report showed how the Secretary of Defense's 2002 authorization of the aggressive techniques at Guantánamo led to their use in Afghanistan and in Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib. Other areas and studies Joost Meerloo, a Dutch psychiatrist, was an early proponent of the concept of brainwashing. ("Menticide" is a neologism coined by him meaning: "killing of the mind.") Meerloo's view was influenced by his experiences during the German occupation of his country and his work with the Dutch government and the American military in the interrogation of accused Nazi war criminals. He later emigrated to the United States and taught at Columbia University. His best-selling 1956 book, The Rape of the Mind, concludes by saying: The modern techniques of brainwashing and menticide—those perversions of psychology—can bring almost any man into submission and surrender. Many of the victims of thought control, brainwashing, and menticide that we have talked about were strong men whose minds and wills were broken and degraded. But although the totalitarians use their knowledge of the mind for vicious and unscrupulous purposes, our democratic society can and must use its knowledge to help man to grow, to guard his freedom, and to understand himself. Russian historian Daniel Romanovsky, who interviewed survivors and eyewitnesses in the 1970s, reported on what he called "Nazi brainwashing" of the people of Belarus by the occupying Germans during the Second World War, which took place through both mass propaganda and intense re-education, especially in schools. Romanovsky noted that very soon most people had adopted the Nazi view that the Jews were an inferior race and were closely tied to the Soviet government, views that had not been at all common before the German occupation.Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, Jonathan Petropoulos, John Roth, Berghahn Books, 15 July 2005, page 209Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe, John-Paul Himka, Joanna Beata Michlic, University of Nebraska Press, 1 July 2013, pages 74, 78* Italy has had controversy over the concept of plagio, a crime consisting in an absolute psychological—and eventually physical—domination of a person. The effect is said to be the annihilation of the subject's freedom and self-determination and the consequent negation of his or her personality. The crime of plagio has rarely been prosecuted in Italy, and only one person was ever convicted. In 1981, an Italian court found that the concept is imprecise, lacks coherence and is liable to arbitrary application. Recent scientific book publications in the field of the mental disorder "dissociative identity disorder" (DID) mention torture-based brainwashing by criminal networks and malevolent actors as a deliberate means to create multiple "programmable" personalities in a person to exploit this individual for sexual and financial reasons.Alayarian, A. (2018). Trauma, Torture and Dissociation: A Psychoanalytic View. (n.p.): Taylor & Francis. Earlier scientific debates in the 1980s and 1990s about torture-based ritual abuse in cults was known as "satanic ritual abuse" which was mainly viewed as a "moral panic." Kathleen Barry, co-founder of the United Nations NGO, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), prompted international awareness of human sex trafficking in her 1979 book Female Sexual Slavery. In his 1986 book Woman Abuse: Facts Replacing Myths, Lewis Okun reported that: "Kathleen Barry shows in Female Sexual Slavery that forced female prostitution involves coercive control practices very similar to thought reform." In their 1996 book, Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States, Rita Nakashima Brock and Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite report that the methods commonly used by pimps to control their victims "closely resemble the brainwashing techniques of terrorists and paranoid cults." In |
Moscow. As the Nazi emissaries stepped off the plane, a Soviet military band played "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles". The Nazi arrival was well planned, with all aesthetics in order. The classic hammer and sickle was propped up next to the swastika of the Nazi flag that had been used in a local film studio for Soviet propaganda films. After stepping off the plane and shaking hands, Ribbentrop and Gustav Hilger along with German ambassador Friedrich-Werner von der Schulenburg and Stalin's chief bodyguard, Nikolai Vlasik, entered a limousine operated by the NKVD to travel to Red Square. The limousine arrived close to Stalin's office and was greeted by Alexander Poskrebyshev, the chief of Stalin's personal chancellery. The Germans were led up a flight of stairs to a room with lavish furnishings. Stalin and Molotov greeted the visitors, much to the Nazis' surprise. It was well known that Stalin avoided meeting foreign visitors, and so his presence at the meeting showed how seriously that the Soviets were taking the negotiations. In late July and early August 1939, Soviet and German officials agreed on most of the details of a planned economic agreement and specifically addressed a potential political agreement, which the Soviets stated could come only after an economic agreement. The German presence in the Soviet capital during negotiations can be regarded as rather tense. German pilot Hans Baur recalled that Soviet secret police followed every move. Their job was to inform authorities when he left his residence and where he was headed. Baur's guide informed him: "Another car would tack itself onto us and follow us fifty or so yards in the rear, and wherever we went and whatever we did, the secret police would be on our heels." Baur also recalled trying to tip his Russian driver, which led to a harsh exchange of words: "He was furious. He wanted to know whether this was the thanks he got for having done his best for us to get him into prison. We knew perfectly well it was forbidden to take tips." August negotiations In early August, Germany and the Soviet Union worked out the last details of their economic deal and started to discuss a political alliance. Both countries' diplomats explained to each other the reasons for the hostility in their foreign policy in the 1930s and found common ground in both countries' anticapitalism: "there is one common element in the ideology of Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union: opposition to the capitalist democracies" or that "it seems to us rather unnatural that a socialist state would stand on the side of the western democracies". At the same time, British, French, and Soviet negotiators scheduled three-party talks on military matters to occur in Moscow in August 1939 that aimed to define what the agreement would specify on the reaction of the three powers to a German attack. The tripartite military talks, started in mid-August, hit a sticking point on the passage of Soviet troops through Poland if Germans attacked, and the parties waited as British and French officials overseas pressured Polish officials to agree to such terms. Polish officials refused to allow Soviet troops into Polish territory if Germany attacked; Polish Foreign Minister Józef Beck pointed out that the Polish government feared that if the Red Army entered Polish territory, it would never leave. On 19 August, the 1939 German–Soviet Commercial Agreement was finally signed. On 21 August, the Soviets suspended the tripartite military talks and cited other reasons. The same day, Stalin received assurances that Germany would approve secret protocols to the proposed non-aggression pact that would place the half of Poland east of the Vistula River as well as Latvia, Estonia, Finland and Bessarabia in the Soviet sphere of influence. That night, Stalin replied that the Soviets were willing to sign the pact and that he would receive Ribbentrop on 23 August. News leaks On 25 August 1939, the New York Times ran a front-page story by Otto D. Tolischus, "Nazi Talks Secret", whose subtitle included "Soviet and Reich Agree on East". On 26 August 1939, the New York Times reported Japanese anger and French communist surprise over the pact. The same day, however, Tolischus filed a story that noted Nazi troops on the move near Gleiwitz (now Gliwice), which led to the false flag Gleiwitz incident on 31 August 1939. On 28 August 1939, the New York Times was still reporting on fears of a Gleiwitz raid. On 29 August 1939, the New York Times reported that the Supreme Soviet had failed on its first day of convening to act on the pact. The same day, the New York Times also reported from Montreal, Canada, that American Professor Samuel N. Harper of the University of Chicago had stated publicly his belief that "the Russo-German non-aggression pact conceals an agreement whereby Russia and Germany may have planned spheres of influence for Eastern Europe". On 30 August 1939, the New York Times reported a Soviet buildup on its Western frontiers by moving 200,000 troops from the Far East. Secret protocol On 22 August, one day after talks broke down with France and Britain, Moscow revealed that Ribbentrop would visit Stalin the next day. The Soviets were still negotiating with the British and the French missions in Moscow. With the Western nations unwilling to accede to Soviet demands, Stalin instead entered a secret German–Soviet pact. On 23 August, a ten-year non-aggression pact was signed with provisions that included consultation, arbitration if either party disagreed, neutrality if either went to war against a third power and no membership of a group "which is directly or indirectly aimed at the other". The article "On Soviet–German Relations" in the Soviet newspaper Izvestia of 21 August 1939, stated: There was also a secret protocol to the pact, which was revealed only after Germany's defeat in 1945 although hints about its provisions had been leaked much earlier, such as to influence Lithuania. According to the protocol, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland were divided into German and Soviet "spheres of influence". In the north, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia were assigned to the Soviet sphere. Poland was to be partitioned in the event of its "political rearrangement": the areas east of the Pisa, Narev, Vistula, and San Rivers would go to the Soviet Union, and Germany would occupy the west. Lithuania, which was adjacent to East Prussia, was assigned to the German sphere of influence, but a second secret protocol, agreed to in September 1939, reassigned most of Lithuania to the Soviet Union. According to the protocol, Lithuania would be granted its historical capital, Vilnius, which was controlled by Poland during the interwar period. Another clause stipulated that Germany would not interfere with the Soviet Union's actions towards Bessarabia, which was then part of Romania. As a result, Bessarabia and also Northern Bukovina and Hertsa regions were occupied by the Soviets and integrated into the Soviet Union. At the signing, Ribbentrop and Stalin enjoyed warm conversations, exchanged toasts and further addressed the prior hostilities between the countries in the 1930s. They characterised Great Britain as always attempting to disrupt Soviet–German relations and stated that the Anti-Comintern Pact was aimed not at the Soviet Union but actually at Western democracies and "frightened principally the City of London [British financiers] and the English shopkeepers." Revelation The agreement stunned the world. John Gunther, in Moscow in August 1939, recalled how the news of the 19 August commercial agreement surprised journalists and diplomats during the Soviet-French-British negotiations, but caused them to hope for world peace. They did not expect the 21 August announcement of the non-aggression pact: "Nothing more unbelievable could be imagined. Astonishment and skepticism turned quickly to consternation and alarm". The news was met with utter shock and surprise by government leaders and media worldwide, most of whom were aware of only the British–French–Soviet negotiations, which had taken place for months; by Germany's allies, notably Japan; by the Comintern and foreign Communist parties; and Jewish communities all around the world. On 24 August, Pravda and Izvestia carried news of the pact's public portions, complete with the now-famous front-page picture of Molotov signing the treaty with a smiling Stalin looking on. The same day, German diplomat Hans von Herwarth, whose grandmother was Jewish, informed Italian diplomat Guido Relli and American chargé d'affaires Charles Bohlen of the secret protocol on the vital interests in the countries' allotted "spheres of influence" but failed to reveal the annexation rights for "territorial and political rearrangement". The agreement's public terms so exceeded the terms of an ordinary non-aggression treaty—requiring that both parties consult with each other, and not aid a third party attacking either—that Gunther heard a joke that Stalin had joined the anti-Comintern pact. Time Magazine repeatedly referred to the Pact as the "Communazi Pact" and its participants as "communazis" until April 1941. Soviet propaganda and representatives went to great lengths to minimize the importance of the fact that they had opposed and fought the Germans in various ways for a decade prior to signing the pact. Molotov tried to reassure the Germans of his good intentions by commenting to journalists that "fascism is a matter of taste". For its part, Germany also did a public volte-face regarding its virulent opposition to the Soviet Union, but Hitler still viewed an attack on the Soviet Union as "inevitable". Concerns over the possible existence of a secret protocol were expressed first by the intelligence organizations of the Baltic states only days after the pact was signed. Speculation grew stronger when Soviet negotiators referred to its content during the negotiations for military bases in those countries (see occupation of the Baltic States). The day after the pact was signed, the Franco- British military delegation urgently requested a meeting with Soviet military negotiator Kliment Voroshilov. On 25 August, Voroshilov told them that "in view of the changed political situation, no useful purpose can be served in continuing the conversation." The same day, Hitler told the British ambassador to Berlin that the pact with the Soviets prevented Germany from facing a two-front war, which changed the strategic situation from that in World War I, and that Britain should accept his demands on Poland. On 25 August, Hitler was surprised when Britain joined a defense pact with Poland. Hitler postponed his plans for an invasion of Poland on 26 August to 1 September. In accordance with the defence pact, Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September. Consequences in Finland, Poland, the Baltic States and Romania Initial invasions On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland from the west. Within a few days, Germany began conducting massacres of Polish and Jewish civilians and POWs, which took place in over 30 towns and villages in the first month of the German occupation. The Luftwaffe also took part by strafing fleeing civilian refugees on roads and by carrying out a bombing campaign. The Soviet Union assisted German air forces by allowing them to use signals broadcast by the Soviet radio station at Minsk, allegedly "for urgent aeronautical experiments." Hitler declared at Danzig: In the opinion of Robert Service, Stalin did not move instantly but was waiting to see whether the Germans would halt within the agreed area, and the Soviet Union also needed to secure the frontier in the Soviet–Japanese Border Wars. On 17 September, the Red Army invaded Poland, violating the 1932 Soviet–Polish Non-Aggression Pact, and occupied the Polish territory assigned to it by the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. That was followed by co-ordination with German forces in Poland. Polish troops already fighting much stronger German forces on its west desperately tried to delay the capture of Warsaw. Consequently, Polish forces could not mount significant resistance against the Soviets. On 21 September, Marshal of the Soviet Union Voroshilov, German milItary attaché General Köstring, and other officers signed a formal agreement in Moscow co-ordinating military movements in Poland, including the "purging" of saboteurs and the Red Army assisting with destruction of the "enemy". Joint German–Soviet parades were held in Lvov and Brest-Litovsk, and the countries' military commanders met in the latter city. Stalin had decided in August that he was going to liquidate the Polish state, and a German–Soviet meeting in September addressed the future structure of the "Polish region." Soviet authorities immediately started a campaign of Sovietisation of the newly-acquired areas. The Soviets organised staged elections, the result of which was to become a legitimisation of the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland. Modification of secret protocols Eleven days after the Soviet invasion of the Polish Kresy, the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was modified by the German–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Demarcation, allotting Germany a larger part of Poland and transferring Lithuania, with the exception of the left bank of the River Scheschupe, the "Lithuanian Strip", from the envisioned German sphere to the Soviet sphere. On 28 September 1939, the Soviet Union and German Reich issued a joint declaration in which they declared: On 3 October, Friedrich Werner von der Schulenburg, the German ambassador in Moscow, informed Joachim Ribbentrop that the Soviet government was willing to cede the city of Vilnius and its environs. On 8 October 1939, a new Nazi-Soviet agreement was reached by an exchange of letters between Vyacheslav Molotov and the German ambassador. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were given no choice but to sign a so-called "Pact of Defence and Mutual Assistance", which permitted the Soviet Union to station troops in them. Soviet war with Finland and Katyn massacre After the Baltic states had been forced to accept treaties, Stalin turned his sights on Finland and was confident that its capitulation could be attained without great effort. The Soviets demanded territories on the Karelian Isthmus, the islands of the Gulf of Finland and a military base near the Finnish capital, Helsinki, which Finland rejected. The Soviets staged the shelling of Mainila and used it as a pretext to withdraw from the Soviet–Finnish Non-Aggression Pact. The Red Army attacked in November 1939. Simultaneously, Stalin set up a puppet government in the Finnish Democratic Republic. The leader of the Leningrad Military District, Andrei Zhdanov, commissioned a celebratory piece from Dmitri Shostakovich, Suite on Finnish Themes, to be performed as the marching bands of the Red Army would be parading through Helsinki. After Finnish defenses surprisingly held out for over three months and inflicted stiff losses on Soviet forces, under the command of Semyon Timoshenko, the Soviets settled for an interim peace. Finland ceded parts of Karelia and Salla (8% of Finnish territory), which resulted in approximately 422,000 Karelians (12% of Finland's population) losing their homes. Soviet official casualty counts in the war exceeded 200,000 although Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev later claimed that the casualties may have been one million. Around that time, after several Gestapo–NKVD Conferences, Soviet NKVD officers also conducted lengthy interrogations of 300,000 Polish POWs in camps that were a selection process to determine who would be killed. On 5 March 1940, in what would later be known as the Katyn massacre, 22,000 members of the military as well as intellectuals were executed, labelled "nationalists and counterrevolutionaries" or kept at camps and prisons in western Ukraine and Belarus. Soviet Union occupies the Baltic states and part of Romania In mid-June 1940, while international attention focused on the German invasion of France, Soviet NKVD troops raided border posts in Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. State administrations were liquidated and replaced by Soviet cadres, who deported or killed 34,250 Latvians, 75,000 Lithuanians and almost 60,000 Estonians. Elections took place, with a single pro-Soviet candidate listed for many positions, and the resulting people's assemblies immediately requesting admission into the Soviet Union, which was granted. (The Soviets annexed the whole of Lithuania, including the Šešupė area, which had been earmarked for Germany.) Finally, on 26 June, four days after the armistice between France and Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union issued an ultimatum that demanded Bessarabia and unexpectedly Northern Bukovina from Romania. Two days later, the Romanians acceded to the Soviet demands, and the Soviets occupied the territories. The Hertsa region was initially not requested by the Soviets but was later occupied by force after the Romanians had agreed to the initial Soviet demands. The subsequent waves of deportations began in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina. Beginnings of Operation Tannenberg and other Nazi atrocities At the end of October 1939, Germany enacted the death penalty for disobedience to the German occupation. Germany began a campaign of "Germanization", which meant assimilating the occupied territories politically, culturally, socially and economically into the German Reich. 50,000–200,000 Polish children were kidnapped to be Germanised. The elimination of Polish elites and intelligentsia was part of Generalplan Ost. The Intelligenzaktion, a plan to eliminate the Polish intelligentsia, Poland's 'leadership class', took place soon after the German invasion of Poland and lasted from fall of 1939 to the spring of 1940. As the result of the operation, in ten regional actions, about 60,000 Polish nobles, teachers, social workers, priests, judges and political activists were killed. It was continued in May 1940, when Germany launched AB-Aktion, More than 16,000 members of the intelligentsia were murdered in Operation Tannenberg alone. Germany also planned to incorporate all of the land into Nazi Germany. That effort resulted in the forced resettlement of two million Poles. Families were forced to travel in the severe winter of 1939–1940, leaving behind almost all of their possessions without compensation. As part of Operation Tannenberg alone, 750,000 Polish peasants were forced to leave, and their property was given to Germans. A further 330,000 were murdered. Germany planned the eventual move of ethnic Poles to Siberia. Although Germany used forced labourers in most other occupied countries, Poles and other Slavs were viewed as inferior by Nazi propaganda and thus better suited for such duties. Between 1 and 2.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the Reich for forced labour. All Polish males were made to perform forced labour. While ethnic Poles were subject to selective persecution, all ethnic Jews were targeted by the Reich. In the winter of 1939–40, about 100,000 Jews were thus deported to Poland. They were initially gathered into massive urban ghettos, such as the 380,000 held in the Warsaw Ghetto, where large numbers died of starvation and diseases under its harsh conditions, including 43,000 in the Warsaw Ghetto alone. Poles and ethnic Jews were imprisoned in nearly every camp of the extensive concentration camp system in German-occupied Poland and the Reich. In Auschwitz, which began operating on 14 June 1940, 1.1 million people perished. Romania and Soviet republics In the summer of 1940, fear of the Soviet Union, in conjunction with German support for the territorial demands of Romania's neighbours and the Romanian government's own miscalculations, resulted in more territorial losses for Romania. Between 28 June and 4 July, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and the Hertsa region of Romania. On 30 August, Ribbentrop and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano issued the Second Vienna Award, giving Northern Transylvania to Hungary. On 7 September, Romania ceded Southern Dobruja to Bulgaria (Axis-sponsored Treaty of Craiova). After various events over the following months, Romania increasingly took on the aspect of a German-occupied country. The Soviet-occupied territories were converted into republics of the Soviet Union. During the two years after the annexation, the Soviets arrested approximately 100,000 Polish citizens and deported between 350,000 and 1,500,000, of whom between 250,000 and 1,000,000 died, mostly civilians. Forced re-settlements into gulag labour camps and exile settlements in remote areas of the Soviet Union occurred. According to Norman Davies, almost half of them were dead by July 1940. Further secret protocol modifications settling borders and immigration issues On 10 January 1941, Germany and the Soviet Union signed an agreement settling several ongoing issues. Secret protocols in the new agreement modified the "Secret Additional Protocols" of the German–Soviet Boundary and Friendship Treaty, ceding the Lithuanian Strip to the Soviet Union in exchange for 7.5 million dollars (31.5 million Reichsmark). The agreement formally set the border between Germany and the Soviet Union between the Igorka River and the Baltic Sea. It also extended trade regulation of the 1940 German-Soviet Commercial Agreement until 1 August 1942, increased deliveries above the levels of the first year of that agreement, settled trading rights in the Baltics and Bessarabia, calculated the compensation for German property interests in the Baltic states that were now occupied by the Soviets and covered other issues. It also covered the migration to Germany within two-and-a-half months of ethnic Germans and German citizens in Soviet-held Baltic territories and the migration to the Soviet Union of Baltic and "White Russian" "nationals" in the German-held territories. Soviet–German relations Early political issues Before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was announced, Western communists denied that such a treaty would be signed. Herbert Biberman, a future member of the Hollywood Ten, denounced rumours as "Fascist propaganda." Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party USA, stated that "there is as much chance of agreement as of Earl Browder being elected president of the Chamber of Commerce." Gunther wrote, however, that some knew "communism and Fascism were more closely allied than was normally understood", and Ernst von Weizsäcker had told Nevile Henderson on 16 August that the Soviet Union would "join in sharing in the Polish spoils". In September 1939, the Comintern suspended all anti-Nazi and anti-fascist propaganda and explained that the war in Europe was a matter of capitalist states attacking one another for imperialist purposes. Western communists acted accordingly; although they had previously supported collective security, they now denounced Britain and France for going to war. When anti-German demonstrations erupted in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Comintern ordered the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia to employ all of its strength to paralyse "chauvinist elements". Moscow soon forced the French Communist Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain to adopt anti-war positions. On 7 September, Stalin called Georgi Dimitrov, who sketched a new Comintern line on the war that stated that the war was unjust and imperialist, which was approved by the secretariat of the Comintern on 9 September. Thus, western communist parties now had to oppose the war and to vote against war credits. Although the French communists had unanimously voted in Parliament for war credits on 2 September and declared their "unshakeable will" to defend the country on 19 September, the Comintern formally instructed | of the Chamber of Commerce." Gunther wrote, however, that some knew "communism and Fascism were more closely allied than was normally understood", and Ernst von Weizsäcker had told Nevile Henderson on 16 August that the Soviet Union would "join in sharing in the Polish spoils". In September 1939, the Comintern suspended all anti-Nazi and anti-fascist propaganda and explained that the war in Europe was a matter of capitalist states attacking one another for imperialist purposes. Western communists acted accordingly; although they had previously supported collective security, they now denounced Britain and France for going to war. When anti-German demonstrations erupted in Prague, Czechoslovakia, the Comintern ordered the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia to employ all of its strength to paralyse "chauvinist elements". Moscow soon forced the French Communist Party and the Communist Party of Great Britain to adopt anti-war positions. On 7 September, Stalin called Georgi Dimitrov, who sketched a new Comintern line on the war that stated that the war was unjust and imperialist, which was approved by the secretariat of the Comintern on 9 September. Thus, western communist parties now had to oppose the war and to vote against war credits. Although the French communists had unanimously voted in Parliament for war credits on 2 September and declared their "unshakeable will" to defend the country on 19 September, the Comintern formally instructed the party to condemn the war as imperialist on 27 September. By 1 October, the French communists advocated listening to German peace proposals, and leader Maurice Thorez deserted from the French Army on 4 October and fled to Russia. Other communists also deserted from the army. The Communist Party of Germany featured similar attitudes. In Die Welt, a communist newspaper published in Stockholm the exiled communist leader Walter Ulbricht opposed the Allies, stated that Britain represented "the most reactionary force in the world", and argued, "The German government declared itself ready for friendly relations with the Soviet Union, whereas the English–French war bloc desires a war against the socialist Soviet Union. The Soviet people and the working people of Germany have an interest in preventing the English war plan". Despite a warning by the Comintern, German tensions were raised when the Soviets stated in September that they must enter Poland to "protect" their ethnic Ukrainian and Belarusian brethren from Germany. Molotov later admitted to German officials that the excuse was necessary because the Kremlin could find no other pretext for the Soviet invasion. During the early months of the Pact, the Soviet foreign policy became critical of the Allies and more pro-German in turn. During the Fifth Session of the Supreme Soviet on 31 October 1939, Molotov analyzed the international situation, thus giving the direction for communist propaganda. According to Molotov, Germany had a legitimate interest in regaining its position as a great power, and the Allies had started an aggressive war in order to maintain the Versailles system. Expansion of raw materials and military trading Germany and the Soviet Union entered an intricate trade pact on 11 February 1940 that was over four times larger than the one that the two countries had signed in August 1939. The new trade pact helped Germany surmount a British blockade. In the first year, Germany received one million tons of cereals, half-a-million tons of wheat, 900,000 tons of oil, 100,000 tons of cotton, 500,000 tons of phosphates and considerable amounts of other vital raw materials, along with the transit of one million tons of soybeans from Manchuria. Those and other supplies were being transported through Soviet and occupied Polish territories. The Soviets were to receive a naval cruiser, the plans to the battleship Bismarck, heavy naval guns, other naval gear and 30 of Germany's latest warplanes, including the Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighters and Ju 88 bomber. The Soviets would also receive oil and electric equipment, locomotives, turbines, generators, diesel engines, ships, machine tools, and samples of German artillery, tanks, explosives, chemical-warfare equipment, and other items. The Soviets also helped Germany to avoid British naval blockades by providing a submarine base, Basis Nord, in the northern Soviet Union near Murmansk. That also provided a refueling and maintenance location and a takeoff point for raids and attacks on shipping. In addition, the Soviets provided Germany with access to the Northern Sea Route for both cargo ships and raiders though only the commerce raider used the route before the German invasion, which forced Britain to protect sea lanes in both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Summer deterioration of relations The Finnish and Baltic invasions began a deterioration of relations between the Soviets and Germany. Stalin's invasions were a severe irritant to Berlin since the intent to accomplish them had not been communicated to the Germans beforehand, and they prompted concern that Stalin was seeking to form an anti-German bloc. Molotov's reassurances to the Germans only intensified the Germans' mistrust. On 16 June, as the Soviets invaded Lithuania but before they had invaded Latvia and Estonia, Ribbentrop instructed his staff "to submit a report as soon as possible as to whether in the Baltic States a tendency to seek support from the Reich can be observed or whether an attempt was made to form a bloc." In August 1940, the Soviet Union briefly suspended its deliveries under its commercial agreement after relations were strained after disagreements over policy in Romania, the Soviet war with Finland, Germany's falling behind on its deliveries of goods under the pact and Stalin's worry that Hitler's war with the West might end quickly after France signed an armistice. The suspension created significant resource problems for Germany. By the end of August, relations had improved again, as the countries had redrawn the Hungarian and Romanian borders and settled some Bulgarian claims, and Stalin was again convinced that Germany would face a long war in the west with Britain's improvement in its air battle with Germany and the execution of an agreement between the United States and Britain regarding destroyers and bases. In early September however, Germany arranged its own occupation of Romania, targeting its oil fields. That move raised tensions with the Soviets, who responded that Germany was supposed to have consulted with the Soviet Union under Article III of the pact. German–Soviet Axis talks After Germany in September 1940 entered the Tripartite Pact with Japan and Italy, Ribbentrop wrote to Stalin, inviting Molotov to Berlin for negotiations aimed to create a 'continental bloc' of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union that would oppose Britain and the United States. Stalin sent Molotov to Berlin to negotiate the terms for the Soviet Union to join the Axis and potentially to enjoy the spoils of the pact. After negotiations during November 1940 on where to extend the Soviet sphere of influence, Hitler broke off talks and continued planning for the eventual attempts to invade the Soviet Union. Late relations In an effort to demonstrate peaceful intentions toward Germany, on 13 April 1941, the Soviets signed a neutrality pact with Japan, an Axis power. While Stalin had little faith in Japan's commitment to neutrality, he felt that the pact was important for its political symbolism to reinforce a public affection for Germany. Stalin felt that there was a growing split in German circles about whether Germany should initiate a war with the Soviet Union. Stalin did not know that Hitler had been secretly discussing an invasion of the Soviet Union since summer 1940 and that Hitler had ordered his military in late 1940 to prepare for war in the East, regardless of the parties' talks of a potential Soviet entry as a fourth Axis power. Termination Germany unilaterally terminated the pact at 03:15 on 22 June 1941 by launching a massive attack on the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. Stalin had ignored repeated warnings that Germany was likely to invade and ordered no "full-scale" mobilisation of forces although the mobilisation was ongoing. After the launch of the invasion, the territories gained by the Soviet Union as a result of the pact were lost in a matter of weeks. The southeastern part was absorbed into Greater Germany's General Government, and the rest was integrated with the Reichskommissariats Ostland and Ukraine. Within six months, the Soviet military had suffered 4.3 million casualties, and three million more had been captured. The lucrative export of Soviet raw materials to Germany over the course of the economic relations continued uninterrupted until the outbreak of hostilities. The Soviet exports in several key areas enabled Germany to maintain its stocks of rubber and grain from the first day of the invasion to October 1941. Aftermath Discovery of the secret protocol The German original of the secret protocols was presumably destroyed in the bombing of Germany, but in late 1943, Ribbentrop had ordered the most secret records of the German Foreign Office from 1933 onward, amounting to some 9,800 pages, to be microfilmed. When the various departments of the Foreign Office in Berlin were evacuated to Thuringia at the end of the war, Karl von Loesch, a civil servant who had worked for the chief interpreter Paul Otto Schmidt, was entrusted with the microfilm copies. He eventually received orders to destroy the secret documents but decided to bury the metal container with the microfilms as personal insurance for his future well-being. In May 1945, von Loesch approached the British Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Thomson with the request to transmit a personal letter to Duncan Sandys, Churchill's son-in-law. In the letter, von Loesch revealed that he had knowledge of the documents' whereabouts but expected preferential treatment in return. Thomson and his American counterpart, Ralph Collins, agreed to transfer von Loesch to Marburg, in the American zone if he would produce the microfilms. The microfilms contained a copy of the Non-Aggression Treaty as well as the Secret Protocol. Both documents were discovered as part of the microfilmed records in August 1945 by US State Department employee Wendell B. Blancke, the head of a special unit called "Exploitation German Archives" (EGA). News of the secret protocols first appeared during the Nuremberg trials. Alfred Seidl, the attorney for defendant Hans Frank, was able to place into evidence an affidavit that described them. It was written from memory by Nazi Foreign Office lawyer :de:Friedrich Gaus, who wrote the text and was present at its signing in Moscow. Later, Seidl obtained the German-language text of the secret protocols from an anonymous Allied source and attempted to place them into evidence while he was questioning witness Ernst von Weizsäcker, a former Foreign Office State Secretary. The Allied prosecutors objected, and the texts were not accepted into evidence, but Weizsäcker was permitted to describe them from memory, thus corroborating the Gaus affidavit. Finally, at the request of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter, American deputy prosecutor Thomas J. Dodd acquired a copy of the secret protocols from Seidl and had it translated into English. They were first published on 22 May 1946 in a front-page story in that newspaper. Later, in Britain, they were published by the Manchester Guardian. The protocols gained wider media attention when they were included in an official State Department collection, Nazi–Soviet Relations 1939–1941, edited by Raymond J. Sontag and James S. Beddie and published on 21 January 1948. The decision to publish the key documents on German–Soviet relations, including the treaty and protocol, had been taken already in spring 1947. Sontag and Beddie prepared the collection throughout the summer of 1947. In November 1947, President Harry S. Truman personally approved the publication, but it was held back in view of the Foreign Ministers Conference in London scheduled for December. Since negotiations at that conference did not prove to be constructive from an American point of view, the document edition was sent to press. The documents made headlines worldwide. State Department officials counted it as a success: "The Soviet Government was caught flat-footed in what was the first effective blow from our side in a clear-cut propaganda war." Despite publication of the recovered copy in western media, for decades, the official policy of the Soviet Union was to deny the existence of the secret protocol. The secret protocol's existence was officially denied until 1989. Vyacheslav Molotov, one of the signatories, went to his grave categorically rejecting its existence. The French Communist Party did not acknowledge the existence of the secret protocol until 1968, as the party de-Stalinized. On 23 August 1986, tens of thousands of demonstrators in 21 western cities, including New York, London, Stockholm, Toronto, Seattle, and Perth participated in Black Ribbon Day Rallies to draw attention to the secret protocols. Stalin's Falsifiers of History and Axis negotiations In response to the publication of the secret protocols and other secret German–Soviet relations documents in the State Department edition Nazi–Soviet Relations (1948), Stalin published Falsifiers of History, which included the claim that during the pact's operation, Stalin rejected Hitler's claim to share in a division of the world, without mentioning the Soviet offer to join the Axis. That version persisted, without exception, in historical studies, official accounts, memoirs, and textbooks published in the Soviet Union until the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The book also claimed that the Munich agreement was a "secret agreement" between Germany and "the west" and a "highly important phase in their policy aimed at goading the Hitlerite aggressors against the Soviet Union." Denial of the secret protocol For decades, it was the official policy of the Soviet Union to deny the existence of the secret protocol to the Soviet–German Pact. At the behest of Mikhail Gorbachev, Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev headed a commission investigating the existence of such a protocol. In December 1989, the commission concluded that the protocol had existed and revealed its findings to the Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union. As a result, the Congress passed the declaration confirming the existence of the secret protocols and condemning and denouncing them. The Soviet government thus finally acknowledged and denounced the Secret Treaty and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Head of State condemned the pact. Vladimir Putin condemned the pact as "immoral" but also defended it as a "necessary evil". At a press conference on 19 December 2019, Putin went further and announced that the signing of the pact was no worse than the 1938 Munich Agreement, which led to the partition of Czechoslovakia. Both successor states of the pact parties have declared the secret protocols to be invalid from the moment that they were signed: the Federal Republic of Germany on 1 September 1989 and the Soviet Union on 24 December 1989, following an examination of the microfilmed copy of the German originals. The Soviet copy of the original document was declassified in 1992 and published in a scientific journal in early 1993. In August 2009, in an article written for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact as "immoral". The new Russian nationalists and revisionists, including Russian negationist Alexander Dyukov and Nataliya Narotchnitskaya, whose book carried an approving foreword by the Russian foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, described the pact as a necessary measure because of the British and French failure to enter into an antifascist pact. Postwar commentary on motives of Stalin and Hitler Some scholars believe that, from the very beginning of the Tripartite negotiations between the Soviet Union, Great Britain and France, the Soviets clearly required the other parties to agree to a Soviet occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and for Finland to be included in the Soviet sphere of influence. On the timing of German rapprochement, many historians agree that the dismissal of Maxim Litvinov, whose Jewish ethnicity was viewed unfavourably by Nazi Germany, removed an obstacle to negotiations with Germany. Stalin immediately directed Molotov to "purge the ministry of Jews." Given Litvinov's prior attempts to create an anti-fascist coalition, association with the doctrine of collective security with France and Britain and a pro-Western orientation by the standards of the Kremlin, his dismissal indicated the existence of a Soviet option of rapprochement with Germany. Likewise, Molotov's appointment served as a signal to Germany that the Soviet Union was open to offers. The dismissal also signaled to France and Britain the existence of a potential negotiation option with Germany. One British official wrote that Litvinov's termination also meant the loss of an admirable technician or shock-absorber but that Molotov's "modus operandi" was "more truly Bolshevik than diplomatic or cosmopolitan." Carr argued that the Soviet Union's replacement of Litvinov with Molotov on 3 May 1939 indicated not an irrevocable shift towards alignment with Germany but rather was Stalin's way of engaging in hard bargaining with the British and the French by appointing a proverbial hard man to the Foreign Commissariat. Historian Albert Resis stated that the Litvinov dismissal gave the Soviets freedom to pursue faster German negotiations but that they did not abandon British–French talks. Derek Watson argued that Molotov could get the best deal with Britain and France because he was not encumbered with the baggage of collective security and could negotiate with Germany. Geoffrey Roberts argued that Litvinov's dismissal helped the Soviets with British–French talks because Litvinov doubted or maybe even opposed such discussions. Edward Hallett Carr, a frequent defender of Soviet policy, stated: "In return for 'non-intervention' Stalin secured a breathing space of immunity from German attack." According to Carr, the "bastion" created by means of the pact "was and could only be, a line of defense against potential German attack." According to Carr, an important advantage was that "if Soviet Russia had eventually to fight Hitler, the Western Powers would already be involved." However, during the last decades, that view has been disputed. Historian Werner Maser stated that "the claim that the Soviet Union was at the time threatened by Hitler, as Stalin supposed... is a legend, to whose creators Stalin himself belonged. In Maser's view, "neither Germany nor Japan were in a situation [of] invading the USSR even with the least perspective of success," which must not have been known to Stalin. Carr further stated that for a long time, the primary motive of Stalin's sudden change of course was assumed to be the fear of German aggressive intentions. Soviet sources have claimed that soon after the pact was signed, both Britain and the US showed understanding that the buffer zone was necessary to keep Hitler from advancing for some time and accepted the ostensible strategic reasoning; however, soon after World War II ended, those countries changed their view. Many Polish newspapers published numerous articles claiming that Russia must apologise to Poland for the pact. Two weeks after Soviet armies had entered the Baltic states, Berlin requested Finland to permit the transit of German troops, and five weeks later Hitler issued a secret directive "to take up the Russian problem, to think about war preparations," a war whose objective would include establishment of a Baltic confederation. Historians have debated whether Stalin was planning an invasion of German territory in the summer of 1941. Most historians agreed that the geopolitical differences between the Soviet Union and the Axis made war inevitable, and that Stalin had made extensive preparations for war and exploited the military conflict in Europe to his advantage. A number of German historians have debunked the claim that Operation Barbarossa was a preemptive strike, such as Andreas Hillgruber, Rolf-Dieter Müller, and Christian Hartmann, but they also acknowledge that the Soviets were aggressive to their neighbors. Remembrance and response The pact was a taboo subject in the postwar Soviet Union. In December |
the parades beginning after January 5 and the Twelfth Day of Christmas or Epiphany on January 6. Carnival celebrations end at midnight on Mardi Gras, a moveable feast related to the timing of Lent and Easter. The next day is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, the 40-day penitential season before Easter. In Mobile, locals often use the term Mardi Gras as a shorthand to refer to the entire Carnival season. During the Carnival season; the mystic societies build colorful floats and parade throughout downtown. Masked society members toss small gifts, known as 'throws,' to parade spectators. The mystic societies, which in essence are exclusive private clubs, also hold formal masquerade balls, usually by invitation only, and oriented to adults. Carnival was first celebrated in Mobile in 1703 when colonial French Catholic settlers carried out their traditional celebration at the Old Mobile Site, prior to the 1711 relocation of the city to the current site. Mobile's first Carnival society was established in 1711 with the Boeuf Gras Society (Fatted Ox Society). Celebrations were relatively small and consisted of local, private parties until the early 19th century. In 1830 Mobile's Cowbellion de Rakin Society was the first formally organized and masked mystic society in the United States to celebrate with a parade. The Cowbellions got their start when Michael Krafft, a cotton factor from Pennsylvania, began a parade with rakes, hoes, and cowbells. The Cowbellians introduced horse-drawn floats to the parades in 1840 with a parade entitled "Heathen Gods and Goddesses". The Striker's Independent Society, formed in 1843, is the oldest surviving mystic society in the United States. Carnival celebrations in Mobile were canceled during the American Civil War. In 1866 Joe Cain revived the Mardi Gras parades when he paraded through the city streets on Fat Tuesday while costumed as a fictional Chickasaw chief named Slacabamorinico. He celebrated the day in front of the occupying Union Army troops. In 2002, Mobile's Tricentennial celebrated with parades that represented all of the city's mystic societies. Founded in 2004, the Conde Explorers in 2005 were the first integrated Mardi Gras society to parade in downtown Mobile. The society has about a hundred members and welcomes men and women of all races. In addition to the parade and ball, the Conde Explorers hold several parties throughout the year. Its members also perform volunteer work. The Conde Explorers were featured in the award-winning documentary, The Order of Myths (2008), by Margaret Brown about Mobile's Mardi Gras. Archives and libraries The National African American Archives and Museum features the history of African-American participation in Mardi Gras, authentic artifacts from the era of slavery, and portraits and biographies of famous African Americans. The University of South Alabama Archives houses primary source material relating to the history of Mobile and southern Alabama, as well as the university's history. The archives are located on the ground floor of the USA Spring Hill Campus and are open to the general public. The Mobile Municipal Archives contains the extant records of the City of Mobile, dating from the city's creation as a municipality by the Mississippi Territory in 1814. The majority of the original records of Mobile's colonial history, spanning the years 1702 through 1813, are housed in Paris, London, Seville, and Madrid. The Mobile Genealogical Society Library and Media Center is located at the Holy Family Catholic Church and School complex. It features handwritten manuscripts and published materials that are available for use in genealogical research. The Mobile Public Library system serves Mobile and consists of eight branches across Mobile County; its large local history and genealogy division is housed in a facility next to the newly restored and enlarged Ben May Main Library on Government Street. The Saint Ignatius Archives, Museum and Theological Research Library contains primary sources, artifacts, documents, photographs and publications that pertain to the history of Saint Ignatius Church and School, the Catholic history of the city, and the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Arts and entertainment The Mobile Museum of Art features permanent exhibits that span several centuries of art and culture. The museum was expanded in 2002 to approximately . The permanent exhibits include the African and Asian Collection Gallery, Altmayer Gallery (American art), Katharine C. Cochrane Gallery of American Fine Art, Maisel European Gallery, Riddick Glass Gallery, Smith Crafts Gallery, and the Ann B. Hearin Gallery (contemporary works). The Centre for the Living Arts is an organization that operates the historic Saenger Theatre and Space 301, a contemporary art gallery. The Saenger Theatre opened in 1927 as a movie palace. Today it is a performing arts center and serves as a small concert venue for the city. It is home to the Mobile Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Scott Speck. Space 301 Gallery and Studio was initially housed adjacent to the Saenger, but moved to its own space in 2008. The building, donated to the centre by the Press-Register after its relocation to a new modern facility, underwent a $5.2 million renovation and redesign prior to opening. The Crescent Theater in downtown Mobile has been showing arthouse films since 2008. The Mobile Civic Center contains three facilities under one roof. The building has an arena, a theater and an exposition hall. It is the primary concert venue for the city and hosts a wide variety of events. It is home to the Mobile Opera and the Mobile Ballet. The 60-year-old Mobile Opera averages about 1,200 attendees per performance. A wide variety of events are held at Mobile's Arthur C. Outlaw Convention Center. It contains a exhibit hall, a grand ballroom, and sixteen meeting rooms. The city has hosts the Greater Gulf State Fair, held each October since 1955. The city also hosted BayFest, an annual three-day music festival with more than 125 live musical acts on multiple stages spread throughout downtown; it now holds Ten Sixty Five festival, a free music festival. The Mobile Theatre Guild is a nonprofit community theatre that has served the city since 1947. It is a member of the Mobile Arts Council, the Alabama Conference of Theatre and Speech, the Southeastern Theatre Conference, and the American Association of Community Theatres. Mobile is also host to the Joe Jefferson Players, Alabama's oldest continually running community theatre. The group was named in honor of the famous comedic actor Joe Jefferson, who spend part of his teenage years in Mobile. The Players debuted their first production on December 17, 1947. Drama Camp Productions and Sunny Side Theater is Mobile's home for children's theater and fun. The group began doing summer camps in 2002, expanded to a year-round facility in 2008 and recently moved into the Azalea City Center for the Arts, a community of drama, music, art, photography, and dance teachers. The group has produced Broadway shows including "Miracle on 34th Street", "Honk", "Fame", and "Hairspray". The Mobile Arts Council is an umbrella organization for the arts in Mobile. It was founded in 1955 as a project of the Junior League of Mobile with the mission to increase cooperation among artistic and cultural organizations in the area and to provide a forum for problems in art, music, theater, and literature. Tourism Museums Mobile is home to a variety of museums. Battleship Memorial Park is a military park on the shore of Mobile Bay and features the World War II era battleship , the World War II era submarine , Korean War and Vietnam War Memorials, and a variety of historical military equipment. The History Museum of Mobile showcases 300 plus years of Mobile history and prehistory. It is housed in the historic Old City Hall (1857), a National Historic Landmark. The Oakleigh Historic Complex features three house museums that attempt to interpret the lives of people from three strata of 19th century society in Mobile, that of the enslaved, the working class, and the upper class. The Mobile Carnival Museum, housing the city's Mardi Gras history and memorabilia, documents the variety of floats, costumes, and displays seen during the history of the festival season. The Bragg-Mitchell Mansion (1855), Richards DAR House (1860), and the Condé-Charlotte House (1822) are historic, furnished antebellum house museums. Fort Morgan (1819), Fort Gaines (1821), and Historic Blakeley State Park all figure predominantly in local American Civil War history. The Mobile Medical Museum is housed in the historic French colonial-style Vincent-Doan House (1827). It features artifacts and resources that chronicle the long history of medicine in Mobile. The Phoenix Fire Museum is located in the restored Phoenix Volunteer Fire Company Number 6 building and features the history of fire companies in Mobile from their organization in 1838. The Mobile Police Department Museum features exhibits that chronicle the history of law enforcement in Mobile. The Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center is a non-profit science center located in downtown. It features permanent and traveling exhibits, an IMAX dome theater, a digital 3D virtual theater, and a hands-on chemistry laboratory. The Dauphin Island Sea Lab is located south of the city, on Dauphin Island near the mouth of Mobile Bay. It houses the Estuarium, an aquarium which illustrates the four habitats of the Mobile Bay ecosystem: the river delta, bay, barrier islands and Gulf of Mexico. Parks and other attractions The Mobile Botanical Gardens feature a variety of flora spread over . It contains the Millie McConnell Rhododendron Garden with 1,000 evergreen and native azaleas and the Longleaf Pine Habitat. Bellingrath Gardens and Home, located on Fowl River, is a botanical garden and historic mansion that dates to the 1930s. The 5 Rivers Delta Resource Center is a facility that allows visitors to learn about and access the Mobile, Tensaw, Apalachee, Middle, Blakeley, and Spanish rivers. It was established to serve as an easily accessible gateway to the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. In addition to offering several boat and adventure tours, it contains a small theater; exhibit hall; meeting facilities; walking trails; a canoe and kayak landing. Mobile has more than 45 public parks within its limits, with some that are of special note. Bienville Square is a historic park in the Lower Dauphin Street Historic District. It assumed its current form in 1850 and is named for Mobile's founder, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. It was once the principal gathering place for residents, when the city was smaller, and remains popular today. Cathedral Square is a one-block performing arts park, also in the Lower Dauphin Street Historic District, which is overlooked by the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. The Fort of Colonial Mobile is a reconstruction of the city's original Fort Condé, built on the original fort's footprint. It serves as the official welcome center and a colonial-era living history museum. Spanish Plaza is a downtown park that honors the Spanish phase of the city between 1780 and 1813. It features the Arches of Friendship, a fountain presented to Mobile by the city of Málaga, Spain. Langan Park, the largest of the parks at , features lakes, natural spaces, and contains the Mobile Museum of Art, Azalea City Golf Course, Mobile Botanical Gardens and Playhouse in the Park. Historic architecture Mobile has antebellum architectural examples of Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, and Creole cottage. Later architectural styles found in the city include the various Victorian types, shotgun types, Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, Beaux-Arts and many others. The city currently has nine major historic districts: Old Dauphin Way, Oakleigh Garden, Lower Dauphin Street, Leinkauf, De Tonti Square, Church Street East, Ashland Place, Campground, and Midtown. Mobile has a number of historic structures in the city, including numerous churches and private homes. Mobile's historic churches include Christ Church Cathedral, the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Emanuel AME Church, Government Street Presbyterian Church, St. Louis Street Missionary Baptist Church, State Street AME Zion Church, Stone Street Baptist Church, Trinity Episcopal Church, St. Francis Street Methodist Church, Saint Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, Saint Francis Xavier Catholic Church, Saint Matthew's Catholic Church, Saint Paul's Episcopal Chapel, and Saint Vincent de Paul. The Sodality Chapel and St. Joseph's Chapel at Spring Hill College are two historic churches on that campus. Two historic Roman Catholic convents survive, the Convent and Academy of the Visitation and the Convent of Mercy. Barton Academy is a historic Greek Revival school building and local landmark on Government Street. The Bishop Portier House and the Carlen House are two of the many surviving examples of Creole cottages in the city. The Mobile City Hospital and the United States Marine Hospital are both restored Greek Revival hospital buildings that predate the Civil War. The Washington Firehouse No. 5 is a Greek Revival fire station, built in 1851. The Hunter House is an example of the Italianate style and was built by a successful 19th-century African American businesswoman. The Shepard House is a good example of the Queen Anne style. The Scottish Rite Temple is the only surviving example of Egyptian Revival architecture in the city. The Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Passenger Terminal is an example of the Mission Revival style. The city has several historic cemeteries that were established shortly after the colonial era. They replaced the colonial Campo Santo, of which no trace remains. The Church Street Graveyard contains above-ground tombs and monuments spread over and was founded in 1819, during the height of yellow fever epidemics. The nearby Magnolia Cemetery was established in 1836 and served as Mobile's primary burial site during the 19th and early 20th centuries, with approximately 80,000 burials. It features tombs and many intricately carved monuments and statues. The Catholic Cemetery was established in 1848 by the Archdiocese of Mobile and covers more than . It contains plots for the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, Little Sisters of the Poor, Sisters of Charity, and Sisters of Mercy, in addition to many other historically significant burials. Mobile's Jewish community dates back to the 1820s and the city has two historic Jewish cemeteries, Sha'arai Shomayim Cemetery and Ahavas Chesed Cemetery. Sha'arai Shomayim is the older of the two. Demographics 2020 census As of the 2020 United States census, there were 187,041 people, 77,628 households, and 41,260 families residing in the city. 2010 census The 2010 United States Census determined that there were 195,111 people residing within the city limits of Mobile. Mobile is the center of Alabama's second-largest metropolitan area, which consists of all of Mobile County. Metropolitan Mobile is estimated to have a population of 413,936 in 2012. The 2010 census indicated that there were 78,959 households, out of which 21,073 had children under the age of 18 living with them, 28,073 were married couples living together, 17,037 had a female householder with no husband present, 3,579 had a male householder with no wife present, and 30,270 were non-families. 25,439 of all households were made up of individuals, and 8,477 had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The racial makeup of the city was 50.6% Black or African American, 45.0% White, 0.3% Native American, 1.8% Asian, 0.0% Pacific Islander, 0.9% from other races, 1.4% from two or more races, and 2.4% of the population were Latino. Non-Hispanic Whites were 43.9% of the population in 2010, down from 62.1% in 1980. The average household size was 2.4 and the average family size was 3.07. Estimated same-sex couple households comprised 0.3% of all households in 2010. The age distribution of the population in 2010 consisted of 6.7% under the age of five years, 75.9% over 18, and 13.7% over 65. The median age was 35.7 years. The male population was 47.0% and the female population was 53.0%. The median income for a household in the city was $37,056 for 2006 to 2010. The per capita income for the city was $22,401. Government Since 1985 the government of Mobile has consisted of a mayor and a seven-member city council. The mayor is elected at-large, and the council members are elected from each of the seven city council single-member districts (SMDs). A supermajority of five votes is required to conduct council business. This form of city government was chosen by the voters after the previous form of government, which had three city commissioners, each elected at-large, was ruled in 1975 to substantially dilute the minority vote and violate the Voting Rights Act in Bolden v. City of Mobile. The three at-large commissioners each required a majority vote to win. Due to appeals, the case took time to reach settlement and establishment of a new electoral system. Municipal elections are held every four years and are nonpartisan. The first mayor elected under the new system of single-member district (SMD) voting was Arthur R. Outlaw, who served his second term as mayor from 1985 to 1989. His first term had been under the old system, from 1967 to 1968. Mike Dow defeated Outlaw in the 1989 election; he was re-elected, serving as mayor for four terms, from 1989 to 2005. His "The String of Pearls" initiative, a series of projects designed to stimulate redevelopment of the city's core, is credited with reviving much of downtown Mobile. Upon his retirement, Dow endorsed Sam Jones as his successor. Sam Jones was elected in 2005 as the first African-American mayor of Mobile. He was re-elected for a second term in 2009 without opposition. His administration continued the focus on downtown redevelopment and bringing industries to the city. He ran for a third term in 2013 but was defeated by Sandy Stimpson. Stimpson took office on November 4, 2013, and was re-elected on August 22, 2017. As of January 2022, the seven-member city council is made up of Cory Penn from District 1, William Carroll from District 2, C.J. Small from District 3, Ben Reynolds from District 4, Joel Daves from District 5, Scott Jones from District 6, and Gina Gregory from District 7. Education Public facilities Public schools in Mobile are operated by the Mobile County Public School System. The Mobile County Public School System has an enrollment of approximately 55,200 students at 88 schools, employs approximately 7,026 public school employees, and had a budget in 2020-2021 of $623 million. The State of Alabama operates the Alabama School of Mathematics and Science on Dauphin Street in Mobile, which boards advanced Alabama high school students. It was founded in 1989 to identify, challenge, and educate future leaders. Private facilities Mobile also has a large number of private schools, most of them parochial in nature. Many belong to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Mobile. The private Catholic institutions include McGill-Toolen Catholic High School (1896), Corpus Christi School, Little Flower Catholic School (1934), Most Pure Heart of Mary Catholic School (1900), Saint Dominic School (1961), Saint Ignatius School (1952), Saint Mary Catholic School (1867), Saint Pius X Catholic School (1957), and Saint Vincent DePaul Catholic School (1976). Notable private Protestant institutions include St. Paul's Episcopal School (1947), Mobile Christian School (1961), St. Lukes Episcopal School (1961), Cottage Hill Baptist School System (1961), Faith Academy (1967), and Trinity Lutheran School (1955). UMS-Wright Preparatory School is an independent co-educational preparatory school. It assumed its current configuration in 1988, when the University Military School (founded 1893) and the Julius T. Wright School for Girls (1923) merged to form UMS-Wright. Tertiary Primary and secondary Major colleges and universities in Mobile that are accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools include the University of South Alabama, Spring Hill College, the University of Mobile, Faulkner University, and Bishop State Community College. Undergraduate and postgraduate The University of South Alabama is a public, doctoral-level university established in 1963. The university is composed of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Mitchell College of Business, the College of Education, the College of Engineering, the College of Medicine, the Doctor of Pharmacy Program, the College of Nursing, the School of Computing, and the School of Continuing Education and Special Programs. Faulkner University is a four-year private Church of Christ-affiliated university based in Montgomery, Alabama. The Mobile campus was established in 1975 and offers bachelor's degrees in Business Administration, Management of Human Resources, and Criminal Justice. It also offers associate degrees in Business Administration, Business Information Systems, Computer & Information Science, Criminal Justice, Informatics, Legal Studies, Arts, and Science. Spring Hill College, chartered in 1830, was the first Catholic college in the southeastern United States and is the third oldest Jesuit college in the country. This four-year private college offers graduate programs in Business Administration, Education, Liberal Arts, Nursing (MSN), and Theological Studies. Undergraduate divisions and programs include the Division of Business, the Communications/Arts Division, International Studies, Inter-divisional Studies, the Language and Literature Division, Bachelor of Science in Nursing, Philosophy and Theology, Political Science, the Sciences Division, the Social Sciences Division, and the Teacher Education Division. The University of Mobile is a four-year private Baptist-affiliated university in the neighboring city of Prichard that was founded in 1961. It consists of the College of Arts and Sciences, School of Business, School of Christian Studies, School of Education, the School of Leadership Development, and the School of Nursing. Community college Bishop State Community College, founded in 1927, is a public, historically African American, community college. Bishop State has four campuses in Mobile and offers a wide array of associate degrees. Vocational Several post-secondary, vocational-type institutions have a campus in Mobile. These include the Alabama Institute Of Real Estate, American Academy Of Hypnosis, Bealle School Of Real Estate, Charles Academy Of Beauty Culture, Fortis College, Virginia College, ITT Technical Institute, Remington College and White And Sons Barber College. Healthcare Mobile serves the central Gulf Coast as a regional center for medicine, with over 850 physicians and 175 dentists. There are four major medical centers within the city limits. Mobile Infirmary Medical Center has 704 beds and is the largest nonprofit hospital in the state. It was founded in 1910. Providence Hospital has 349 beds. It was founded in 1854 by the Daughters of Charity from Emmitsburg, Maryland. The University of South Alabama Medical Center has 346 beds. Its roots go back to 1830 with the old city-owned Mobile City Hospital and associated medical school. A teaching hospital, it is designated as Mobile's only level I trauma center by the Alabama Department of Public Health. It is also a regional burn center. Springhill Medical Center, with 252 beds, was founded in 1975. It is Mobile's only for-profit facility. Additionally, the University of South Alabama operates the University of South Alabama Children's and Women's Hospital with 219 beds, dedicated exclusively to the care of women and minors. In 2008, the University of South Alabama opened the USA Mitchell Cancer Center Institute. The center is home to the first academic cancer research center in the central Gulf Coast region. Mobile Infirmary Medical Center operated Infirmary West, formerly Knollwood Hospital, with 100 acute-care beds, but closed the facility at the end of October 2012 due to declining revenues. BayPointe Hospital and Children's Residential Services, with 94-beds, is the only psychiatric hospital in the city. It houses a residential unit for children, an acute unit for children and adolescents, and an age-segregated involuntary hospital unit for adults undergoing evaluation ordered by the Mobile Probate Court. The city has a broad array of outpatient surgical centers, emergency clinics, home health care services, assisted-living facilities and skilled nursing facilities. Economy Aerospace, steel, ship building, retail, services, construction, medicine, and manufacturing are Mobile's major industries. After having economic decline for several decades, Mobile's economy began to rebound in the late 1980s. Between 1993 and 2003 roughly 13,983 new jobs were created as 87 new companies were founded and 399 existing companies were expanded. Defunct companies that had been founded or based in Mobile included Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company, Delchamps, and Gayfers. Current companies that were formerly based in the city include Checkers, Minolta-QMS, Morrison's, and the Waterman Steamship Corporation. In addition to those discussed below, AlwaysHD, Foosackly's, Integrity Media, and Volkert, Inc. are headquartered in Mobile. Major industry Port of Mobile Mobile's Alabama State Docks underwent the largest expansion in its history in the early 21st century. It expanded its container processing and storage facility and increased container storage at the docks by over 1,000% at a cost of over $300 million, a project completed in 2005. Despite the expansion of its container capabilities and the addition of two massive new cranes, the port went from 9th largest to the 12th largest by tonnage in the nation from 2008 to 2010. Shipyards Shipbuilding began to make a major comeback in Mobile in 1999 with the founding of Austal USA. A subsidiary of the Australian company Austal, it expanded its production facility for United States defense and commercial aluminum shipbuilding on Blakeley Island in 2005. Austal announced in October 2012, after winning a new defense contract and completing another building within their complex on the island, that it would expand its workforce from 3,000 to 4,500 employees. Atlantic Marine operated a major shipyard at the former Alabama Drydock and Shipbuilding Company site on Pinto Island. It was acquired by British defense conglomerate BAE Systems in May 2010 for $352 million. Doing business as BAE Systems Southeast Shipyards, the company continues to operate the site as a full-service shipyard, employing approximately 600 workers with plans to expand. Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley The Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley is an industrial complex and airport located south of the central business district of the city. It is the largest industrial and transportation complex in the region, having more than 70 companies, many of which are aerospace, spread over . Notable employers at Brookley include Airbus North America Engineering (Airbus Military North America's facilities are at the Mobile Regional Airport), ST Aerospace Mobile (a division of ST Engineering), and Continental Motors. Plans for an Airbus A320 family aircraft assembly plant in Mobile were formally announced by Airbus CEO Fabrice Brégier from the Mobile Convention Center on July 2, 2012. The plans include a $600 million factory at the Brookley Aeroplex for the assembly of the A319, A320 and A321 aircraft. It was planned to employ up roughly 1,000 full-time workers when fully operational. Construction began with a groundbreaking ceremony on April 8, 2013, with it becoming operable by 2015 and producing up to 50 aircraft per year by 2017. The assembly plant is the company's first factory to be built within the United States. It was announced on February 1, 2013, that Airbus had hired Alabama-based Hoar Construction to oversee construction of the facility. The factory officially opened on September 14, 2015, covering one million square feet on 53 acres of flat grassland. On October 16, 2017, Airbus announced a partnership with Bombardier Aerospace, taking over a majority share of the Bombardier CSeries airliner program. As a result of this partnership, Airbus plans to open an assembly line for CSeries aircraft in Mobile, particularly to serve the US market. This effort may allow the companies to circumvent high import tariffs on the CSeries family. The aircraft was renamed the Airbus A220 on July 10, 2018. Production started in August 2019; the first A220 from the new line is due to be delivered to Delta in the third quarter of 2020. ThyssenKrupp German technology conglomerate ThyssenKrupp broke ground on a $4.65 billion combined stainless and carbon steel processing facility in Calvert, a few miles north of Mobile, in 2007. It was originally projected to eventually employ 2,700 people. The facility became operational in July 2010. The company put both its carbon mill in Calvert and a steel slab-making unit in Rio de Janeiro up for sale in May 2012, citing rising production costs and a worldwide decrease in demand. ThyssenKrupp's stainless steel division, Inoxum, including the stainless portion of the Calvert plant, was sold to Finnish stainless steel company Outokumpu Oyi in 2012. Top employers According to Mobile's 2019 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the top employers in the city during 2019 were: Unemployment rate The United States Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment rate (not seasonally adjusted) for the Mobile Metropolitan Statistical Area was 7.5% for July 2013, compared with an unadjusted rate of 6.6% for Alabama as a whole and 7.4% for the entire nation. Transportation Air Local airline passengers are served by the Mobile Regional Airport, with direct connections to four major hub airports. It is served by American Eagle, with service to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and Charlotte/Douglas International Airport; United Express, with service to George Bush Intercontinental Airport and Delta Connection, with service to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. The Mobile Downtown Airport at the Brookley Aeroplex serves corporate, cargo, and private aircraft. Cycling paths In an effort to leverage Mobile's waterways for recreational use, as opposed to simply industrial use, The Three Mile Creek Greenway Trail is being designed and implemented under the instruction of the City Council. The linear park will ultimately span seven miles, from Langan (Municipal) Park to Dr. Martin Luther King Junior Avenue, and include trailheads, sidewalks, and bike lanes. The existing greenway is centered at Tricentennial Park. Other trails include the paved Mobile Airport Perimeter Trail, encircling the Mobile Downtown Airport and mountain biking trails on the west side of the University of South Alabama. Rail Mobile is served by four Class I railroads, including the Canadian National Railway (CNR), CSX Transportation (CSX), the Kansas City Southern Railway (KCS), and the Norfolk Southern Railway (NS). The Alabama and Gulf Coast Railway (AGR), a Class III railroad, links Mobile to | the United States Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. The federal district court ordered that the three students be admitted to Murphy for the 1964 school year, leading to the desegregation of Mobile County's school system. The civil rights movement gained congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, eventually ending legal segregation and regaining effective suffrage for African Americans. But whites in the state had more than one way to reduce African Americans' voting power. Maintaining the city commission form of government with at-large voting resulted in all positions being elected by the white majority, as African Americans could not command a majority for their candidates in the informally segregated city. In 1969 Brookley Air Force Base was closed by the Department of Defense, dealing Mobile's economy a severe blow. The closing resulted in a 10% unemployment rate in the city. This and other factors related to industrial restructuring ushered in a period of economic depression that lasted through the 1970s. The loss of jobs created numerous problems and resulted in loss of population as residents moved away for work. Mobile's city commission form of government was challenged and finally overturned in 1982 in City of Mobile v. Bolden, which was remanded by the United States Supreme Court to the district court. Finding that the city had adopted a commission form of government in 1911 and at-large positions with discriminatory intent, the court proposed that the three members of the city commission should be elected from single-member districts, likely ending their division of executive functions among them. Mobile's state legislative delegation in 1985 finally enacted a mayor-council form of government, with seven members elected from single-member districts. This was approved by voters. As white conservatives increasingly entered the Republican Party in the late 20th century, African-American residents of the city have elected members of the Democratic Party as their candidates of choice. Since the change to single-member districts, more women and African Americans were elected to the council than under the at-large system. Beginning in the late 1980s, newly elected mayor Mike Dow and the city council began an effort termed the "String of Pearls Initiative" to make Mobile into a competitive city. The city initiated construction of numerous new facilities and projects, and the restoration of hundreds of historic downtown buildings and homes. City and county leaders also made efforts to attract new business ventures to the area. Geography and climate Geography Mobile is located in the southwestern corner of the U.S. state of Alabama. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , with of it being land, and , or 26.1% of the total, being covered by water. The elevation in Mobile ranges from on Water Street in downtown to at the Mobile Regional Airport. Neighborhoods Mobile has a number of notable historic neighborhoods. These include Ashland Place, Campground, Church Street East, De Tonti Square, Leinkauf, Lower Dauphin Street, Midtown, Oakleigh Garden, Old Dauphin Way, Spring Hill, and Toulminville. Climate Mobile's geographical location on the Gulf of Mexico provides a mild subtropical climate (Köppen Cfa), with hot, humid summers and mild, rainy winters. The record low temperature was , set on February 13, 1899, and the record high was , set on August 29, 2000. A 2007 study by WeatherBill, Inc. determined that Mobile is the wettest city in the contiguous 48 states, with of average annual rainfall over a 30-year period. Mobile averages 120 days per year with at least of rain. Precipitation is heavy year-round. On average, July and August are the wettest months, with frequent and often-heavy shower and thunderstorm activity. October stands out as a slightly drier month than all others. Snow is rare in Mobile, with its last snowfall occurring on December 8, 2017; before this, the last snowfall had been nearly four years earlier, on January 27, 2014. Mobile is occasionally affected by major tropical storms and hurricanes. The city suffered a major natural disaster on the night of September 12, 1979, when category-3 Hurricane Frederic passed over the heart of the city. The storm caused tremendous damage to Mobile and the surrounding area. Mobile had moderate damage from Hurricane Opal on October 4, 1995, and Hurricane Ivan on September 16, 2004. Mobile suffered millions of dollars in damage from Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005, which damaged much of the Gulf Coast cities. A storm surge of , topped by higher waves, damaged eastern sections of the city with extensive flooding in downtown, the Battleship Parkway, and the elevated Jubilee Parkway. As can be seen in the above 2005 photograph, floodwaters covered stairs of the entrance to the Federal Courthouse, located three blocks from the waterfront. Christmas Day tornado In late December 2012, the city suffered two tornado hits. On December 25, 2012, at 4:54 pm, a large wedge tornado touched down in the city. The tornado rapidly intensified as it moved north-northeast at speeds of up to . The path took the tornado into Midtown, causing damage or destruction to at least 100 structures. The heaviest damage to houses was along Carlen Street, Rickarby Place, Dauphin Street, Old Shell Road, Margaret Street, Silverwood Street, and Springhill Avenue. In addition to residential structures, the tornado caused significant damage to the Carmelite Monastery, Little Flower Catholic Church, commercial real estate along Airport Boulevard and Government Street in the Midtown at the Loop neighborhood, Murphy High School, Trinity Episcopal Church, Springhill Avenue Temple, and Mobile Infirmary Hospital before moving into the neighboring city of Prichard. The tornado was classified as an EF2 tornado by the National Weather Service on December 26. The path taken through the city was just a short distance east of the path taken days earlier, on December 20, by an EF1 tornado which had touched down near Davidson High School and taken a path ending in Prichard. Initial damage estimates for insured and uninsured ranged from $140 to $150 million. Culture Mobile's French and Spanish colonial history has given it a culture distinguished by French, Spanish, Creole, African and Catholic heritage, in addition to later British and American influences. It is distinguished from all other cities in the state of Alabama. The annual Carnival celebration is perhaps the best example of its differences. Mobile is the birthplace of the celebration of Mardi Gras in the United States and has the oldest celebration, dating to the early 18th century during the French colonial period. Carnival in Mobile evolved over the course of 300 years from a beginning as a sedate French Catholic tradition into the mainstream multi-week celebration that today bridges a spectrum of cultures. Mobile's official cultural ambassadors are the Azalea Trail Maids, meant to embody the ideals of Southern hospitality.Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Back Roads (1981) were shot in Mobile. Carnival and Mardi Gras The Carnival season has expanded throughout the late fall and winter: balls in the city may be scheduled as early as November, with the parades beginning after January 5 and the Twelfth Day of Christmas or Epiphany on January 6. Carnival celebrations end at midnight on Mardi Gras, a moveable feast related to the timing of Lent and Easter. The next day is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent, the 40-day penitential season before Easter. In Mobile, locals often use the term Mardi Gras as a shorthand to refer to the entire Carnival season. During the Carnival season; the mystic societies build colorful floats and parade throughout downtown. Masked society members toss small gifts, known as 'throws,' to parade spectators. The mystic societies, which in essence are exclusive private clubs, also hold formal masquerade balls, usually by invitation only, and oriented to adults. Carnival was first celebrated in Mobile in 1703 when colonial French Catholic settlers carried out their traditional celebration at the Old Mobile Site, prior to the 1711 relocation of the city to the current site. Mobile's first Carnival society was established in 1711 with the Boeuf Gras Society (Fatted Ox Society). Celebrations were relatively small and consisted of local, private parties until the early 19th century. In 1830 Mobile's Cowbellion de Rakin Society was the first formally organized and masked mystic society in the United States to celebrate with a parade. The Cowbellions got their start when Michael Krafft, a cotton factor from Pennsylvania, began a parade with rakes, hoes, and cowbells. The Cowbellians introduced horse-drawn floats to the parades in 1840 with a parade entitled "Heathen Gods and Goddesses". The Striker's Independent Society, formed in 1843, is the oldest surviving mystic society in the United States. Carnival celebrations in Mobile were canceled during the American Civil War. In 1866 Joe Cain revived the Mardi Gras parades when he paraded through the city streets on Fat Tuesday while costumed as a fictional Chickasaw chief named Slacabamorinico. He celebrated the day in front of the occupying Union Army troops. In 2002, Mobile's Tricentennial celebrated with parades that represented all of the city's mystic societies. Founded in 2004, the Conde Explorers in 2005 were the first integrated Mardi Gras society to parade in downtown Mobile. The society has about a hundred members and welcomes men and women of all races. In addition to the parade and ball, the Conde Explorers hold several parties throughout the year. Its members also perform volunteer work. The Conde Explorers were featured in the award-winning documentary, The Order of Myths (2008), by Margaret Brown about Mobile's Mardi Gras. Archives and libraries The National African American Archives and Museum features the history of African-American participation in Mardi Gras, authentic artifacts from the era of slavery, and portraits and biographies of famous African Americans. The University of South Alabama Archives houses primary source material relating to the history of Mobile and southern Alabama, as well as the university's history. The archives are located on the ground floor of the USA Spring Hill Campus and are open to the general public. The Mobile Municipal Archives contains the extant records of the City of Mobile, dating from the city's creation as a municipality by the Mississippi Territory in 1814. The majority of the original records of Mobile's colonial history, spanning the years 1702 through 1813, are housed in Paris, London, Seville, and Madrid. The Mobile Genealogical Society Library and Media Center is located at the Holy Family Catholic Church and School complex. It features handwritten manuscripts and published materials that are available for use in genealogical research. The Mobile Public Library system serves Mobile and consists of eight branches across Mobile County; its large local history and genealogy division is housed in a facility next to the newly restored and enlarged Ben May Main Library on Government Street. The Saint Ignatius Archives, Museum and Theological Research Library contains primary sources, artifacts, documents, photographs and publications that pertain to the history of Saint Ignatius Church and School, the Catholic history of the city, and the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Arts and entertainment The Mobile Museum of Art features permanent exhibits that span several centuries of art and culture. The museum was expanded in 2002 to approximately . The permanent exhibits include the African and Asian Collection Gallery, Altmayer Gallery (American art), Katharine C. Cochrane Gallery of American Fine Art, Maisel European Gallery, Riddick Glass Gallery, Smith Crafts Gallery, and the Ann B. Hearin Gallery (contemporary works). The Centre for the Living Arts is an organization that operates the historic Saenger Theatre and Space 301, a contemporary art gallery. The Saenger Theatre opened in 1927 as a movie palace. Today it is a performing arts center and serves as a small concert venue for the city. It is home to the Mobile Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Maestro Scott Speck. Space 301 Gallery and Studio was initially housed adjacent to the Saenger, but moved to its own space in 2008. The building, donated to the centre by the Press-Register after its relocation to a new modern facility, underwent a $5.2 million renovation and redesign prior to opening. The Crescent Theater in downtown Mobile has been showing arthouse films since 2008. The Mobile Civic Center contains three facilities under one roof. The building has an arena, a theater and an exposition hall. It is the primary concert venue for the city and hosts a wide variety of events. It is home to the Mobile Opera and the Mobile Ballet. The 60-year-old Mobile Opera averages about 1,200 attendees per performance. A wide variety of events are held at Mobile's Arthur C. Outlaw Convention Center. It contains a exhibit hall, a grand ballroom, and sixteen meeting rooms. The city has hosts the Greater Gulf State Fair, held each October since 1955. The city also hosted BayFest, an annual three-day music festival with more than 125 live musical acts on multiple stages spread throughout downtown; it now holds Ten Sixty Five festival, a free music festival. The Mobile Theatre Guild is a nonprofit community theatre that has served the city since 1947. It is a member of the Mobile Arts Council, the Alabama Conference of Theatre and Speech, the Southeastern Theatre Conference, and the American Association of Community Theatres. Mobile is also host to the Joe Jefferson Players, Alabama's oldest continually running community theatre. The group was named in honor of the famous comedic actor Joe Jefferson, who spend part of his teenage years in Mobile. The Players debuted their first production on December 17, 1947. Drama Camp Productions and Sunny Side Theater is Mobile's home for children's theater and fun. The group began doing summer camps in 2002, expanded to a year-round facility in 2008 and recently moved into the Azalea City Center for the Arts, a community of drama, music, art, photography, and dance teachers. The group has produced Broadway shows including "Miracle on 34th Street", "Honk", "Fame", and "Hairspray". The Mobile Arts Council is an umbrella organization for the arts in Mobile. It was founded in 1955 as a project of the Junior League of Mobile with the mission to increase cooperation among artistic and cultural organizations in the area and to provide a forum for problems in art, music, theater, and literature. Tourism Museums Mobile is home to a variety of museums. Battleship Memorial Park is a military park on the shore of Mobile Bay and features the World War II era battleship , the World War II era submarine , Korean War and Vietnam War Memorials, and a variety of historical military equipment. The History Museum of Mobile showcases 300 plus years of Mobile history and prehistory. It is housed in the historic Old City Hall (1857), a National Historic Landmark. The Oakleigh Historic Complex features three house museums that attempt to interpret the lives of people from three strata of 19th century society in Mobile, that of the enslaved, the working class, and the upper class. The Mobile Carnival Museum, housing the city's Mardi Gras history and memorabilia, documents the variety of floats, costumes, and displays seen during the history of the festival season. The Bragg-Mitchell Mansion (1855), Richards DAR House (1860), and the Condé-Charlotte House (1822) are historic, furnished antebellum house museums. Fort Morgan (1819), Fort Gaines (1821), and Historic Blakeley State Park all figure predominantly in local American Civil War history. The Mobile Medical Museum is housed in the historic French colonial-style Vincent-Doan House (1827). It features artifacts and resources that chronicle the long history of medicine in Mobile. The Phoenix Fire Museum is located in the restored Phoenix Volunteer Fire Company Number 6 building and features the history of fire companies in Mobile from their organization in 1838. The Mobile Police Department Museum features exhibits that chronicle the history of law enforcement in Mobile. The Gulf Coast Exploreum Science Center is a non-profit science center located in downtown. It features permanent and traveling exhibits, an IMAX dome theater, a digital 3D virtual theater, and a hands-on chemistry laboratory. The Dauphin Island Sea Lab is located south of the city, on Dauphin Island near the mouth of Mobile Bay. It houses the Estuarium, an aquarium which illustrates the four habitats of the Mobile Bay ecosystem: the river delta, bay, barrier islands and Gulf of Mexico. Parks and other attractions The Mobile Botanical Gardens feature a variety of flora spread over . It contains the Millie McConnell Rhododendron Garden with 1,000 evergreen and native azaleas and the Longleaf Pine Habitat. Bellingrath Gardens and Home, located on Fowl River, is a botanical garden and historic mansion that dates to the 1930s. The 5 Rivers Delta Resource Center is a facility that allows visitors to learn about and access the Mobile, Tensaw, Apalachee, Middle, Blakeley, and Spanish rivers. It was established to serve as an easily accessible gateway to the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. In addition to offering several boat and adventure tours, it contains a small theater; exhibit hall; meeting facilities; walking trails; a canoe and kayak landing. Mobile has more than 45 public parks within its limits, with some that are of special note. Bienville Square is a historic park in the Lower Dauphin Street Historic District. It assumed its current form in 1850 and is named for Mobile's founder, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. It was once the principal gathering place for residents, when the city was smaller, and remains popular today. Cathedral Square is a one-block performing arts park, also in the Lower Dauphin Street Historic District, which is overlooked by the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. The Fort of Colonial Mobile is a reconstruction of the city's original Fort Condé, built on the original fort's footprint. It serves as the official welcome center and a colonial-era living history museum. Spanish Plaza is a downtown park that honors the Spanish phase of the city between 1780 and 1813. It features the Arches of Friendship, a fountain presented to Mobile by the city of Málaga, Spain. Langan Park, the largest of the parks at , features lakes, natural spaces, and contains the Mobile Museum of Art, Azalea City Golf Course, Mobile Botanical Gardens and Playhouse in the Park. Historic architecture Mobile has antebellum architectural examples of Greek Revival, Gothic Revival, Italianate, and Creole cottage. Later architectural styles found in the city include the various Victorian types, shotgun types, Colonial Revival, Tudor Revival, Spanish Colonial Revival, Beaux-Arts and many others. The city currently has nine major historic districts: Old Dauphin Way, Oakleigh Garden, Lower Dauphin Street, Leinkauf, De Tonti Square, Church Street East, Ashland Place, Campground, and Midtown. Mobile has a number of historic structures in the city, including numerous churches and private homes. Mobile's historic churches include Christ Church Cathedral, the Cathedral Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Emanuel AME Church, Government Street Presbyterian Church, St. Louis Street Missionary Baptist Church, State Street AME Zion Church, Stone Street Baptist Church, Trinity Episcopal Church, St. Francis Street Methodist Church, Saint Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, Saint Francis Xavier Catholic Church, Saint Matthew's Catholic Church, Saint Paul's Episcopal Chapel, and Saint Vincent de Paul. The Sodality Chapel and St. Joseph's Chapel at Spring Hill College are two historic churches on that campus. Two historic Roman Catholic convents survive, the Convent and Academy of the Visitation and the Convent of Mercy. Barton Academy is a historic Greek Revival school building and local landmark on Government Street. The Bishop Portier House and the Carlen House are two of the many surviving examples of Creole cottages in the city. The Mobile City Hospital and the United States Marine Hospital are both restored Greek Revival hospital buildings that predate the Civil War. The Washington Firehouse No. 5 is a Greek Revival fire station, built in 1851. The Hunter House is an example of the Italianate style and was built by a successful 19th-century African American businesswoman. The Shepard House is a good example of the Queen Anne style. The Scottish Rite Temple is the only surviving example of Egyptian Revival architecture in the city. The Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Passenger Terminal is an example of the Mission Revival style. The city has several historic cemeteries that were established shortly after the colonial era. They replaced the colonial Campo Santo, of |
Monoamine oxidases catalyze the oxidative deamination of monoamines. Oxygen is used to remove an amine group (plus the adjacent hydrogen atom) from a molecule, resulting in the corresponding ketone (or aldehyde) and ammonia. Monoamine oxidases contain the covalently bound cofactor FAD and are, thus, classified as flavoproteins. Monoamine oxidase A and B share roughly 70% of their structure and both have substrate binding sites that are predominantly hydrophobic. Two tyrosine residues (398, 435, 407 and 444) in the binding pocket that are commonly involved in inhibitor activity have been hypothesized to be relevant to orienting substrates, and mutations of these residues are relevant to mental health. Four main models have been proposed for the mechanism of electron transfer (single electron transfer, hydrogen atom transfer, nucleophilic model, and hydride transfer) although there is insufficient evidence to support any of them. Substrate specificities They are well known enzymes in pharmacology, since they are the target for the action of a number of monoamine oxidase inhibitor drugs. MAO-A is particularly important in the catabolism of monoamines ingested in food. Both MAOs are also vital to the inactivation of monoamine neurotransmitters, for which they display different specificities. Serotonin, melatonin, norepinephrine, and epinephrine are mainly broken down by MAO-A. Phenethylamine and benzylamine are mainly broken down by MAO-B. Both forms break down dopamine, tyramine, and tryptamine equally. Specific reactions catalyzed by MAO include: Adrenaline or noradrenaline to 3,4-Dihydroxymandelic acid Metanephrine or normetanephrine to vanillylmandelic acid (VMA) Dopamine to dihydroxyphenylacetic acid 3-Methoxytyramine to homovanillic acid Clinical significance Because of the vital role that MAOs play in the inactivation of neurotransmitters, MAO dysfunction (too much or too little MAO activity) is thought to be responsible for a number of psychiatric and neurological disorders. For example, unusually high or low levels of MAOs in the body have been associated with schizophrenia, depression, attention deficit disorder, substance abuse, migraines, and irregular sexual maturation. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors are one of the major classes of drug prescribed for the treatment of depression, although they are often last-line treatment due to risk of the drug's interaction with diet or other drugs. Excessive levels of catecholamines (epinephrine, norepinephrine, and dopamine) may lead to a hypertensive crisis, and excessive levels of serotonin may lead to serotonin syndrome. In fact, MAO-A inhibitors act as antidepressant and anti-anxiety agents, whereas MAO-B inhibitors are used alone or in combination to treat Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Some research suggests that certain phenotypes of depression, such as those with anxiety, and "atypical" symptoms involving psychomotor retardation, weight gain and interpersonal sensitivity. However the findings related to this have not been consistent. MAOIs may be effective in treatment resistant depression, especially those that do not respond to tricyclic antidepressants. PET research shows that use of tobacco cigarettes heavily depletes MAO-B, mimicking the action of an MAO-B inhibitor. Smokers who smoke for emotional relief may therefore be unintentionally treating depression and/or anxiety that is better addressed by an MAO-B inhibitor. Parasite interactions Sleeping sickness - caused by trypanosomes - gets its name from the sleep disruption it causes in mammals. That sleep disruption is caused, at least in part, by trypanosomes' tendency to disrupt MAO activity in the orexin system. Animal models There are significant differences in MAO activity in different species. Dopamine is primarily deaminated by MAO-A in rats, but by MAO-B in vervet monkeys and humans. Mice unable to produce either MAO-A or MAO-B display autistic-like traits. These knockout mice display an increased response to stress. Arthropods Insects Insect brains express MAOs, and some insecticides work by inhibiting them. An MAOI effect is especially important for chlordimeform (although one result shows little or no effect in Periplaneta americana); and dieldrin may or may not be an MAOI in Locusta migratoria. Acari MAO activity has been detected in Rhipicephalus microplus and chlordimeform is an MAOI in R. m.. Genetics The genes encoding MAO-A and MAO-B are located | agents, whereas MAO-B inhibitors are used alone or in combination to treat Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. Some research suggests that certain phenotypes of depression, such as those with anxiety, and "atypical" symptoms involving psychomotor retardation, weight gain and interpersonal sensitivity. However the findings related to this have not been consistent. MAOIs may be effective in treatment resistant depression, especially those that do not respond to tricyclic antidepressants. PET research shows that use of tobacco cigarettes heavily depletes MAO-B, mimicking the action of an MAO-B inhibitor. Smokers who smoke for emotional relief may therefore be unintentionally treating depression and/or anxiety that is better addressed by an MAO-B inhibitor. Parasite interactions Sleeping sickness - caused by trypanosomes - gets its name from the sleep disruption it causes in mammals. That sleep disruption is caused, at least in part, by trypanosomes' tendency to disrupt MAO activity in the orexin system. Animal models There are significant differences in MAO activity in different species. Dopamine is primarily deaminated by MAO-A in rats, but by MAO-B in vervet monkeys and humans. Mice unable to produce either MAO-A or MAO-B display autistic-like traits. These knockout mice display an increased response to stress. Arthropods Insects Insect brains express MAOs, and some insecticides work by inhibiting them. An MAOI effect is especially important for chlordimeform (although one result shows little or no effect in Periplaneta americana); and dieldrin may or may not be an MAOI in Locusta migratoria. Acari MAO activity has been detected in Rhipicephalus microplus and chlordimeform is an MAOI in R. m.. Genetics The genes encoding MAO-A and MAO-B are located side-by-side on the short arm of the X chromosome, and have about 70% sequence similarity. Rare mutations in the gene are associated with Brunner syndrome. A study based on the Dunedin cohort concluded that maltreated children with a low-activity polymorphism in the promoter region of the MAO-A gene were more likely to develop antisocial conduct disorders than maltreated children with the high-activity variant. Out of the 442 total males in the study (maltreated or not), 37% had the low activity variant. Of the 13 maltreated males with low MAO-A activity, 11 had been assessed as exhibiting adolescent conduct disorder and 4 were convicted for violent offenses. The suggested mechanism for this effect is the decreased ability of those with low MAO-A activity to quickly degrade norepinephrine, the synaptic neurotransmitter involved in sympathetic arousal and rage. This is argued to provide direct support for the idea that genetic susceptibility to disease is not determined at birth, but varies with exposure to environmental influences. However, most individuals with conduct disorder or convictions did not have low activity of MAO-A; maltreatment was found to have caused stronger predisposition for antisocial behavior than differences in MAO-A activity. The claim that an interaction between low MAO-A activity and maltreatment would cause anti-social behavior has been criticized since the predisposition towards anti-social |
the title song, 2014 Madness (Madness album), 1983 Madness (Sleeping with Sirens album) or the title song, 2015 Madness (Tony MacAlpine album), 1993 Madness, by Sarah McLeod, 2010 The Madness (Art of Anarchy album) or the title song, 2017 The Madness (The Madness album), 1988 Songs "Madness" (Elton John song), 1978 "Madness" (Ivi Adamou song), 2012 "Madness" (Muse song), 2012 "Madness (Is All in the Mind)", by Madness, 1983 (for the Prince Buster song recorded by Madness in 1979, see below) "Madness", by Alanis Morissette from Flavors of Entanglement, 2008 "Madness", by Battle Beast from Unholy Savior, 2015 "Madness", by Cascada, 2014 "Madness", by KSI from All Over the Place, 2021 "Madness", by Prince Buster from I Feel the Spirit, 1963 "Madness", by the Rasmus from Into, 2001 Other uses Madness (Magic: The Gathering), a keyword in the trading card game Magic: The Gathering Madness (manga), | Madness may refer to: Emotion and mental health Anger, an intense emotional response to a perceived provocation, hurt or threat Insanity, a spectrum of behaviors characterized by certain abnormal mental or behavioral patterns Mental disorder, a diagnosis of a behavioral or mental pattern that may cause suffering or poor ability to function Film and television Madness (1919 film), a German horror film directed by Conrad Veidt Madness (1980 film), an Italian crime-drama film directed by Fernando Di Leo Madness (1992 film), an Italian giallo film directed by Bruno Mattei Madness (2010 film), |
each monarch in turn, although as time went by and the fledgling Parliament of England passed new laws, it lost some of its practical significance. At the end of the 16th century, there was an upsurge in interest in Magna Carta. Lawyers and historians at the time believed that there was an ancient English constitution, going back to the days of the Anglo-Saxons, that protected individual English freedoms. They argued that the Norman invasion of 1066 had overthrown these rights, and that Magna Carta had been a popular attempt to restore them, making the charter an essential foundation for the contemporary powers of Parliament and legal principles such as habeas corpus. Although this historical account was badly flawed, jurists such as Sir Edward Coke used Magna Carta extensively in the early 17th century, arguing against the divine right of kings. Both James I and his son Charles I attempted to suppress the discussion of Magna Carta. The political myth of Magna Carta and its protection of ancient personal liberties persisted after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 until well into the 19th century. It influenced the early American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies and the formation of the United States Constitution, which became the supreme law of the land in the new republic of the United States. Research by Victorian historians showed that the original 1215 charter had concerned the medieval relationship between the monarch and the barons, rather than the rights of ordinary people, but the charter remained a powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries. Three clauses (1, 9, and 29) remain in force in England and Wales. Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as "the greatest constitutional document of all —the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot". In the 21st century, four exemplifications of the original 1215 charter remain in existence, two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. There are also a handful of the subsequent charters in public and private ownership, including copies of the 1297 charter in both the United States and Australia. Although scholars refer to the 63 numbered "clauses" of Magna Carta, this is a modern system of numbering, introduced by Sir William Blackstone in 1759; the original charter formed a single, long unbroken text. The four original 1215 charters were displayed together at the British Library for one day, 3 February 2015, to mark the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. History 13th century Background Magna Carta originated as an unsuccessful attempt to achieve peace between royalist and rebel factions in 1215, as part of the events leading to the outbreak of the First Barons' War. England was ruled by King John, the third of the Angevin kings. Although the kingdom had a robust administrative system, the nature of government under the Angevin monarchs was ill-defined and uncertain. John and his predecessors had ruled using the principle of , or "force and will", taking executive and sometimes arbitrary decisions, often justified on the basis that a king was above the law. Many contemporary writers believed that monarchs should rule in accordance with the custom and the law, with the counsel of the leading members of the realm, but there was no model for what should happen if a king refused to do so. John had lost most of his ancestral lands in France to King Philip II in 1204 and had struggled to regain them for many years, raising extensive taxes on the barons to accumulate money to fight a war which ended in expensive failure in 1214. Following the defeat of his allies at the Battle of Bouvines, John had to sue for peace and pay compensation. John was already personally unpopular with many of the barons, many of whom owed money to the Crown, and little trust existed between the two sides. A triumph would have strengthened his position, but in the face of his defeat, within a few months after his return from France, John found that rebel barons in the north and east of England were organising resistance to his rule. The rebels took an oath that they would "stand fast for the liberty of the church and the realm", and demanded that the King confirm the Charter of Liberties that had been declared by King Henry I in the previous century, and which was perceived by the barons to protect their rights. The rebel leadership was unimpressive by the standards of the time, even disreputable, but were united by their hatred of John; Robert Fitzwalter, later elected leader of the rebel barons, claimed publicly that John had attempted to rape his daughter, and was implicated in a plot to assassinate John in 1212. John held a council in London in January 1215 to discuss potential reforms, and sponsored discussions in Oxford between his agents and the rebels during the spring. Both sides appealed to Pope Innocent III for assistance in the dispute. During the negotiations, the rebellious barons produced an initial document, which historians have termed "the Unknown Charter of Liberties", which drew on Henry I's Charter of Liberties for much of its language; seven articles from that document later appeared in the "Articles of the Barons" and the subsequent charter. It was John's hope that the Pope would give him valuable legal and moral support, and accordingly John played for time; the King had declared himself to be a papal vassal in 1213 and correctly believed he could count on the Pope for help. John also began recruiting mercenary forces from France, although some were later sent back to avoid giving the impression that the King was escalating the conflict. In a further move to shore up his support, John took an oath to become a crusader, a move which gave him additional political protection under church law, even though many felt the promise was insincere. Letters backing John arrived from the Pope in April, but by then the rebel barons had organised into a military faction. They congregated at Northampton in May and renounced their feudal ties to John, marching on London, Lincoln, and Exeter. John's efforts to appear moderate and conciliatory had been largely successful, but once the rebels held London, they attracted a fresh wave of defectors from the royalists. The King offered to submit the problem to a committee of arbitration with the Pope as the supreme arbiter, but this was not attractive to the rebels. Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury, had been working with the rebel barons on their demands, and after the suggestion of papal arbitration failed, John instructed Langton to organise peace talks. Great Charter of 1215 John met the rebel leaders at Runnymede, a water-meadow on the south bank of the River Thames, on 10 June 1215. Runnymede was a traditional place for assemblies, but it was also located on neutral ground between the royal fortress of Windsor Castle and the rebel base at Staines, and offered both sides the security of a rendezvous where they were unlikely to find themselves at a military disadvantage. Here the rebels presented John with their draft demands for reform, the 'Articles of the Barons'. Stephen Langton's pragmatic efforts at mediation over the next ten days turned these incomplete demands into a charter capturing the proposed peace agreement; a few years later, this agreement was renamed Magna Carta, meaning "Great Charter". By 15 June, general agreement had been made on a text, and on 19 June, the rebels renewed their oaths of loyalty to John and copies of the charter were formally issued. Although, as the historian David Carpenter has noted, the charter "wasted no time on political theory", it went beyond simply addressing individual baronial complaints, and formed a wider proposal for political reform. It promised the protection of church rights, protection from illegal imprisonment, access to swift justice, and, most importantly, limitations on taxation and other feudal payments to the Crown, with certain forms of feudal taxation requiring baronial consent. It focused on the rights of free men—in particular, the barons; however, the rights of serfs were included in articles 16, 20 and 28. Its style and content reflected Henry I's Charter of Liberties, as well as a wider body of legal traditions, including the royal charters issued to towns, the operations of the Church and baronial courts and European charters such as the Statute of Pamiers. Under what historians later labelled "clause 61", or the "security clause", a council of 25 barons would be created to monitor and ensure John's future adherence to the charter. If John did not conform to the charter within 40 days of being notified of a transgression by the council, the 25 barons were empowered by clause 61 to seize John's castles and lands until, in their judgement, amends had been made. Men were to be compelled to swear an oath to assist the council in controlling the King, but once redress had been made for any breaches, the King would continue to rule as before. In one sense this was not unprecedented; other kings had previously conceded the right of individual resistance to their subjects if the King did not uphold his obligations. Magna Carta was, however, novel in that it set up a formally recognised means of collectively coercing the King. The historian Wilfred Warren argues that it was almost inevitable that the clause would result in civil war, as it "was crude in its methods and disturbing in its implications". The barons were trying to force John to keep to the charter, but clause 61 was so heavily weighted against the King that this version of the charter could not survive. John and the rebel barons did not trust each other, and neither side seriously attempted to implement the peace accord. The 25 barons selected for the new council were all rebels, chosen by the more extremist barons, and many among the rebels found excuses to keep their forces mobilised. Disputes began to emerge between the royalist faction and those rebels who had expected the charter to return lands that had been confiscated. Clause 61 of Magna Carta contained a commitment from John that he would "seek to obtain nothing from anyone, in our own person or through someone else, whereby any of these grants or liberties may be revoked or diminished". Despite this, the King appealed to Pope Innocent for help in July, arguing that the charter compromised the Pope's rights as John's feudal lord. As part of the June peace deal, the barons were supposed to surrender London by 15 August, but this they refused to do. Meanwhile, instructions from the Pope arrived in August, written before the peace accord, with the result that papal commissioners excommunicated the rebel barons and suspended Langton from office in early September. Once aware of the charter, the Pope responded in detail: in a letter dated 24 August and arriving in late September, he declared the charter to be "not only shameful and demeaning but also illegal and unjust" since John had been "forced to accept" it, and accordingly the charter was "null, and void of all validity for ever"; under threat of excommunication, the King was not to observe the charter, nor the barons try to enforce it. By then, violence had broken out between the two sides; less than three months after it had been agreed, John and the loyalist barons firmly repudiated the failed charter: the First Barons' War erupted. The rebel barons concluded that peace with John was impossible, and turned to Philip II's son, the future Louis VIII, for help, offering him the English throne. The war soon settled into a stalemate. The King became ill and died on the night of 18 October 1216, leaving the nine-year-old Henry III as his heir. Charters of the Welsh Princes The Magna Carta of 1215 was the first document which included English and Welsh law, including reference to common acceptance of the lawful judgement of peers. Chapter 56: The return of lands and liberties to Welshmen if those lands and liberties had been taken by English (and vice versa) without a law abiding judgement of their peers. Chapter 57: The return of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, illegitimate son of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth (Llywelyn the Great) along with other Welsh hostages which were originally taken for "peace" and "good". Lists of participants in 1215 Counsellors named in Magna Carta The preamble to Magna Carta includes the names of the following 27 ecclesiastical and secular magnates who had counselled John to accept its terms. The names include some of the moderate reformers, notably Archbishop Stephen Langton, and some of John's loyal supporters, such as William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke. They are listed here in the order in which they appear in the charter itself: Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Henry de Loundres, Archbishop of Dublin William of Sainte-Mère-Église, Bishop of London Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester Jocelin of Wells, Bishop of Bath and Glastonbury Hugh of Wells, Bishop of Lincoln Walter de Gray, Bishop of Worcester William de Cornhill, Bishop of Coventry Benedict of Sausetun, Bishop of Rochester Pandulf Verraccio, subdeacon and papal legate to England Eymeric, Master of the Knights Templar in England William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey William d'Aubigny, Earl of Arundel Alan of Galloway, Constable of Scotland Warin FitzGerold Peter FitzHerbert Hubert de Burgh, Seneschal of Poitou Hugh de Neville Matthew FitzHerbert Thomas Basset Alan Basset Philip d'Aubigny Robert of Ropsley John Marshal John FitzHugh The Council of Twenty-Five Barons The names of the Twenty-Five Barons appointed under clause 61 to monitor John's future conduct are not given in the charter itself, but do appear in four early sources, all seemingly based on a contemporary listing: a late-13th-century collection of law tracts and statutes, a Reading Abbey manuscript now in Lambeth Palace Library, and the and of Matthew Paris. The process of appointment is not known, but the names were drawn almost exclusively from among John's more active opponents. They are listed here in the order in which they appear in the original sources: Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford William de Forz, Earl of Albemarle Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex and Gloucester Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk and Suffolk Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford William Marshal junior Robert Fitzwalter, baron of Little Dunmow Gilbert de Clare, heir to the earldom of Hertford Eustace de Vesci, Lord of Alnwick Castle Hugh Bigod, heir to the Earldoms of Norfolk and Suffolk William de Mowbray, Lord of Axholme Castle William Hardell, Mayor of the City of London William de Lanvallei, Lord of Walkern Robert de Ros, Baron of Helmsley John de Lacy, Constable of Chester and Lord of Pontefract Castle Richard de Percy John FitzRobert de Clavering, Lord of Warkworth Castle William Malet Geoffrey de Saye Roger de Montbegon, Lord of Hornby Castle, Lancashire William of Huntingfield, Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk Richard de Montfichet William d'Aubigny, Lord of Belvoir Excommunicated rebels In September 1215, the papal commissioners in England—Subdeacon Pandulf, Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, and Simon, Abbot of Reading—excommunicated the rebels, acting on instructions earlier received from Rome. A letter sent by the commissioners from Dover on 5 September to Archbishop Langton explicitly names nine senior rebel barons (all members of the Council of Twenty-Five), and six clerics numbered among the rebel ranks: Barons Robert Fitzwalter Saer de Quincy, Earl of Winchester Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex and Gloucester Eustace de Vesci Richard de Percy John de Lacy, Constable of Chester William d'Aubigny William de Mowbray Clerics Giles de Braose, Bishop of Hereford William, Archdeacon of Hereford Alexander the clerk (possibly Alexander of St Albans) Osbert de Samara John de Fereby Robert, chaplain to Robert Fitzwalter Great Charter of 1216 Although the Charter of 1215 was a failure as a peace treaty, it was resurrected under the new government of the young Henry III as a way of drawing support away from the rebel faction. On his deathbed, King John appointed a council of thirteen executors to help Henry reclaim the kingdom, and requested that his son be placed into the guardianship of William Marshal, one of the most famous knights in England. William knighted the boy, and Cardinal Guala Bicchieri, the papal legate to England, then oversaw his coronation at Gloucester Cathedral on 28 October. The young King inherited a difficult situation, with over half of England occupied by the rebels. He had substantial support though from Guala, who intended to win the civil war for Henry and punish the rebels. Guala set about strengthening the ties between England and the Papacy, starting with the coronation itself, during which Henry gave homage to the Papacy, recognising the Pope as his feudal lord. Pope Honorius III declared that Henry was the Pope's vassal and ward, and that the legate had complete authority to protect Henry and his kingdom. As an additional measure, Henry took the cross, declaring himself a crusader and thereby entitled to special protection from Rome. The war was not going well for the loyalists, but Prince Louis and the rebel barons were also finding it difficult to make further progress. John's death had defused some of the rebel concerns, and the royal castles were still holding out in the occupied parts of the country. Henry's government encouraged the rebel barons to come back to his cause in exchange for the return of their lands, and reissued a version of the 1215 Charter, albeit having first removed some of the clauses, including those unfavourable to the Papacy and clause 61, which had set up the council of barons. The move was not successful, and opposition to Henry's new government hardened. Great Charter of 1217 In February 1217, Louis set sail for France to gather reinforcements. In his absence, arguments broke out between Louis' French and English followers, and Cardinal Guala declared that Henry's war against the rebels was the equivalent of a religious crusade. This declaration resulted in a series of defections from the rebel movement, and the tide of the conflict swung in Henry's favour. Louis returned at the end of April, but his northern forces were defeated by William Marshal at the Battle of Lincoln in May. Meanwhile, support for Louis' campaign was diminishing in France, and he concluded that the war in England was lost. He negotiated terms with Cardinal Guala, under which Louis would renounce his claim to the English throne; in return, his followers would be given back their lands, any sentences of excommunication would be lifted, and Henry's government would promise to enforce the charter of the previous year. The proposed agreement soon began to unravel amid claims from some loyalists that it was too generous towards the rebels, particularly the clergy who had joined the rebellion. In the absence of a settlement, Louis stayed in London with his remaining forces, hoping for the arrival of reinforcements from France. When the expected fleet did arrive in August, it was intercepted and defeated by loyalists at the Battle of Sandwich. Louis entered into fresh peace negotiations, and the factions came to agreement on the final Treaty of Lambeth, also known as the Treaty of Kingston, on 12 and 13 September 1217. The treaty was similar to the first peace offer, but excluded the rebel clergy, whose lands and appointments remained forfeit; it included a promise, however, that Louis' followers would be allowed to enjoy their traditional liberties and customs, referring back to the Charter of 1216. Louis left England as agreed and joined the Albigensian Crusade in the south of France, bringing the war to an end. A great council was called in October and November to take stock of the post-war situation; this council is thought to have formulated and issued the Charter of 1217. The charter resembled that of 1216, although some additional clauses were added to protect the rights of the barons over their feudal subjects, and the restrictions on the Crown's ability to levy taxation were watered down. There remained a range of disagreements about the management of the royal forests, which involved a special legal system that had resulted in a source of considerable royal revenue; complaints existed over both the implementation of these courts, and the geographic boundaries of the royal forests. A complementary charter, the Charter of the Forest, was created, pardoning existing forest offences, imposing new controls over the forest courts, and establishing a review of the forest boundaries. To distinguish the two charters, the term ("the great charter of liberties") was used by the scribes to refer to the larger document, which in time became known simply as Magna Carta. Great Charter of 1225 Magna Carta became increasingly embedded into English political life during Henry III's minority. As the King grew older, his government slowly began to recover from the civil war, regaining control of the counties and beginning to raise revenue once again, taking care not to overstep the terms of the charters. Henry remained a minor and his government's legal ability to make permanently binding decisions on his behalf was limited. In 1223, the tensions over the status of the charters became clear in the royal court, when Henry's government attempted to reassert its rights over its properties and revenues in the counties, facing resistance from many communities that argued—if sometimes incorrectly—that the charters protected the new arrangements. This resistance resulted in an argument between Archbishop Langton and William Brewer over whether the King had any duty to fulfil the terms of the charters, given that he had been forced to agree to them. On this occasion, Henry gave oral assurances that he considered himself bound by the charters, enabling a royal inquiry into the situation in the counties to progress. Two years later, the question of Henry's commitment to the charters re-emerged, when Louis VIII of France invaded Henry's remaining provinces in France, Poitou and Gascony. Henry's army in Poitou was under-resourced, and the province quickly fell. It became clear that Gascony would also fall unless reinforcements were sent from England. In early 1225, a great council approved a tax of £40,000 to dispatch an army, which quickly retook Gascony. In exchange for agreeing to support Henry, the barons demanded that the King reissue Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. The content was almost identical to the 1217 versions, but in the new versions, the King declared that the charters were issued of his own "spontaneous and free will" and confirmed them with the royal seal, giving the new Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest of 1225 much more authority than the previous versions. The barons anticipated that the King would act in accordance with these charters, subject to the law and moderated by the advice of the nobility. Uncertainty continued, and in 1227, when he was declared of age and able to rule independently, Henry announced that future charters had to be issued under his own seal. This brought into question the validity of the previous charters issued during his minority, and Henry actively threatened to overturn the Charter of the Forest unless the taxes promised in return for it were actually paid. In 1253, Henry confirmed the charters once again in exchange for taxation. Henry placed a symbolic emphasis on rebuilding royal authority, but his rule was relatively circumscribed by Magna Carta. He generally acted within the terms of the charters, which prevented the Crown from taking extrajudicial action against the barons, including the fines and expropriations that had been common under his father, John. The charters did not address the sensitive issues of the appointment of royal advisers and the distribution of patronage, and they lacked any means of enforcement if the King chose to ignore them. The inconsistency with which he applied the charters over the course of his rule alienated many barons, even those within his own faction. Despite the various charters, the provision of royal justice was inconsistent and driven by the needs of immediate politics: sometimes action would be taken to address a legitimate baronial complaint, while on other occasions the problem would simply be ignored. The royal courts, which toured the country to provide justice at the local level, typically for lesser barons and the gentry claiming grievances against major lords, had little power, allowing the major barons to dominate the local justice system. Henry's rule became lax and careless, resulting in a reduction in royal authority in the provinces and, ultimately, the collapse of his authority at court. In 1258, a group of barons seized power from Henry in a coup d'état, citing the need to strictly enforce Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest, creating a new baronial-led government to advance reform through the Provisions of Oxford. The barons were not militarily powerful enough to win a decisive victory, and instead appealed to Louis IX of France in 1263–1264 to arbitrate on their proposed reforms. The reformist barons argued their case based on Magna Carta, suggesting that it was inviolable under English law and that the King had broken its terms. Louis came down firmly in favour of Henry, but the French arbitration failed to achieve peace as the rebellious barons refused to accept the verdict. England slipped back into the Second Barons' War, which was won by Henry's son, the Lord Edward. Edward also invoked Magna Carta in advancing his cause, arguing that the reformers had taken matters too far and were themselves acting against Magna Carta. In a conciliatory gesture after the barons had been defeated, in 1267 Henry issued the Statute of Marlborough, which included a fresh commitment to observe the terms of Magna Carta. Witnesses in 1225 The following 65 individuals were witnesses to the 1225 issue of Magna Carta, named in the order in which they appear in the charter itself: Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Eustace of Fauconberg, Bishop of London Jocelin of Wells, Bishop of Bath Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester Hugh of Wells, Bishop of Lincoln Richard Poore, Bishop of Salisbury Benedict of Sausetun, Bishop of Rochester William de Blois, Bishop of Worcester John of Fountains, Bishop of Ely Hugh Foliot, Bishop of Hereford Ralph Neville, Bishop of Chichester William Briwere, Bishop of Exeter William of Trumpington, Abbot of St Albans Hugh of Northwold, Abbot of Bury St Edmunds Richard, Abbot of Battle the Abbot of St Augustine's, Canterbury Randulf of Evesham, Abbot of Evesham Richard of Barking, Abbot of Westminster Alexander of Holderness, Abbot of Peterborough Simon, Abbot of Reading Robert of Hendred, Abbot of Abingdon John Walsh, Abbot of Malmesbury the Abbot of Winchcombe the Abbot of Hyde the Abbot of Chertsey the Abbot of Sherborne the Abbot of Cerne the Abbot of Abbotsbury the Abbot of Milton the Abbot of | England and Ireland Ranulf, Earl of Chester and Lincoln William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury William de Warenne, Earl of Surrey Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester and Hertford William de Ferrers, Earl of Derby William de Mandeville, Earl of Essex Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk William de Forz, Earl of Albemarle Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford John de Lacy, Constable of Chester Robert de Ros Robert Fitzwalter Robert de Vieuxpont William Brewer Richard de Montfichet Peter FitzHerbert Matthew FitzHerbert William d'Aubigny Robert Gresley Reginald de Braose John of Monmouth John FitzAlan Hugh de Mortimer William de Beauchamp William de St John Peter de Maulay Brian de Lisle Thomas of Moulton Richard de Argentan Geoffrey de Neville William de Maudit John de Baalun Great Charter of 1297: statute King Edward I reissued the Charters of 1225 in 1297 in return for a new tax. It is this version which remains in statute today, although with most articles now repealed. The (Confirmation of Charters) was issued in Norman French by Edward I in 1297. Edward, needing money, had taxed the nobility, and they had armed themselves against him, forcing Edward to issue his confirmation of Magna Carta and the Forest Charter to avoid civil war. The nobles had sought to add another document, the , to Magna Carta. Edward I's government was not prepared to concede this, they agreed to the issuing of the , confirming the previous charters and confirming the principle that taxation should be by consent, although the precise manner of that consent was not laid down. A passage mandates that copies shall be distributed in "cathedral churches throughout our realm, there to remain, and shall be read before the people two times by the year", hence the permanent installation of a copy in Salisbury Cathedral. In the Confirmation's second article, it is confirmed that With the reconfirmation of the Charters in 1300, an additional document was granted, the (The Articles upon the Charters). It was composed of 17 articles and sought in part to deal with the problem of enforcing the Charters. Magna Carta and the Forest Charter were to be issued to the sheriff of each county, and should be read four times a year at the meetings of the county courts. Each county should have a committee of three men who could hear complaints about violations of the Charters. Pope Clement V continued the papal policy of supporting monarchs (who ruled by divine grace) against any claims in Magna Carta which challenged the King's rights, and annulled the in 1305. Edward I interpreted Clement V's papal bull annulling the as effectively applying to the , although the latter was not specifically mentioned. In 1306 Edward I took the opportunity given by the Pope's backing to reassert forest law over large areas which had been "disafforested". Both Edward and the Pope were accused by some contemporary chroniclers of "perjury", and it was suggested by Robert McNair Scott that Robert the Bruce refused to make peace with Edward I's son, Edward II, in 1312 with the justification: "How shall the king of England keep faith with me, since he does not observe the sworn promises made to his liege men..." Magna Carta's influence on English medieval law The Great Charter was referred to in legal cases throughout the medieval period. For example, in 1226, the knights of Lincolnshire argued that their local sheriff was changing customary practice regarding the local courts, "contrary to their liberty which they ought to have by the charter of the lord king". In practice, cases were not brought against the King for breach of Magna Carta and the Forest Charter, but it was possible to bring a case against the King's officers, such as his sheriffs, using the argument that the King's officers were acting contrary to liberties granted by the King in the charters. In addition, medieval cases referred to the clauses in Magna Carta which dealt with specific issues such as wardship and dower, debt collection, and keeping rivers free for navigation. Even in the 13th century, some clauses of Magna Carta rarely appeared in legal cases, either because the issues concerned were no longer relevant, or because Magna Carta had been superseded by more relevant legislation. By 1350 half the clauses of Magna Carta were no longer actively used. 14th–15th centuries During the reign of King Edward III six measures, later known as the Six Statutes, were passed between 1331 and 1369. They sought to clarify certain parts of the Charters. In particular the third statute, in 1354, redefined clause 29, with "free man" becoming "no man, of whatever estate or condition he may be", and introduced the phrase "due process of law" for "lawful judgement of his peers or the law of the land". Between the 13th and 15th centuries Magna Carta was reconfirmed 32 times according to Sir Edward Coke, and possibly as many as 45 times. Often the first item of parliamentary business was a public reading and reaffirmation of the Charter, and, as in the previous century, parliaments often exacted confirmation of it from the monarch. The Charter was confirmed in 1423 by King Henry VI. By the mid-15th century, Magna Carta ceased to occupy a central role in English political life, as monarchs reasserted authority and powers which had been challenged in the 100 years after Edward I's reign. The Great Charter remained a text for lawyers, particularly as a protector of property rights, and became more widely read than ever as printed versions circulated and levels of literacy increased. 16th century During the 16th century, the interpretation of Magna Carta and the First Barons' War shifted. Henry VII took power at the end of the turbulent Wars of the Roses, followed by Henry VIII, and extensive propaganda under both rulers promoted the legitimacy of the regime, the illegitimacy of any sort of rebellion against royal power, and the priority of supporting the Crown in its arguments with the Papacy. Tudor historians rediscovered the Barnwell chronicler, who was more favourable to King John than other 13th-century texts, and, as historian Ralph Turner describes, they "viewed King John in a positive light as a hero struggling against the papacy", showing "little sympathy for the Great Charter or the rebel barons". Pro-Catholic demonstrations during the 1536 uprising cited Magna Carta, accusing the King of not giving it sufficient respect. The first mechanically printed edition of Magna Carta was probably the of 1508 by Richard Pynson, although the early printed versions of the 16th century incorrectly attributed the origins of Magna Carta to Henry III and 1225, rather than to John and 1215, and accordingly worked from the later text. An abridged English-language edition was published by John Rastell in 1527. Thomas Berthelet, Pynson's successor as the royal printer during 1530–1547, printed an edition of the text along with other "ancient statutes" in 1531 and 1540. In 1534, George Ferrers published the first unabridged English-language edition of Magna Carta, dividing the Charter into 37 numbered clauses. At the end of the 16th century, there was an upsurge in antiquarian interest in England. This work concluded that there was a set of ancient English customs and laws, temporarily overthrown by the Norman invasion of 1066, which had then been recovered in 1215 and recorded in Magna Carta, which in turn gave authority to important 16th-century legal principles. Modern historians note that although this narrative was fundamentally incorrect—many refer to it as a "myth"—it took on great importance among the legal historians of the time. The antiquarian William Lambarde, for example, published what he believed were the Anglo-Saxon and Norman law codes, tracing the origins of the 16th-century English Parliament back to this period, albeit misinterpreting the dates of many documents concerned. Francis Bacon argued that clause 39 of Magna Carta was the basis of the 16th-century jury system and judicial processes. Antiquarians Robert Beale, James Morice and Richard Cosin argued that Magna Carta was a statement of liberty and a fundamental, supreme law empowering English government. Those who questioned these conclusions, including the Member of Parliament Arthur Hall, faced sanctions. 17th–18th centuries Political tensions In the early 17th century, Magna Carta became increasingly important as a political document in arguments over the authority of the English monarchy. James I and Charles I both propounded greater authority for the Crown, justified by the doctrine of the divine right of kings, and Magna Carta was cited extensively by their opponents to challenge the monarchy. Magna Carta, it was argued, recognised and protected the liberty of individual Englishmen, made the King subject to the common law of the land, formed the origin of the trial by jury system, and acknowledged the ancient origins of Parliament: because of Magna Carta and this ancient constitution, an English monarch was unable to alter these long-standing English customs. Although the arguments based on Magna Carta were historically inaccurate, they nonetheless carried symbolic power, as the charter had immense significance during this period; antiquarians such as Sir Henry Spelman described it as "the most majestic and a sacrosanct anchor to English Liberties". Sir Edward Coke was a leader in using Magna Carta as a political tool during this period. Still working from the 1225 version of the text—the first printed copy of the 1215 charter only emerged in 1610—Coke spoke and wrote about Magna Carta repeatedly. His work was challenged at the time by Lord Ellesmere, and modern historians such as Ralph Turner and Claire Breay have critiqued Coke as "misconstruing" the original charter "anachronistically and uncritically", and taking a "very selective" approach to his analysis. More sympathetically, J. C. Holt noted that the history of the charters had already become "distorted" by the time Coke was carrying out his work. In 1621, a bill was presented to Parliament to renew Magna Carta; although this bill failed, lawyer John Selden argued during Darnell's Case in 1627 that the right of habeas corpus was backed by Magna Carta. Coke supported the Petition of Right in 1628, which cited Magna Carta in its preamble, attempting to extend the provisions, and to make them binding on the judiciary. The monarchy responded by arguing that the historical legal situation was much less clear-cut than was being claimed, restricted the activities of antiquarians, arrested Coke for treason, and suppressed his proposed book on Magna Carta. Charles initially did not agree to the Petition of Right, and refused to confirm Magna Carta in any way that would reduce his independence as King. England descended into civil war in the 1640s, resulting in Charles I's execution in 1649. Under the republic that followed, some questioned whether Magna Carta, an agreement with a monarch, was still relevant. An anti-Cromwellian pamphlet published in 1660, The English devil, said that the nation had been "compelled to submit to this Tyrant Nol or be cut off by him; nothing but a word and a blow, his Will was his Law; tell him of Magna Carta, he would lay his hand on his sword and cry Magna Farta". In a 2005 speech the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Woolf, repeated the claim that Cromwell had referred to Magna Carta as "Magna Farta". The radical groups that flourished during this period held differing opinions of Magna Carta. The Levellers rejected history and law as presented by their contemporaries, holding instead to an "anti-Normanism" viewpoint. John Lilburne, for example, argued that Magna Carta contained only some of the freedoms that had supposedly existed under the Anglo-Saxons before being crushed by the Norman yoke. The Leveller Richard Overton described the charter as "a beggarly thing containing many marks of intolerable bondage". Both saw Magna Carta as a useful declaration of liberties that could be used against governments they disagreed with. Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the more extreme Diggers, stated "the best lawes that England hath, [viz., Magna Carta] were got by our Forefathers importunate petitioning unto the kings that still were their Task-masters; and yet these best laws are yoaks and manicles, tying one sort of people to be slaves to another; Clergy and Gentry have got their freedom, but the common people still are, and have been left servants to work for them." Glorious Revolution The first attempt at a proper historiography was undertaken by Robert Brady, who refuted the supposed antiquity of Parliament and belief in the immutable continuity of the law. Brady realised that the liberties of the Charter were limited and argued that the liberties were the grant of the King. By putting Magna Carta in historical context, he cast doubt on its contemporary political relevance; his historical understanding did not survive the Glorious Revolution, which, according to the historian J. G. A. Pocock, "marked a setback for the course of English historiography." According to the Whig interpretation of history, the Glorious Revolution was an example of the reclaiming of ancient liberties. Reinforced with Lockean concepts, the Whigs believed England's constitution to be a social contract, based on documents such as Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and the Bill of Rights. The English Liberties (1680, in later versions often British Liberties) by the Whig propagandist Henry Care (d. 1688) was a cheap polemical book that was influential and much-reprinted, in the American colonies as well as Britain, and made Magna Carta central to the history and the contemporary legitimacy of its subject. Ideas about the nature of law in general were beginning to change. In 1716, the Septennial Act was passed, which had a number of consequences. First, it showed that Parliament no longer considered its previous statutes unassailable, as it provided for a maximum parliamentary term of seven years, whereas the Triennial Act (1694) (enacted less than a quarter of a century previously) had provided for a maximum term of three years. It also greatly extended the powers of Parliament. Under this new constitution, monarchical absolutism was replaced by parliamentary supremacy. It was quickly realised that Magna Carta stood in the same relation to the King-in-Parliament as it had to the King without Parliament. This supremacy would be challenged by the likes of Granville Sharp. Sharp regarded Magna Carta as a fundamental part of the constitution, and maintained that it would be treason to repeal any part of it. He also held that the Charter prohibited slavery. Sir William Blackstone published a critical edition of the 1215 Charter in 1759, and gave it the numbering system still used today. In 1763, Member of Parliament John Wilkes was arrested for writing an inflammatory pamphlet, No. 45, 23 April 1763; he cited Magna Carta continually. Lord Camden denounced the treatment of Wilkes as a contravention of Magna Carta. Thomas Paine, in his Rights of Man, would disregard Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights on the grounds that they were not a written constitution devised by elected representatives. Use in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States When English colonists left for the New World, they brought royal charters that established the colonies. The Massachusetts Bay Company charter, for example, stated that the colonists would "have and enjoy all liberties and immunities of free and natural subjects." The Virginia Charter of 1606, which was largely drafted by Sir Edward Coke, stated that the colonists would have the same "liberties, franchises and immunities" as people born in England. The Massachusetts Body of Liberties contained similarities to clause 29 of Magna Carta; when drafting it, the Massachusetts General Court viewed Magna Carta as the chief embodiment of English common law. The other colonies would follow their example. In 1638, Maryland sought to recognise Magna Carta as part of the law of the province, but the request was denied by Charles I. In 1687, William Penn published The Excellent Privilege of Liberty and Property: being the birth-right of the Free-Born Subjects of England, which contained the first copy of Magna Carta printed on American soil. Penn's comments reflected Coke's, indicating a belief that Magna Carta was a fundamental law. The colonists drew on English law books, leading them to an anachronistic interpretation of Magna Carta, believing that it guaranteed trial by jury and habeas corpus. The development of parliamentary supremacy in the British Isles did not constitutionally affect the Thirteen Colonies, which retained an adherence to English common law, but it directly affected the relationship between Britain and the colonies. When American colonists fought against Britain, they were fighting not so much for new freedom, but to preserve liberties and rights that they believed to be enshrined in Magna Carta. In the late 18th century, the United States Constitution became the supreme law of the land, recalling the manner in which Magna Carta had come to be regarded as fundamental law. The Constitution's Fifth Amendment guarantees that "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law", a phrase that was derived from Magna Carta. In addition, the Constitution included a similar writ in the Suspension Clause, Article 1, Section 9: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it." Each of these proclaim that no person may be imprisoned or detained without evidence that he or she committed a crime. The Ninth Amendment states that "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The writers of the U.S. Constitution wished to ensure that the rights they already held, such as those that they believed were provided by Magna Carta, would be preserved unless explicitly curtailed. The U.S. Supreme Court has explicitly referenced Edward Coke's analysis of Magna Carta as an antecedent of the Sixth Amendment's right to a speedy trial. 19th–21st centuries Interpretation Initially, the Whig interpretation of Magna Carta and its role in constitutional history remained dominant during the 19th century. The historian William Stubbs's Constitutional History of England, published in the 1870s, formed the high-water mark of this view. Stubbs argued that Magna Carta had been a major step in the shaping of the English nation, and he believed that the barons at Runnymede in 1215 were not just representing the nobility, but the people of England as a whole, standing up to a tyrannical ruler in the form of King John. This view of Magna Carta began to recede. The late-Victorian jurist and historian Frederic William Maitland provided an alternative academic history in 1899, which began to return Magna Carta to its historical roots. In 1904, Edward Jenks published an article entitled "The Myth of Magna Carta", which undermined the previously accepted view of Magna Carta. Historians such as Albert Pollard agreed with Jenks in concluding that Edward Coke had largely "invented" the myth of Magna Carta in the 17th century; these historians argued that the 1215 charter had not referred to liberty for the people at large, but rather to the protection of baronial rights. This view also became popular in wider circles, and in 1930 Sellar and Yeatman published their parody on English history, 1066 and All That, in which they mocked the supposed importance of Magna Carta and its promises of universal liberty: "Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England, and thus a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People)". In many literary representations of the medieval past, however, Magna Carta remained a foundation of English national identity. Some authors used the medieval roots of the document as an argument to preserve the social status quo, while others pointed to Magna Carta to challenge perceived economic injustices. The Baronial Order of Magna Charta was formed in 1898 to promote the ancient principles and values felt to be displayed in Magna Carta. |
a Premier cru vineyard in Chablis, France See also Milieu control, a term to describe tactics that control environment and human communication through the use of social pressure and group language Milieu intérieur, in biology, the extra-cellular | Milieu, a Premier cru vineyard in Chablis, France See also Milieu control, a term to describe tactics that control environment and human communication through the use of social pressure and |
whenever and are coprime. The sum of the Möbius function over all positive divisors of (including itself and 1) is zero except when : The equality above leads to the important Möbius inversion formula and is the main reason why is of relevance in the theory of multiplicative and arithmetic functions. Other applications of in combinatorics are connected with the use of the Pólya enumeration theorem in combinatorial groups and combinatorial enumerations. There is a formula for calculating the Möbius function without directly knowing the factorization of its argument: i.e. is the sum of the primitive -th roots of unity. (However, the computational complexity of this definition is at least the same as that of the Euler product definition.) Proof of the formula for Using the formula can be seen as a consequence of the fact that the th roots of unity sum to 0, since each th root of unity is a primitive th root of unity for exactly one divisor of . However it is also possible to prove this identity from first principles. First note that it is trivially true when . Suppose then that . Then there is a bijection between the factors of for which and the subsets of the set of all prime factors of . The asserted result follows from the fact that every non-empty finite set has an equal number of odd- and even-cardinality subsets. This last fact can be shown easily by induction on the cardinality of a non-empty finite set . First, if , there is exactly one odd-cardinality subset of , namely itself, and exactly one even-cardinality subset, namely . Next, if , then divide the subsets of into two subclasses depending on whether they contain or not some fixed element in . There is an obvious bijection between these two subclasses, pairing those subsets that have the same complement relative to the subset . Also, one of | of odd- and even-cardinality subsets. This last fact can be shown easily by induction on the cardinality of a non-empty finite set . First, if , there is exactly one odd-cardinality subset of , namely itself, and exactly one even-cardinality subset, namely . Next, if , then divide the subsets of into two subclasses depending on whether they contain or not some fixed element in . There is an obvious bijection between these two subclasses, pairing those subsets that have the same complement relative to the subset . Also, one of these two subclasses consists of all the subsets of the set , and therefore, by the induction hypothesis, has an equal number of odd- and even-cardinality subsets. These subsets in turn correspond bijectively to the even- and odd-cardinality -containing subsets of . The inductive step follows directly from these two bijections. A related result is that the binomial coefficients exhibit alternating entries of odd and even power which sum symmetrically. Mertens function In number theory another arithmetic function closely related to the Möbius function is the Mertens function, defined by for every natural number . This function is closely linked with the positions of zeroes of the Riemann zeta function. See the article on the Mertens conjecture for more information about the connection between and the Riemann hypothesis. From the formula it follows that the Mertens function is given by: where is the Farey sequence of order . This formula is used in the proof of the Franel–Landau theorem. Average order The mean value (in the sense of average orders) of the Möbius function is zero. This statement is, in fact, equivalent to the prime number theorem. sections if and only if is divisible by the square of a prime. The first numbers with this property are 4, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 32, 36, 40, 44, 45, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 56, 60, 63, ... . If is prime, then , but the converse is not true. The first non prime for which is . The first such numbers with three distinct prime factors (sphenic numbers) are 30, 42, 66, 70, 78, 102, 105, 110, 114, 130, 138, 154, 165, 170, 174, 182, 186, 190, 195, 222, ... . and the first such numbers with 5 distinct prime factors are 2310, 2730, 3570, 3990, 4290, 4830, 5610, 6006, 6090, 6270, 6510, 6630, 7410, 7590, 7770, 7854, 8610, |
been proposed as a possible mechanism for its distinguished efficacy regarding the treatment of neuropathic pain. The dextrorotary form (dextromethadone), which acts as an NMDA receptor antagonist and is devoid of opioid activity, has been shown to produce analgesia in experimental models of chronic pain. Methadone also acted as a potent, noncompetitive α3β4 neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist in rat receptors, expressed in human embryonic kidney cell lines. Metabolism Methadone has a slow metabolism and very high fat solubility, making it longer lasting than morphine-based drugs. Methadone has a typical elimination half-life of 15 to 60 hours with a mean of around 22. However, metabolism rates vary greatly between individuals, up to a factor of 100, ranging from as few as 4 hours to as many as 130 hours, or even 190 hours. This variability is apparently due to genetic variability in the production of the associated cytochrome enzymes CYP3A4, CYP2B6 and CYP2D6. Many substances can also induce, inhibit or compete with these enzymes further affecting (sometimes dangerously) methadone half-life. A longer half-life frequently allows for administration only once a day in opioid detoxification and maintenance programs. People who metabolize methadone rapidly, on the other hand, may require twice daily dosing to obtain sufficient symptom alleviation while avoiding excessive peaks and troughs in their blood concentrations and associated effects. This can also allow lower total doses in some such people. The analgesic activity is shorter than the pharmacological half-life; dosing for pain control usually requires multiple doses per day normally dividing daily dosage for administration at 8 hour intervals. The main metabolic pathway involves N-demethylation by CYP3A4 in the liver and intestine to give 2-ethylidene-1,5-dimethyl-3,3-diphenylpyrrolidine (EDDP). This inactive product, as well as the inactive 2-ethyl-5-methyl-3,3- diphenyl-1-pyrroline (EMDP), produced by a second N-demethylation, are detectable in the urine of those taking methadone. Route of administration The most common route of administration at a methadone clinic is in a racemic oral solution, though in Germany, only the R enantiomer (the L optical isomer) has traditionally been used, as it is responsible for most of the desired opioid effects. The single-isomer form is becoming less common due to the higher production costs. Methadone is available in traditional pill, sublingual tablet, and two different formulations designed for the person to drink. Drinkable forms include ready-to-dispense liquid (sold in the United States as Methadose), and Diskets® (known on the street as "wafers" or "biscuits") tablets which are dispersible in water for oral administration, used in a similar fashion to Alka-Seltzer. The liquid form is the most common as it allows for smaller dose changes. Methadone is almost as effective when administered orally as by injection. Oral medication is usually preferable because it offers safety, simplicity and represents a step away from injection-based drug abuse in those recovering from addiction. U.S. federal regulations require the oral form in addiction treatment programs. Injecting methadone pills can cause collapsed veins, bruising, swelling, and possibly other harmful effects. Methadone pills often contain talc that, when injected, produces a swarm of tiny solid particles in the blood, causing numerous minor blood clots. These particles cannot be filtered out before injection, and will accumulate in the body over time, especially in the lungs and eyes, producing various complications such as pulmonary hypertension, an irreversible and progressive disease. The formulation sold under the brand name Methadose (flavored liquid suspension for oral dosing, commonly used for maintenance purposes) should not be injected either. Information leaflets included in packs of UK methadone tablets state that the tablets are for oral use only and that use by any other route can cause serious harm. In addition to this warning, additives have now been included in the tablet formulation to make the use of them by the IV route more difficult. Chemistry Detection in biological fluids Methadone and its major metabolite, 2-ethylidene-1,5-dimethyl-3,3-diphenylpyrrolidine (EDDP), are often measured in urine as part of a drug abuse testing program, in plasma or serum to confirm a diagnosis of poisoning in hospitalized victims, or in whole blood to assist in a forensic investigation of a traffic or other criminal violation or a case of sudden death. Methadone usage history is considered in interpreting the results as a chronic user can develop tolerance to doses that would incapacitate an opioid-naive individual. Chronic users often have high methadone and EDDP baseline values. Conformation The protonated form of methadone takes on an extended conformation, while the free base is more compact. In particular, it was found that there is an interaction between the tertiary amine and the carbonyl carbon of the ketone function (R3N ••• >C=O) that limits the molecule's conformation freedom, though the distance (291 pm by X-ray) is far too long to represent a true chemical bond. However, it does represent the initial trajectory of attack of an amine on a carbonyl group and was an important piece of experimental evidence for the proposal of the Bürgi–Dunitz angle for carbonyl addition reactions. History Methadone was developed in 1937 in Germany by scientists working for I.G. Farbenindustrie AG at the Farbwerke Hoechst who were looking for a synthetic opioid that could be created with readily available precursors, to solve Germany's opium shortage problem. On 11 September 1941 Bockmühl and Ehrhart filed an application for a patent for a synthetic substance they called Hoechst 10820 or Polamidon (a name still in regular use in Germany) and whose structure had only slight relation to morphine or the opiate alkaloids.(Bockmühl and Ehrhart, 1949). It was brought to market in 1943 and was widely used by the German army during WWII. In the 1930s, pethidine (meperidine) went into production in Germany; however, production of methadone, then being developed under the designation Hoechst 10820, was not carried forward because of side effects discovered in the early research. After the war, all German patents, trade names and research records were requisitioned and expropriated by the Allies. The records on the research work of the I.G. Farbenkonzern at the Farbwerke Hoechst were confiscated by the U.S. Department of Commerce Intelligence, investigated by a Technical Industrial Committee of the U.S. Department of State and then brought to the US. The report published by the committee noted that while methadone was potentially addictive, it produced less sedation and respiratory depression than morphine and was thus interesting as a commercial drug. In the early 1950s, methadone (most times the racemic HCl salts mixture) was also investigated for use as an antitussive. Isomethadone, noracymethadol, LAAM, and normethadone were first developed in Germany, United Kingdom, Belgium, Austria, Canada, and the United States in the thirty or so years after the 1937 discovery of pethidine, the first synthetic opioid used in medicine. These synthetic opioids have increased length and depth of satiating any opiate cravings and generate very strong analgesic effects due to their long metabolic half-life and strong receptor affinity at the mu-opioid receptor sites. Therefore, they impart much of the satiating and anti-addictive effects of methadone by means of suppressing drug cravings. It was only in 1947 that the drug was given the generic name "methadone" by the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association. Since the patent rights of the I.G. Farbenkonzern and Farbwerke Hoechst were no longer protected each pharmaceutical company interested in the formula could buy the rights for the commercial production of methadone for just one dollar (MOLL 1990). Methadone was introduced into the United States in 1947 by Eli Lilly and Company as an analgesic under the trade name Dolophine. An urban myth later arose that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler ordered the manufacture of methadone or that the brand name 'Dolophine' was named after him, probably based on the similarity of “doloph” with “Adolph”. (The pejorative term "adolphine" would appear in the early 1970s.) However, the name “Dolophine” was a contraction of "Dolo" from the Latin word dolor (pain), and finis, the Latin word for "end". Therefore, Dolophine literally means "pain end". Methadone was studied as a treatment for opioid addiction at the Addiction Research Center of the Narcotics Farm in Lexington, Kentucky in the 1950s, and by Rockefeller University physicians Robert Dole and Marie Nyswander in the 1960s in New York City. By 1976, methadone clinics had opened in cities including Chicago, New York, and New Haven, with some 38,000 patients treated in New York City alone. Society and culture Brand names Brand names include Dolophine, Symoron, Amidone, Methadose, Physeptone, Metadon, Metadol, Metadol-D, Heptanon and Heptadon among others. Cost In the US, generic methadone tablets are inexpensive, with retail prices ranging from $0.25 to $2.50 per defined daily dose. Brand-name methadone tablets may cost much more. Methadone maintenance clinics in the US may be covered by private insurances, Medicaid, or Medicare. Medicare covers methadone under the prescription drug benefit, Medicare Part D, when it is prescribed for pain, but not when it is used for opioid dependence treatment because it cannot be dispensed in a retail pharmacy for this purpose. In California methadone maintenance treatment is covered under the medical benefit. Patients' eligibility for methadone maintenance treatment is most often contingent on them being enrolled in substance abuse counseling. People on methadone maintenance in the US either have to pay cash or if covered by insurance must complete a pre-determined number of hours per month in therapeutic groups or counseling. The United States Department of Veteran's Affairs (VA) Alcohol and Drug Dependence Rehabilitation Program offers methadone services to eligible veterans enrolled in the VA health care system. Methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) cost analyses often compare the cost of clinic visits versus the overall societal costs of illicit opioid use. A preliminary cost analysis conducted in 2016 by the US Department of Defense determined that methadone treatment, which includes psychosocial and support services, may cost an average of $126.00 per week or $6,552.00 per year. The average cost for one full year of methadone maintenance treatment is approximately $4,700 per patient, whereas one full year of imprisonment costs approximately $24,000 per person. Controversy Methadone substitution as a treatment of opioid addiction has been criticized in the social sciences for its role in the social control of addicts. It is suggested that methadone does not function as much to curb addiction as to redirect it and maintain dependency on authorised channels. Several authors apply a Foucauldian analysis to the widespread prescription of the drug and use in institutions such as prisons, hospitals, and rehabilitation centres. Such critique centers on the notion that substance addiction is reframed with a disease model. Thus methadone, which mimics the effects of opioids and renders the addict compliant, is labeled as a "treatment" and so achieves the disciplinary objectives of managing the "undesirables". Regulation United States and Canada Methadone is a Schedule I controlled substance in Canada and Schedule II in the United States, with an ACSCN of 9250 and a 2014 annual aggregate manufacturing quota of 31,875 kilos for sale. Methadone intermediate is also controlled, under ACSCN 9226 also under Schedule II, with a quota of 38,875 kilos. In most countries of the world, methadone is similarly restricted. The salts of methadone in use are the hydrobromide (free base conversion ratio 0.793), hydrochloride (0.894), and HCl monohydrate (0.850). Methadone is also regulated internationally as a Schedule I controlled substance under the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961. Methadone clinics In the United States, prescription of methadone requires intensive monitoring and must be obtained in-person from an opioid treatment program—colloquially known as a 'methadone clinic'—when prescribed for opioid use disorder (OUD). According to federal laws, methadone cannot be prescribed by a doctor and obtained from a pharmacy in order to treat addiction. Because of its long half-life, methadone is almost invariably prescribed to be taken in a single daily dose. At nearly all methadone clinics in the US, patients must visit a clinic to receive and take their dose under the supervision of a nurse. Both patients who are new to methadone treatment and high-risk patients—such as those who are using drugs and alcohol, including cannabis—must visit the clinic daily. However, some clinics close on national holidays and provide doses to patients to take home. 'Take-home' or 'Take-away' methadone After 90 days to 6 months (depending on the clinic), if patients have met the clinic's criteria, they are typically eligible for take-home doses of methadone. Therefore, they may be allowed to take anywhere from one to six | strictly regulated. In the US, outpatient treatment programs must be certified by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and registered by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in order to prescribe methadone for opioid addiction. A 2009 Cochrane review found methadone was effective in retaining people in treatment and in the reduction or cessation of heroin use as measured by self-report and urine/hair analysis but did not affect criminal activity or risk of death. Treatment of opioid-dependent persons with methadone follows one of two routes: maintenance or detoxification. Methadone maintenance therapy (MMT) usually takes place in outpatient settings. It is usually prescribed as a single daily dose medication for those who wish to abstain from illicit opioid use. Treatment models for MMT differ. It is not uncommon for treatment recipients to be administered methadone in a specialist clinic, where they are observed for around 15–20 minutes post-dosing, to reduce the risk of diversion of medication. The duration of methadone treatment programs range from a few months to years. Given opioid dependence is characteristically a chronic relapsing/remitting disorder, MMT may be lifelong. The length of time a person remains in treatment depends on a number of factors. While starting doses may be adjusted based on the amount of opioids reportedly used, most clinical guidelines suggest doses start low (e.g. at doses not exceeding 40 mg daily) and are incremented gradually. It has been found that doses of 40 mg per day were sufficient to help control the withdrawal symptoms but not enough to curb the cravings for the drug. Doses of 80 to 100 mg per day have shown higher rates of success in patients and less illicit heroin use during the maintenance therapy.However, higher doses do put a patient more at risk for overdose than a moderately low dose (e.g. 20 mg/day). Methadone maintenance has been shown to reduce the transmission of bloodborne viruses associated with opioid injection, such as hepatitis B and C, and/or HIV. The principal goals of methadone maintenance are to relieve opioid cravings, suppress the abstinence syndrome, and block the euphoric effects associated with opioids. Chronic methadone dosing will eventually lead to neuroadaptation, characterised by a syndrome of tolerance and withdrawal (dependence). However, when used correctly in treatment, maintenance therapy has been found to be medically safe, non-sedating, and can provide a slow recovery from opioid addiction. Methadone has been widely used for pregnant women addicted to opioids. Pain Methadone is used as an analgesic in chronic pain, often in rotation with other opioids. Due to its activity at the NMDA receptor, it may be more effective against neuropathic pain; for the same reason, tolerance to the analgesic effects may be less than that of other opioids. Adverse effects Adverse effects of methadone include: Sedation Constipation Flushing Perspiration Heat intolerance Dizziness or fainting Weakness Chronic fatigue, sleepiness and exhaustion Sleep problems such as drowsiness, Insomnia Constricted pupils Dry mouth Nausea and vomiting Low blood pressure Headache Heart problems such as chest pain or fast/pounding heartbeat Abnormal heart rhythms Respiratory problems such as trouble breathing, slow or shallow breathing (hypoventilation), light-headedness, or fainting weight gain Memory loss Itching Difficulty urinating Swelling of the hands, arms, feet, and legs Mood changes, euphoria, disorientation Blurred vision Decreased libido, difficulty in reaching orgasm, or impotence Missed menstrual periods, Skin rash Central sleep apnea Withdrawal symptoms Physical symptoms Lightheadedness Tearing of the eyes Mydriasis (dilated pupils) Photophobia (sensitivity to light) Hyperventilation syndrome (breathing that is too fast/deep) Runny nose Yawning Sneezing Nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea Fever Sweating Chills Tremors Akathisia (restlessness) Tachycardia (fast heartbeat) Aches and pains, often in the joints or legs Elevated pain sensitivity Blood pressure that is too high (hypertension, may cause a stroke) Cognitive symptoms Suicidal ideation Susceptibility to cravings Depression Spontaneous orgasm Prolonged insomnia Delirium Auditory hallucinations Visual hallucinations Increased perception of odors (olfaction), real or imagined Marked increase in sex drive Agitation Anxiety Panic disorder Nervousness Paranoia Delusions Apathy Anorexia (symptom) Methadone withdrawal symptoms are reported as being significantly more protracted than withdrawal from opioids with shorter half-lives. When used for opioid maintenance therapy, Methadone is generally administered as an oral liquid. Methadone has been implicated in contributing to significant tooth decay. Methadone causes dry mouth, reducing the protective role of saliva in preventing decay. Other putative mechanisms of methadone-related tooth decay include craving for carbohydrates related to opioids, poor dental care, and general decrease in personal hygiene. These factors, combined with sedation, have been linked to the causation of extensive dental damage. Black box warning Methadone has the following US FDA black box warning: Risk of addiction and abuse Potentially fatal respiratory depression Lethal overdose in accidental ingestion QT prolongation Neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome in children of pregnant women CYP450 drug interactions Risks when used with benzodiazepines and other CNS depressants, including alcohol. A certified opioid treatment program is required under federal law (42 CFR 8.12) when dispensing methadone for the treatment of opioid addiction or detoxification. Overdose Most people who have overdosed on methadone may show some of the following symptoms: Miosis (constricted pupils) Vomiting Spasms of the stomach and intestines Hypoventilation (breathing that is too slow/shallow) Drowsiness, sleepiness, disorientation, sedation, unresponsiveness Skin that is cool, clammy (damp), and pale Blue fingernails and lips Limp muscles, trouble staying awake, nausea Unconsciousness and coma The respiratory depression of an overdose can be treated with naloxone. Naloxone is preferred to the newer, longer-acting antagonist naltrexone. Despite methadone's much longer duration of action compared to either heroin and other shorter-acting agonists and the need for repeat doses of the antagonist naloxone, it is still used for overdose therapy. As naltrexone has a longer half-life, it is more difficult to titrate. If too large a dose of the opioid antagonist is given to a dependent person, it will result in withdrawal symptoms (possibly severe). When using naloxone, the naloxone will be quickly eliminated and the withdrawal will be short-lived. Doses of naltrexone take longer to be eliminated from the person's system. A common problem in treating methadone overdoses is that, given the short action of naloxone (versus the extremely longer-acting methadone), a dosage of naloxone given to a methadone-overdosed person will initially work to bring the person out of overdose, but once the naloxone wears off, if no further naloxone is administered, the person can go right back into overdose (based upon time and dosage of the methadone ingested). Tolerance and dependence As with other opioid medications, tolerance and dependence usually develop with repeated doses. There is some clinical evidence that tolerance to analgesia is less with methadone compared to other opioids; this may be due to its activity at the NMDA receptor. Tolerance to the different physiological effects of methadone varies; tolerance to analgesic properties may or may not develop quickly, but tolerance to euphoria usually develops rapidly, whereas tolerance to constipation, sedation, and respiratory depression develops slowly (if ever). Methadone fills the same opioid receptors in the brain as heroin and other prescription pain killers making it a suitable substitute. Driving Methadone treatment may impair driving ability. Drug abusers had significantly more involvement in serious crashes than non-abusers in a study by the University of Queensland. In the study of a group of 220 drug abusers, most of them poly-drug abusers, 17 were involved in crashes killing people, compared with a control group of other people randomly selected having no involvement in fatal crashes. However, there have been multiple studies verifying the ability of methadone maintenance patients to drive. In the UK, persons who are prescribed oral methadone can continue to drive after they have satisfactorily completed an independent medical examination which will include a urine screen for drugs. The license will be issued for 12 months at a time and even then, only following a favourable assessment from their own doctor. Individuals who are prescribed methadone for either IV or IM administration cannot drive in the UK, mainly due to the increased sedation effects that this route of use can cause. Mortality In the United States, deaths linked to methadone more than quadrupled in the five-year period between 1999 and 2004. According to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, as well as a 2006 series in the Charleston Gazette (West Virginia), medical examiners listed methadone as contributing to 3,849 deaths in 2004. That number was up from 790 in 1999. Approximately 82 percent of those deaths were listed as accidental, and most deaths involved combinations of methadone with other drugs (especially benzodiazepines). Although deaths from methadone are on the rise, methadone-associated deaths are not being caused primarily by methadone intended for methadone treatment programs, according to a panel of experts convened by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which released a report titled "Methadone-Associated Mortality, Report of a National Assessment". The consensus report concludes that "although the data remains incomplete, National Assessment meeting participants concurred that methadone tablets or Diskets® distributed through channels other than opioid treatment programs most likely are the central factors in methadone-associated mortality." In 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a caution about methadone, titled "Methadone Use for Pain Control May Result in Death." The FDA also revised the drug's package insert. The change deleted previous information about the usual adult dosage. The Charleston Gazette reported, "The old language about the 'usual adult dose' was potentially deadly, according to pain specialists." Pharmacology Methadone acts by binding to the µ-opioid receptor, but also has some affinity for the NMDA receptor, an ionotropic glutamate receptor. Methadone is metabolized by CYP3A4, CYP2B6, CYP2D6, and is a substrate, or in this case target, for the P-glycoprotein efflux protein, a protein which helps pump foreign substances out of cells, in the intestines and brain. The bioavailability and elimination half-life of methadone are subject to substantial interindividual variability. Its main route of administration is oral. Adverse effects include sedation, hypoventilation, constipation and miosis, in addition to tolerance, dependence and withdrawal difficulties. The withdrawal period can be much more prolonged than with other opioids, spanning anywhere from two weeks to several months. The metabolic half-life of methadone differs from its duration of action. The metabolic half-life is 8 to 59 hours (approximately 24 hours for opioid-tolerant people, and 55 hours in opioid-naive people), as opposed to a half-life of 1 to 5 hours for morphine. The length of the half-life of methadone allows for exhibition of respiratory depressant effects for an extended duration of time in opioid-naive people. Mechanism of action Levomethadone (the L enantiomer) is a μ-opioid receptor agonist with higher intrinsic activity than morphine, but lower affinity. Dextromethadone (the S enantiomer) does not affect opioid receptors but binds to the glutamatergic NMDA (N-methyl--aspartate) receptor, and acts as an antagonist against glutamate. Methadone has been shown to reduce neuropathic pain in rat models, primarily through NMDA receptor antagonism. Glutamate is the primary excitatory neurotransmitter in the central nervous system. NMDA receptors have a very important role in modulating long-term excitation and memory formation. NMDA antagonists such as dextromethorphan (DXM, a cough suppressant), ketamine (a dissociative anaesthetic), tiletamine (a veterinary anaesthetic) and ibogaine (from the African tree Tabernanthe iboga) are being studied for their role in decreasing the development of tolerance to opioids and as possible for eliminating addiction/tolerance/withdrawal, possibly by disrupting memory circuitry. Acting as an NMDA antagonist may be one mechanism by which methadone decreases craving for opioids and tolerance, and has been proposed as a possible mechanism for its distinguished efficacy regarding the treatment of neuropathic pain. The dextrorotary form (dextromethadone), which acts as an NMDA receptor antagonist and is devoid of opioid activity, has been shown to produce analgesia in experimental models of chronic pain. Methadone also acted as a potent, noncompetitive α3β4 neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist in rat receptors, expressed in human embryonic kidney cell lines. Metabolism Methadone has a slow metabolism and very high fat solubility, making it longer lasting than morphine-based drugs. Methadone has a typical elimination half-life of 15 to 60 hours with a mean of around 22. However, metabolism rates vary greatly between individuals, up to a factor of 100, ranging from |
if one defines then The previous formula arises in the special case of the constant function , whose Dirichlet inverse is . A particular application of the first of these extensions arises if we have (complex-valued) functions and defined on the positive integers, with By defining and , we deduce that A simple example of the use of this formula is counting the number of reduced fractions , where and are coprime and . If we let be this number, then is the total number of fractions with , where and are not necessarily coprime. (This is because every fraction with and can be reduced to the fraction with , and vice versa.) Here it is straightforward to determine , but is harder to compute. Another inversion formula is (where we assume that the series involved are absolutely convergent): As above, this generalises to the case where is an arithmetic function possessing a Dirichlet inverse : For example, there is a well known proof relating the Riemann zeta function to the prime zeta function that uses the series-based form of Möbius inversion in the previous equation when . Namely, by the Euler product representation of for These identities for alternate forms of Möbius inversion are found in. A more general theory of Möbius inversion formulas partially cited in the next section on incidence algebras is constructed by Rota in. Multiplicative notation As Möbius inversion applies to any abelian group, it makes no difference whether the group operation is written as addition or as multiplication. This gives rise to the following notational variant of the inversion formula: Proofs of generalizations The first generalization can be proved as follows. We use Iverson's convention that [condition] is the indicator function of the condition, being 1 if the condition is true and 0 if false. We use the result that that is, , where is the unit function. We have the following: The proof in the more general case where replaces 1 is essentially identical, as is the second generalisation. On posets For a poset , a set endowed with a partial order relation , define the Möbius function of | backwards. As an example the sequence starting with is: The generated sequences can perhaps be more easily understood by considering the corresponding Dirichlet series: each repeated application of the transform corresponds to multiplication by the Riemann zeta function. Generalizations A related inversion formula more useful in combinatorics is as follows: suppose and are complex-valued functions defined on the interval such that then Here the sums extend over all positive integers which are less than or equal to . This in turn is a special case of a more general form. If is an arithmetic function possessing a Dirichlet inverse , then if one defines then The previous formula arises in the special case of the constant function , whose Dirichlet inverse is . A particular application of the first of these extensions arises if we have (complex-valued) functions and defined on the positive integers, with By defining and , we deduce that A simple example of the use of this formula is counting the number of reduced fractions , where and are coprime and . If we let be this number, then is the total number of fractions with , where and are not necessarily coprime. (This is because every fraction with and can be reduced to the fraction with , and vice versa.) Here it is straightforward to determine , but is harder to compute. Another inversion formula is (where we assume that the series involved are absolutely convergent): As above, this generalises to the case where is an arithmetic function possessing a Dirichlet inverse : For example, there is a well known proof relating the Riemann zeta function to the prime zeta function that uses the series-based form of Möbius inversion in the previous equation when . Namely, by the Euler product representation of for These identities for alternate forms of Möbius inversion are found in. A more general theory of Möbius inversion formulas partially cited in the next section on incidence algebras is constructed by Rota in. Multiplicative notation As Möbius inversion applies to any abelian group, it makes no difference whether the group |
his widow, two sons and a daughter. Since the establishment of the Faraday Society in 1903, Lowry had been its active member and served as its president between 1928 and 1930. In 1914 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society. During and after the World War I, Lowry acted as director of shell-filling (1917–1919) and worked for the Trench Warfare Committee, Chemical Warfare Committee and Ordnance Committee. For this service, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire and the Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus. Research In 1898, Lowry noted the change in optical rotation on nitro-d-camphor with time and invented the term mutarotational to describe this phenomenon. He studied changes in optical rotation caused by acid- and base-catalyzed reactions of camphor derivatives. This led in 1923 to his formulation of the protonic definition of acids and bases, now known as Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory, independently of the work by Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted. Lowry published a few hundred papers and several books. His 1935 monograph on "Optical Rotatory Power" (1935) has long been regarded as a standard work on the subject. | Lowry (; 26 October 1874 – 2 November 1936) was an English physical chemist who developed the Brønsted–Lowry acid–base theory simultaneously with and independently of Johannes Nicolaus Brønsted and was a founder-member and president (1928–1930) of the Faraday Society. Biography Lowry was born in Low Moor, Bradford, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, in a Cornish family. He was the second son of the Reverend E. P. Lowry who was the minister of the Wesleyan Church in Aldershot from 1892 to 1919. He was educated at Kingswood School, Bath, Somerset, and then at the Central Technical College in South Kensington. During those years he realized that he wanted to be a chemist. He studied chemistry under Henry Edward Armstrong, an English chemist whose interests were primarily in organic chemistry but also included the nature of ions in aqueous solutions. From 1896 to 1913 Lowry was assistant to Armstrong, and between 1904 and 1913 worked as lecturer in chemistry at the Westminster Training College. In 1913, he was appointed head of the chemical department in Guy’s Hospital Medical and became the first teacher of chemistry in a Medical School to be made a University Professor, at the University of London. From 1920 till his death, Lowry served as the Chair of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He married a |
Hulk were both featured in Esquire magazine's list of 28 college campus heroes, alongside John F. Kennedy and Bob Dylan. In 2009, writer Geoff Boucher reflected that, Superman and DC Comics instantly seemed like boring old Pat Boone; Marvel felt like The Beatles and the British Invasion. It was Kirby's artwork with its tension and psychedelia that made it perfect for the times—or was it Lee's bravado and melodrama, which was somehow insecure and brash at the same time? In addition to Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Marvel began publishing further superhero titles featuring such heroes and antiheroes as the Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Inhumans, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel and the Silver Surfer, and such memorable antagonists as Doctor Doom, Magneto, Galactus, Loki, the Green Goblin, and Doctor Octopus, all existing in a shared reality known as the Marvel Universe, with locations that mirror real-life cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Marvel even lampooned itself and other comics companies in a parody comic, Not Brand Echh (a play on Marvel's dubbing of other companies as "Brand Echh", à la the then-common phrase "Brand X"). Originally, the company's publications were branded by a minuscule "Mc" on the upper right-hand corner of the covers. However, artist/writer Steve Ditko put a larger masthead picture of the title character of The Amazing Spider-Man on the upper left-hand corner on issue #2 that included the series' issue number and price. Lee appreciated the value of this visual motif and adapted it for the company's entire publishing line. This branding pattern, being typically either a full-body picture of the characters' solo titles or a collection of the main characters' faces in ensemble titles, would become standard for Marvel for decades. Cadence Industries ownership In 1968, while selling 50 million comic books a year, company founder Goodman revised the constraining distribution arrangement with Independent News he had reached under duress during the Atlas years, allowing him now to release as many titles as demand warranted. Late that year, he sold Marvel Comics and its parent company, Magazine Management, to the Perfect Film and Chemical Corporation, though he remained as publisher. In 1969, Goodman finally ended his distribution deal with Independent by signing with Curtis Circulation Company. In 1971, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare approached Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Stan Lee to do a comic book story about drug abuse. Lee agreed and wrote a three-part Spider-Man story portraying drug use as dangerous and unglamorous. However, the industry's self-censorship board, the Comics Code Authority, refused to approve the story because of the presence of narcotics, deeming the context of the story irrelevant. Lee, with Goodman's approval, published the story regardless in The Amazing Spider-Man #96–98 (May–July 1971), without the Comics Code seal. The market reacted well to the storyline, and the CCA subsequently revised the Code the same year. Goodman retired as publisher in 1972 and installed his son, Chip, as publisher. Shortly thereafter, Lee succeeded him as publisher and also became Marvel's president for a brief time. During his time as president, he appointed his associate editor, prolific writer Roy Thomas, as editor-in-chief. Thomas added "Stan Lee Presents" to the opening page of each comic book. A series of new editors-in-chief oversaw the company during another slow time for the industry. Once again, Marvel attempted to diversify, and with the updating of the Comics Code published titles themed to horror (The Tomb of Dracula), martial arts (Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu), sword-and-sorcery (Conan the Barbarian in 1970, Red Sonja), satire (Howard the Duck) and science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey, "Killraven" in Amazing Adventures, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, and, late in the decade, the long-running Star Wars series). Some of these were published in larger-format black and white magazines, under its Curtis Magazines imprint. Marvel was able to capitalize on its successful superhero comics of the previous decade by acquiring a new newsstand distributor and greatly expanding its comics line. Marvel pulled ahead of rival DC Comics in 1972, during a time when the price and format of the standard newsstand comic were in flux. Goodman increased the price and size of Marvel's November 1971 cover-dated comics from 15 cents for 36 pages total to 25 cents for 52 pages. DC followed suit, but Marvel the following month dropped its comics to 20 cents for 36 pages, offering a lower-priced product with a higher distributor discount. In 1973, Perfect Film and Chemical renamed itself as Cadence Industries and renamed Magazine Management as Marvel Comics Group. Goodman, now disconnected from Marvel, set up a new company called Seaboard Periodicals in 1974, reviving Marvel's old Atlas name for a new Atlas Comics line, but this lasted only a year and a half. In the mid-1970s a decline of the newsstand distribution network affected Marvel. Cult hits such as Howard the Duck fell victim to the distribution problems, with some titles reporting low sales when in fact the first specialty comic book stores resold them at a later date. But by the end of the decade, Marvel's fortunes were reviving, thanks to the rise of direct market distribution—selling through those same comics-specialty stores instead of newsstands. Marvel ventured into audio in 1975 with a radio series and a record, both had Stan Lee as narrator. The radio series was Fantastic Four. The record was Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero concept album for music fans. Marvel held its own comic book convention, Marvelcon '75, in spring 1975, and promised a Marvelcon '76. At the 1975 event, Stan Lee used a Fantastic Four panel discussion to announce that Jack Kirby, the artist co-creator of most of Marvel's signature characters, was returning to Marvel after having left in 1970 to work for rival DC Comics. In October 1976, Marvel, which already licensed reprints in different countries, including the UK, created a superhero specifically for the British market. Captain Britain debuted exclusively in the UK, and later appeared in American comics. During this time, Marvel and the Iowa-based Register and Tribune Syndicate launched a number of syndicated comic strips — The Amazing Spider-Man, Howard the Duck, Conan the Barbarian, and The Incredible Hulk. None of the strips lasted past 1982, except for The Amazing Spider-Man, which is still being published. In 1978, Jim Shooter became Marvel's editor-in-chief. Although a controversial personality, Shooter cured many of the procedural ills at Marvel, including repeatedly missed deadlines. During Shooter's nine-year tenure as editor-in-chief, Chris Claremont and John Byrne's run on the Uncanny X-Men and Frank Miller's run on Daredevil became critical and commercial successes. Shooter brought Marvel into the rapidly evolving direct market, institutionalized creator royalties, starting with the Epic Comics imprint for creator-owned material in 1982; introduced company-wide crossover story arcs with Contest of Champions and Secret Wars; and in 1986 launched the ultimately unsuccessful New Universe line to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Marvel Comics imprint. Star Comics, a children-oriented line differing from the regular Marvel titles, was briefly successful during this period. Marvel Entertainment Group ownership In 1986, Marvel's parent, Marvel Entertainment Group, was sold to New World Entertainment, which within three years sold it to MacAndrews and Forbes, owned by Revlon executive Ronald Perelman in 1989. In 1991 Perelman took MEG public. Following the rapid rise of this stock, Perelman issued a series of junk bonds that he used to acquire other entertainment companies, secured by MEG stock. Marvel earned a great deal of money with their 1980s children's comics imprint Star Comics and they earned a great deal more money and worldwide success during the comic book boom of the early 1990s, launching the successful 2099 line of comics set in the future (Spider-Man 2099, etc.) and the creatively daring though commercially unsuccessful Razorline imprint of superhero comics created by novelist and filmmaker Clive Barker. In 1990, Marvel began selling Marvel Universe Cards with trading card maker SkyBox International. These were collectible trading cards that featured the characters and events of the Marvel Universe. The 1990s saw the rise of variant covers, cover enhancements, swimsuit issues, and company-wide crossovers that affected the overall continuity of the Marvel Universe. Marvel suffered a blow in early 1992, when seven of its most prized artists — Todd McFarlane (known for his work on Spider-Man), Jim Lee (X-Men), Rob Liefeld (X-Force), Marc Silvestri (Wolverine), Erik Larsen (The Amazing Spider-Man), Jim Valentino (Guardians of the Galaxy), and Whilce Portacio (Uncanny X-Men) — left to form Image Comics in a deal brokered by Malibu Comics' owner Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Three years later, on November 3, 1994, Rosenberg sold Malibu to Marvel. In purchasing Malibu, Marvel now owned leading standard for computer coloring of comic books that had been developed by Rosenberg, and also integrated the Ultraverse line of comics and the Genesis Universe into Marvel's multiverse. In late 1994, Marvel acquired the comic book distributor Heroes World Distribution to use as its own exclusive distributor. As the industry's other major publishers made exclusive distribution deals with other companies, the ripple effect resulted in the survival of only one other major distributor in North America, Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. Then, by the middle of the decade, the industry had slumped, and in December 1996 MEG filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In early 1997, when Marvel's Heroes World endeavor failed, Diamond also forged an exclusive deal with Marvel—giving the company its own section of its comics catalog Previews. In 1996, Marvel had some of its titles participate in "Heroes Reborn", a crossover that allowed Marvel to relaunch some of its flagship characters such as the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, and outsource them to the studios of two of the former Marvel artists turned Image Comics founders, Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. The relaunched titles, which saw the characters transported to a parallel universe with a history distinct from the mainstream Marvel Universe, were a solid success amidst a generally struggling industry, but Marvel discontinued the experiment after a one-year run and returned the characters to the Marvel Universe proper. Marvel Enterprises In 1997, Toy Biz bought Marvel Entertainment Group to end the bankruptcy, forming a new corporation, Marvel Enterprises. With his business partner Avi Arad, publisher Bill Jemas, and editor-in-chief Bob Harras, Toy Biz co-owner Isaac Perlmutter helped stabilize the comics line. In 1998, the company launched the imprint Marvel Knights, taking place just outside Marvel continuity with better production quality. The imprint was helmed by soon-to-become editor-in-chief Joe Quesada; it featured tough, gritty stories showcasing such characters as the Daredevil, the Inhumans, and Black Panther. With the new millennium, Marvel Comics emerged from bankruptcy and again began diversifying its offerings. In 2001, Marvel withdrew from the Comics Code Authority and established its own Marvel Rating System for comics. The first title from this era to not have the code was X-Force #119 (October 2001). Marvel also created new imprints, such as MAX (an explicit-content line) and Marvel Adventures (developed for child audiences). The company also created an alternate universe imprint, Ultimate Marvel, that allowed the company to reboot its major titles by revising and updating its characters to introduce to a new generation. Some of the company's properties were adapted into successful film franchises, such as the Men in Black movie series (which was based on a Malibu book), starting in 1997, the Blade movie series, starting in 1998, the X-Men movie series, starting in 2000, and the highest grossing series, Spider-Man, beginning in 2002. Marvel's Conan the Barbarian title was canceled in 1993 after 275 issues, while the Savage Sword of Conan magazine had lasted 235 issues. Marvel published additional titles including miniseries until 2000 for a total of 650 issues. Conan was picked up by Dark Horse Comics three years later. In a cross-promotion, the November 1, 2006, episode of the CBS soap opera The Guiding Light, titled "She's a Marvel", featured the character Harley Davidson Cooper (played by Beth Ehlers) as a superheroine named the Guiding Light. The character's story continued in an eight-page backup feature, "A New Light", that appeared in several Marvel titles published November 1 and 8. Also that year, Marvel created a wiki on its Web site. In late 2007 the company launched Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, a digital archive of over 2,500 back issues available for viewing, for a monthly or annual subscription fee. At the December 2007 the New York Anime Fest, the company announcement that Del Rey Manga would published two original English language Marvel manga books featuring the X-Men and Wolverine to hit the stands in spring 2009. In 2009 Marvel Comics closed its Open Submissions Policy, in which the company had accepted unsolicited samples from aspiring comic book artists, saying the time-consuming review process had produced no suitably professional work. The same year, the company commemorated its 70th anniversary, dating to its inception as Timely Comics, by issuing the one-shot Marvel Mystery Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 and a variety of other special issues. Disney conglomerate unit (2009–present) On August 31, 2009, The Walt Disney Company announced it would acquire Marvel Comics' parent corporation, Marvel Entertainment, for a cash and stock deal worth approximately $4 billion, which if necessary would be adjusted at closing, giving Marvel shareholders $30 and 0.745 Disney shares for each share of Marvel they owned. As of 2008, Marvel and its major, longtime competitor DC Comics shared over 80% of the American comic-book market. As of September 2010, Marvel switched its bookstore distribution company from Diamond Book Distributors to Hachette Distribution Services. Marvel moved its office to the Sports Illustrated Building in October 2010. Marvel relaunched the CrossGen imprint, owned by Disney Publishing Worldwide, in March 2011. Marvel and Disney Publishing began jointly publishing Disney/Pixar Presents magazine that May. Marvel discontinued its Marvel Adventures imprint in March 2012, and replaced them with a line of two titles connected to the Marvel Universe TV block. Also in March, Marvel announced its Marvel ReEvolution initiative that included Infinite Comics, a line of digital comics, Marvel AR, a software application that provides an augmented reality experience to readers and Marvel NOW!, a relaunch of most of the company's major titles with different creative teams. Marvel NOW! also saw the debut of new flagship titles including Uncanny Avengers and All-New X-Men. In April 2013, Marvel and other Disney conglomerate components began announcing joint projects. With ABC, a Once Upon a Time graphic novel was announced for publication in September. With Disney, Marvel announced in October 2013 that in January 2014 it would release its first title under their joint "Disney Kingdoms" imprint "Seekers of the Weird", a five-issue miniseries. On January 3, 2014, fellow Disney subsidiary Lucasfilm announced that as of 2015, Star Wars comics would once again be published by Marvel. Following the events of the company-wide crossover "Secret Wars" in 2015, a relaunched Marvel universe began in September 2015, called the All-New, All-Different Marvel. Marvel Legacy was the company's Fall 2017 relaunch branding, which began that September. Books released as part of that initiative featured lenticular variant covers that required comic book stores to double their regular issue order to be able to order the variants. The owner of two Comix Experience stores complained about requiring retailers purchase an excess of copies featuring the regular cover that they would not be able to sell in order to acquire the more sought-after variant. Marvel responded to these complaints by rescinding these ordering requirements on newer series, but maintained it on more long-running titles like Invincible Iron Man. As a result, MyComicShop.com and at least 70 other comic book stores boycotted these variant covers. Despite the release of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Logan, Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming in theaters, none of those characters' titles featured in the top 10 sales and the Guardians of the Galaxy comic book series was cancelled. Conan Properties International announced on January 12, 2018 that Conan would return to Marvel in early 2019. On March 1, 2019, Serial Box, a digital book platform, announced a partnership with Marvel, in which they would publish new and original stories tied to a number of Marvel's popular franchises. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, from March to May 2020, Marvel and its distributor Diamond Comic Distributors stopped producing and releasing new comic books. On March 25, 2021, Marvel | Stan Lee to do a comic book story about drug abuse. Lee agreed and wrote a three-part Spider-Man story portraying drug use as dangerous and unglamorous. However, the industry's self-censorship board, the Comics Code Authority, refused to approve the story because of the presence of narcotics, deeming the context of the story irrelevant. Lee, with Goodman's approval, published the story regardless in The Amazing Spider-Man #96–98 (May–July 1971), without the Comics Code seal. The market reacted well to the storyline, and the CCA subsequently revised the Code the same year. Goodman retired as publisher in 1972 and installed his son, Chip, as publisher. Shortly thereafter, Lee succeeded him as publisher and also became Marvel's president for a brief time. During his time as president, he appointed his associate editor, prolific writer Roy Thomas, as editor-in-chief. Thomas added "Stan Lee Presents" to the opening page of each comic book. A series of new editors-in-chief oversaw the company during another slow time for the industry. Once again, Marvel attempted to diversify, and with the updating of the Comics Code published titles themed to horror (The Tomb of Dracula), martial arts (Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu), sword-and-sorcery (Conan the Barbarian in 1970, Red Sonja), satire (Howard the Duck) and science fiction (2001: A Space Odyssey, "Killraven" in Amazing Adventures, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, and, late in the decade, the long-running Star Wars series). Some of these were published in larger-format black and white magazines, under its Curtis Magazines imprint. Marvel was able to capitalize on its successful superhero comics of the previous decade by acquiring a new newsstand distributor and greatly expanding its comics line. Marvel pulled ahead of rival DC Comics in 1972, during a time when the price and format of the standard newsstand comic were in flux. Goodman increased the price and size of Marvel's November 1971 cover-dated comics from 15 cents for 36 pages total to 25 cents for 52 pages. DC followed suit, but Marvel the following month dropped its comics to 20 cents for 36 pages, offering a lower-priced product with a higher distributor discount. In 1973, Perfect Film and Chemical renamed itself as Cadence Industries and renamed Magazine Management as Marvel Comics Group. Goodman, now disconnected from Marvel, set up a new company called Seaboard Periodicals in 1974, reviving Marvel's old Atlas name for a new Atlas Comics line, but this lasted only a year and a half. In the mid-1970s a decline of the newsstand distribution network affected Marvel. Cult hits such as Howard the Duck fell victim to the distribution problems, with some titles reporting low sales when in fact the first specialty comic book stores resold them at a later date. But by the end of the decade, Marvel's fortunes were reviving, thanks to the rise of direct market distribution—selling through those same comics-specialty stores instead of newsstands. Marvel ventured into audio in 1975 with a radio series and a record, both had Stan Lee as narrator. The radio series was Fantastic Four. The record was Spider-Man: Rock Reflections of a Superhero concept album for music fans. Marvel held its own comic book convention, Marvelcon '75, in spring 1975, and promised a Marvelcon '76. At the 1975 event, Stan Lee used a Fantastic Four panel discussion to announce that Jack Kirby, the artist co-creator of most of Marvel's signature characters, was returning to Marvel after having left in 1970 to work for rival DC Comics. In October 1976, Marvel, which already licensed reprints in different countries, including the UK, created a superhero specifically for the British market. Captain Britain debuted exclusively in the UK, and later appeared in American comics. During this time, Marvel and the Iowa-based Register and Tribune Syndicate launched a number of syndicated comic strips — The Amazing Spider-Man, Howard the Duck, Conan the Barbarian, and The Incredible Hulk. None of the strips lasted past 1982, except for The Amazing Spider-Man, which is still being published. In 1978, Jim Shooter became Marvel's editor-in-chief. Although a controversial personality, Shooter cured many of the procedural ills at Marvel, including repeatedly missed deadlines. During Shooter's nine-year tenure as editor-in-chief, Chris Claremont and John Byrne's run on the Uncanny X-Men and Frank Miller's run on Daredevil became critical and commercial successes. Shooter brought Marvel into the rapidly evolving direct market, institutionalized creator royalties, starting with the Epic Comics imprint for creator-owned material in 1982; introduced company-wide crossover story arcs with Contest of Champions and Secret Wars; and in 1986 launched the ultimately unsuccessful New Universe line to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Marvel Comics imprint. Star Comics, a children-oriented line differing from the regular Marvel titles, was briefly successful during this period. Marvel Entertainment Group ownership In 1986, Marvel's parent, Marvel Entertainment Group, was sold to New World Entertainment, which within three years sold it to MacAndrews and Forbes, owned by Revlon executive Ronald Perelman in 1989. In 1991 Perelman took MEG public. Following the rapid rise of this stock, Perelman issued a series of junk bonds that he used to acquire other entertainment companies, secured by MEG stock. Marvel earned a great deal of money with their 1980s children's comics imprint Star Comics and they earned a great deal more money and worldwide success during the comic book boom of the early 1990s, launching the successful 2099 line of comics set in the future (Spider-Man 2099, etc.) and the creatively daring though commercially unsuccessful Razorline imprint of superhero comics created by novelist and filmmaker Clive Barker. In 1990, Marvel began selling Marvel Universe Cards with trading card maker SkyBox International. These were collectible trading cards that featured the characters and events of the Marvel Universe. The 1990s saw the rise of variant covers, cover enhancements, swimsuit issues, and company-wide crossovers that affected the overall continuity of the Marvel Universe. Marvel suffered a blow in early 1992, when seven of its most prized artists — Todd McFarlane (known for his work on Spider-Man), Jim Lee (X-Men), Rob Liefeld (X-Force), Marc Silvestri (Wolverine), Erik Larsen (The Amazing Spider-Man), Jim Valentino (Guardians of the Galaxy), and Whilce Portacio (Uncanny X-Men) — left to form Image Comics in a deal brokered by Malibu Comics' owner Scott Mitchell Rosenberg. Three years later, on November 3, 1994, Rosenberg sold Malibu to Marvel. In purchasing Malibu, Marvel now owned leading standard for computer coloring of comic books that had been developed by Rosenberg, and also integrated the Ultraverse line of comics and the Genesis Universe into Marvel's multiverse. In late 1994, Marvel acquired the comic book distributor Heroes World Distribution to use as its own exclusive distributor. As the industry's other major publishers made exclusive distribution deals with other companies, the ripple effect resulted in the survival of only one other major distributor in North America, Diamond Comic Distributors Inc. Then, by the middle of the decade, the industry had slumped, and in December 1996 MEG filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In early 1997, when Marvel's Heroes World endeavor failed, Diamond also forged an exclusive deal with Marvel—giving the company its own section of its comics catalog Previews. In 1996, Marvel had some of its titles participate in "Heroes Reborn", a crossover that allowed Marvel to relaunch some of its flagship characters such as the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, and outsource them to the studios of two of the former Marvel artists turned Image Comics founders, Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld. The relaunched titles, which saw the characters transported to a parallel universe with a history distinct from the mainstream Marvel Universe, were a solid success amidst a generally struggling industry, but Marvel discontinued the experiment after a one-year run and returned the characters to the Marvel Universe proper. Marvel Enterprises In 1997, Toy Biz bought Marvel Entertainment Group to end the bankruptcy, forming a new corporation, Marvel Enterprises. With his business partner Avi Arad, publisher Bill Jemas, and editor-in-chief Bob Harras, Toy Biz co-owner Isaac Perlmutter helped stabilize the comics line. In 1998, the company launched the imprint Marvel Knights, taking place just outside Marvel continuity with better production quality. The imprint was helmed by soon-to-become editor-in-chief Joe Quesada; it featured tough, gritty stories showcasing such characters as the Daredevil, the Inhumans, and Black Panther. With the new millennium, Marvel Comics emerged from bankruptcy and again began diversifying its offerings. In 2001, Marvel withdrew from the Comics Code Authority and established its own Marvel Rating System for comics. The first title from this era to not have the code was X-Force #119 (October 2001). Marvel also created new imprints, such as MAX (an explicit-content line) and Marvel Adventures (developed for child audiences). The company also created an alternate universe imprint, Ultimate Marvel, that allowed the company to reboot its major titles by revising and updating its characters to introduce to a new generation. Some of the company's properties were adapted into successful film franchises, such as the Men in Black movie series (which was based on a Malibu book), starting in 1997, the Blade movie series, starting in 1998, the X-Men movie series, starting in 2000, and the highest grossing series, Spider-Man, beginning in 2002. Marvel's Conan the Barbarian title was canceled in 1993 after 275 issues, while the Savage Sword of Conan magazine had lasted 235 issues. Marvel published additional titles including miniseries until 2000 for a total of 650 issues. Conan was picked up by Dark Horse Comics three years later. In a cross-promotion, the November 1, 2006, episode of the CBS soap opera The Guiding Light, titled "She's a Marvel", featured the character Harley Davidson Cooper (played by Beth Ehlers) as a superheroine named the Guiding Light. The character's story continued in an eight-page backup feature, "A New Light", that appeared in several Marvel titles published November 1 and 8. Also that year, Marvel created a wiki on its Web site. In late 2007 the company launched Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, a digital archive of over 2,500 back issues available for viewing, for a monthly or annual subscription fee. At the December 2007 the New York Anime Fest, the company announcement that Del Rey Manga would published two original English language Marvel manga books featuring the X-Men and Wolverine to hit the stands in spring 2009. In 2009 Marvel Comics closed its Open Submissions Policy, in which the company had accepted unsolicited samples from aspiring comic book artists, saying the time-consuming review process had produced no suitably professional work. The same year, the company commemorated its 70th anniversary, dating to its inception as Timely Comics, by issuing the one-shot Marvel Mystery Comics 70th Anniversary Special #1 and a variety of other special issues. Disney conglomerate unit (2009–present) On August 31, 2009, The Walt Disney Company announced it would acquire Marvel Comics' parent corporation, Marvel Entertainment, for a cash and stock deal worth approximately $4 billion, which if necessary would be adjusted at closing, giving Marvel shareholders $30 and 0.745 Disney shares for each share of Marvel they owned. As of 2008, Marvel and its major, longtime competitor DC Comics shared over 80% of the American comic-book market. As of September 2010, Marvel switched its bookstore distribution company from Diamond Book Distributors to Hachette Distribution Services. Marvel moved its office to the Sports Illustrated Building in October 2010. Marvel relaunched the CrossGen imprint, owned by Disney Publishing Worldwide, in March 2011. Marvel and Disney Publishing began jointly publishing Disney/Pixar Presents magazine that May. Marvel discontinued its Marvel Adventures imprint in March 2012, and replaced them with a line of two titles connected to the Marvel Universe TV block. Also in March, Marvel announced its Marvel ReEvolution initiative that included Infinite Comics, a line of digital comics, Marvel AR, a software application that provides an augmented reality experience to readers and Marvel NOW!, a relaunch of most of the company's major titles with different creative teams. Marvel NOW! also saw the debut of new flagship titles including Uncanny Avengers and All-New X-Men. In April 2013, Marvel and other Disney conglomerate components began announcing joint projects. With ABC, a Once Upon a Time graphic novel was announced for publication in September. With Disney, Marvel announced in October 2013 that in January 2014 it would release its first title under their joint "Disney Kingdoms" imprint "Seekers of the Weird", a five-issue miniseries. On January 3, 2014, fellow Disney subsidiary Lucasfilm announced that as of 2015, Star Wars comics would once again be published by Marvel. Following the events of the company-wide crossover "Secret Wars" in 2015, a relaunched Marvel universe began in September 2015, called the All-New, All-Different Marvel. Marvel Legacy was the company's Fall 2017 relaunch branding, which began that September. Books released as part of that initiative featured lenticular variant covers that required comic book stores to double their regular issue order to be able to order the variants. The owner of two Comix Experience stores complained about requiring retailers purchase an excess of copies featuring the regular cover that they would not be able to sell in order to acquire the more sought-after variant. Marvel responded to these complaints by rescinding these ordering requirements on newer series, but maintained it on more long-running titles like Invincible Iron Man. As a result, MyComicShop.com and at least 70 other comic book stores boycotted these variant covers. Despite the release of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Logan, Thor: Ragnarok and Spider-Man: Homecoming in theaters, none of those characters' titles featured in the top 10 sales and the Guardians of the Galaxy comic book series was cancelled. Conan Properties International announced on January 12, 2018 that Conan |
in Bloomington, Indiana. Smith wounded nine others before committing suicide on July 4. Mark Potok, director of intelligence for the Southern Poverty Law Center, believes that Smith may have acted in retaliation after Hale's application to practice law was rejected. During a television interview in the summer of 1999, Hale stated that his "church does not condone violent or illegal activities". Court trials and federal convictions In 2000, a religious group in Oregon called the Church of the Creator sued Hale's organization, the World Church of the Creator, for trademark infringement. Hale filed a lawsuit against Judge Joan Lefkow, the United States district court judge presiding over the trademark infringement case who, after an appeal, had ruled against Hale's organization. Hale stated that the WCOTC was in a "state of war" with Lefkow, and denounced Lefkow in a news conference, claiming that she was biased against him because she was married to a Jewish man and had biracial grandchildren. On January 8, 2003, Hale was arrested, charged with soliciting an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant named Tony Evola to kill Lefkow. The FBI sent Evola to join the World Church of the Creator after Hale gave a speech at the funeral of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith. In March 2000, Evola attended his first World Church of the Creator meeting and won Hale's trust by confronting a protester to the organization. At a meeting the next month in April 2000, Hale invited Evola to be his "head of security" which entailed arranging Hale's travel plans and serving as a personal bodyguard. During his tenure as bodyguard, Evola recorded conversations that would be later used as evidence against Hale. In a recorded conversation on June 17, 2000, Hale described Smith as a "good man" and a "comrade". On June 23, Hale told Evola and two other followers that he wished Smith “hadn't done it” and lamented the difficulty of nonviolent resistance through the courts without a license to practice law. On June 29, Evola recorded Hale stating that he “personally still [had the] intention” to follow the law himself because he was being “watched all the time”. On June 30, 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States refused Hale's appeal to challenge the state of Illinois's denial of his license to practice law. In response Hale recorded on his voicemail that his followers "are free according to our own conscience to take whatever actions we deem necessary to resist this tyranny." On December 3, 2000, Evola asked Hale, "What are we gonna do about this traitor?" to which Hale responded "[A]ll we can do at this point is be legal and peaceful and follow the rules." On December 17, 2000, Hale communicated with Evola in an Internet chatroom. Evola asked Hale about rats in reference to a former member's testimony against the World Church of the Creator in court to which Hale replied, "Of course, it is very important that I be able to say truthfully that I have never advocated anything illegal," yet he "wouldn't mind if something happens to big rats. But I would never want to involve myself in such things." On January 11, 2001, Evola fabricated a story that "everything's in motion" to which Hale responded "I think it would be best, you know, I think it would be best that nothing happened." Evola further pursued the possibility of a fabricated assassination to which Hale responded the former member had "already been deposed” so killing him was a futile decision. Evola persisted and Hale replied "I'm gonna have to say no to this and I have to say no for a number of reasons." Evola offered to provide Hale with an alibi for the murder, and Hale declined because "what I would be doing or what I would be authorizing would be grounds for disbarment if I had a license and I just hate to go [sic] that." Evola persisted to which Hale stated "I don't want to ever hear about it again." The next day Hale sent an email to Evola about the "idea" and stated, "I must veto it." Hale wrote, "You are very persuasive and obviously I think extremely well of you for your idea," but he concluded, "I must instruct you not to proceed." The discussions between Evola and Hale about Ken Dippold served as a prelude to further discussions about Joan Humphrey Lefkow. On February 28, 2005, Lefkow's mother and husband were murdered at her home on Chicago's North Side. Chicago police revealed on March 10 that Bart Ross, a plaintiff in a medical malpractice case that Lefkow had dismissed, admitted to the murders in a suicide note written before shooting himself during a routine traffic stop in Wisconsin the previous evening. The murders and suicide were unrelated to Hale or Creativity. On April 6, 2005, Hale was sentenced to a 40-year prison term exactly one year after the trial began for attempting to solicit Lefkow's murder. U.S. District Court Judge James Moody presided over the sentencing. During the trial, jurors heard more than a dozen tapes of Hale using racial slurs, including one in which he joked about Benjamin Smith's murderous shooting spree. According to prosecutors, Hale had asked one of his followers named Anthony Evola to kill Lefkow. In June 2016, Hale was transferred out of ADX Florence to medium-security federal prison FCI Terre Haute, Indiana, but by late 2017 was back at Florence. In July 2020, Hale was transferred out of ADX once again, this time to USP Marion, a medium-security institution in Illinois. Hale's projected release date is April 2, 2037. | decision. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois concluded it did not have jurisdiction to review an earlier decision of the Illinois Supreme Court upholding the license denial. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision in an opinion filed on July 14, 2003. Two days after Hale was denied a license to practice law, a World Church of the Creator member and college student, Benjamin Smith, went on a three-day shooting spree in which he randomly targeted members of racial and ethnic minority groups in Illinois and Indiana. Beginning on July 2, 1999, Smith shot nine Orthodox Jews while they were walking to and from their synagogues in Chicago's West Rogers Park neighborhood. He also killed two people, including former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, in Evanston, Illinois, and a 26-year-old Korean graduate student, Won-Joon Yoon, who was on his way to church in Bloomington, Indiana. Smith wounded nine others before committing suicide on July 4. Mark Potok, director of intelligence for the Southern Poverty Law Center, believes that Smith may have acted in retaliation after Hale's application to practice law was rejected. During a television interview in the summer of 1999, Hale stated that his "church does not condone violent or illegal activities". Court trials and federal convictions In 2000, a religious group in Oregon called the Church of the Creator sued Hale's organization, the World Church of the Creator, for trademark infringement. Hale filed a lawsuit against Judge Joan Lefkow, the United States district court judge presiding over the trademark infringement case who, after an appeal, had ruled against Hale's organization. Hale stated that the WCOTC was in a "state of war" with Lefkow, and denounced Lefkow in a news conference, claiming that she was biased against him because she was married to a Jewish man and had biracial grandchildren. On January 8, 2003, Hale was arrested, charged with soliciting an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant named Tony Evola to kill Lefkow. The FBI sent Evola to join the World Church of the Creator after Hale gave a speech at the funeral of Benjamin Nathaniel Smith. In March 2000, Evola attended his first World Church of the Creator meeting and won Hale's trust by confronting a protester to the organization. At a meeting the next month in April 2000, Hale invited Evola to be his "head of security" which entailed arranging Hale's travel plans and serving as a personal bodyguard. During his tenure as bodyguard, Evola recorded conversations that would be later used as evidence against Hale. In a recorded conversation on June 17, 2000, Hale described Smith as a "good man" and a "comrade". On June 23, Hale told Evola and two other followers that he wished Smith “hadn't done it” and lamented the difficulty of nonviolent resistance through the courts without a license to practice law. On June 29, Evola recorded Hale stating that he “personally still [had the] intention” to follow the law himself because he was being “watched all the time”. On June 30, 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States refused Hale's appeal to challenge the state of Illinois's |
strong commitment to "mate-ship" and political equality. 20th century to today Singapore describes meritocracy as one of its official guiding principles for domestic public policy formulation, placing emphasis on academic credentials as objective measures of merit. There is criticism that, under this system, Singaporean society is being increasingly stratified and that an elite class is being created from a narrow segment of the population. Singapore has a growing level of tutoring for children, and top tutors are often paid better than school teachers. Defenders of this system recall the ancient Chinese proverb "Wealth does not pass too all people in the family tree of three generations" (), suggesting that the nepotism or cronyism of elitists eventually will be, and often are, limited by those lower down the hierarchy. Singaporean academics are continuously re-examining the application of meritocracy as an ideological tool and how it's stretched to encompass the ruling party's objectives. Professor Kenneth Paul Tan at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy asserts that "Meritocracy, in trying to 'isolate' merit by treating people with fundamentally unequal backgrounds as superficially the same, can be a practice that ignores and even conceals the real advantages and disadvantages that are unevenly distributed to different segments of an inherently unequal society, a practice that in fact perpetuates this fundamental inequality. In this way, those who are picked by meritocracy as having merit may already have enjoyed unfair advantages from the very beginning, ignored according to the principle of nondiscrimination." How meritocracy in the Singaporean context relates to the application of pragmatism as an ideological device, which combines strict adherence to market principles without any aversion to social engineering and little propensity for classical social welfarism, is further illustrated by Kenneth Paul Tan in subsequent articles: There is a strong ideological quality in Singapore's pragmatism, and a strongly pragmatic quality in ideological negotiations within the dynamics of hegemony. In this complex relationship, the combination of ideological and pragmatic maneuvering over the decades has resulted in the historical dominance of government by the PAP in partnership with global capital whose interests have been advanced without much reservation.Within the Ecuadorian Ministry of Labor, the Ecuadorian Meritocracy Institute was created under the technical advice of the Singaporean government. With similar objections, John Rawls rejects the ideal of meritocracy as well. Meritocracy trap The "meritocracy trap", a concept introduced by Daniel Markovits in his eponymous book, criticizes the aspirational view of meritocracy as being the cause of all problems associated with this matter: it is meritocracy itself that creates radical inequality and causes so many people in society, including those who are supposed to benefit from the situation, to be worse off. The accelerating inequality has been evolving under meritocracy’s own conditions. However, the author does not reject the whole idea of meritocracy; he tries to look for different and more suitable approaches to the matter. While many critics support the idea that the inequality that has been increasing since the middle of twentieth century is actually a result of inadequate meritocracy, based on the analysis of its indicators Markovits finds that increasing inequality is actually a result of meritocracy itself. The author points out the shift from the last five, six, seven decades, when the elite “leisure class” worked only rarely and spent days enjoying their fortune, while hard working people stayed poor for their whole lives. But lately, an important change occurred: according to a Harvard Business survey, members of the elite social circles are working more and harder than ever before. More than 60% of individuals with high income work circa 50 hours per week, around 30% of them work more than 60 hours per week and the last 10% spend over 80 hours per week occupied with their work responsibilities. Also, by having access to the best possible education available since starting school, members from the top 1% of households prevail in the world leading universities around the world. The interaction of these elements creates unusual and never-seen-before living situation for members of the elite circles: by hard work, higher amount of hours spent at work and performing with higher skills obtained from the best universities, they gain respect and position of the “superordinate” working class while losing their unflattering label of "leisure class". As the author implies in his calculations, the income of a typical elite household is now from three quarters made up of earnings from labor instead of ancestors' heritage. Secondly, Markovits introduces the idea of "snowball inequality", which is basically an ongoing cycle of widening gap between elite workers and members of the middle class. While the high-profile individuals obtain exclusive positions thanks to higher level of their skills, they occupy jobs and oust middle class workers from the core of economic events. After that, the elites take advantage of their high earnings by securing the best education for their own offspring so that they obtain the highest qualification and are desired by the market for their great skills. Hence the gap between elite and middle class members is widening with every generation, inequality extensively triumphing over social mobility and forming a "time divide" – with long hours working high-profile individuals on one side, and substantially inactive middle class workers that are less and less required on the other side. One side of the coin is in this case a clear loser: the middle class, which is unwillingly being excluded from economic prosperity, social benefit and the long desired ideal of American Dream. While it is impossible to measure the exact effects on the middle class, the side effects are more obvious: opioid epidemic, dramatic raise in "deaths of despair" (suicides, mental health and alcoholism), and lowering level of life expectancy in these societies are just some of them. Quite surprisingly however, the high-profile member of society is being harmed by meritocracy as well: they have to pay a significant price for their hectic working life. Many of them admit suffering from physical and mental health issues, inability to sustain a good quality personal life and lack of time spent with their families. What is of even higher importance is that meritocracy causes a continuous "competitive trap" within the elite social circles as its members are from a very early age basically contestants of a meritocratic marathon that starts in their exclusive preschools, continues at colleges and universities and finally moves its second half to the work environment. They are truly trapped in this vicious race where they are compelled to constantly compete with others and, most importantly, with themselves. In this matter, the author encounters the basic weakness of the aspirational lifestyle, which promotes the idea of meritocracy as a means for fair evaluation of the most skilled, gifted and hard-working. Markovits proposes a different approach to meritocracy, one where socioeconomic life conveniences are freely distributed to the people who are sufficiently successful at the things they are doing rather than creating an environment of ongoing competition. He promotes the idea that striving for being the best and brightest is a road to personal destruction and we should be more open to the idea of just being good enough. Restructuring of economic roles, organizations and institutions is desirable in order to include a wider population and hence narrow the increasing inequality gap by questioning the social hegemony | also an advantage of his view that he proposes to privilege not the wise, but the educated. Even if we agreed that the wise should rule, there is a serious problem about how to identify them. This becomes especially important if a successful political justification must be generally acceptable to the ruled. In that case, privileging the wise would require not only their being so wise as to be better rulers, but also, and more demandingly, that their wisdom be something that can be agreed to by all reasonable citizens. I turn to this conception of justification below. Mill's position has great plausibility: good education promotes the ability of citizens to rule more wisely. So, how can we deny that the educated subset would rule more wisely than others? But then why shouldn't they have more votes? Estlund goes on to criticize Mill's education-based meritocracy on various grounds. 18th century: West Africa The Ashanti King Osei Kwadwo who ruled from c. 1764 to 1777, began the meritocratic system of appointing central officials according to their ability, rather than their birth. 19th century In the United States, the federal bureaucracy used the spoils system from 1828 until the assassination of United States President James A. Garfield by a disappointed office seeker in 1881 proved its dangers. Two years later in 1883, the system of appointments to the United States Federal Bureaucracy was revamped by the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, partially based on the British meritocratic civil service that had been established years earlier. The act stipulated that government jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit, through competitive exams, rather than ties to politicians or political affiliation. It also made it illegal to fire or demote government employees for political reasons. To enforce the merit system and the judicial system, the law also created the United States Civil Service Commission. In the modern American meritocracy, the president may hand out only a certain number of jobs, which must be approved by the United States Senate. Australia began establishing public universities in the 1850s with the goal of promoting meritocracy by providing advanced training and credentials. The educational system was set up to service urban males of middle-class background, but of diverse social and religious origins. It was increasingly extended to all graduates of the public school system, those of rural and regional background, and then to women and finally to ethnic minorities. Both the middle classes and the working classes have promoted the ideal of meritocracy within a strong commitment to "mate-ship" and political equality. 20th century to today Singapore describes meritocracy as one of its official guiding principles for domestic public policy formulation, placing emphasis on academic credentials as objective measures of merit. There is criticism that, under this system, Singaporean society is being increasingly stratified and that an elite class is being created from a narrow segment of the population. Singapore has a growing level of tutoring for children, and top tutors are often paid better than school teachers. Defenders of this system recall the ancient Chinese proverb "Wealth does not pass too all people in the family tree of three generations" (), suggesting that the nepotism or cronyism of elitists eventually will be, and often are, limited by those lower down the hierarchy. Singaporean academics are continuously re-examining the application of meritocracy as an ideological tool and how it's stretched to encompass the ruling party's objectives. Professor Kenneth Paul Tan at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy asserts that "Meritocracy, in trying to 'isolate' merit by treating people with fundamentally unequal backgrounds as superficially the same, can be a practice that ignores and even conceals the real advantages and disadvantages that are unevenly distributed to different segments of an inherently unequal society, a practice that in fact perpetuates this fundamental inequality. In this way, those who are picked by meritocracy as having merit may already have enjoyed unfair advantages from the very beginning, ignored according to the principle of nondiscrimination." How meritocracy in the Singaporean context relates to the application of pragmatism as an ideological device, which combines strict adherence to market principles without any aversion to social engineering and little propensity for classical social welfarism, is further illustrated by Kenneth Paul Tan in subsequent articles: There is a strong ideological quality in Singapore's pragmatism, and a strongly pragmatic quality in ideological negotiations within the dynamics of hegemony. In this complex relationship, the combination of ideological and pragmatic maneuvering over the decades has resulted in the historical dominance of government by the PAP in partnership with global capital whose interests have been advanced without much reservation.Within the Ecuadorian Ministry of Labor, the Ecuadorian Meritocracy Institute was created under the technical advice of the Singaporean government. With similar objections, John Rawls rejects the ideal of meritocracy as well. Meritocracy trap The "meritocracy trap", a concept introduced by Daniel Markovits in his eponymous book, criticizes the aspirational view of meritocracy as being the cause of all problems associated with this matter: it is meritocracy itself that creates radical inequality and causes so many people in society, including those who are supposed to benefit from the situation, to be worse off. The accelerating inequality has been evolving under meritocracy’s own conditions. However, the author does not reject the whole idea of meritocracy; he tries to look for different and more suitable approaches to the matter. While many critics support the idea that the inequality that has been increasing since the middle of twentieth century is actually a result of inadequate meritocracy, based on the analysis of its indicators Markovits finds that increasing inequality is actually a result of meritocracy itself. The author points out the shift from the last five, six, seven decades, when the elite “leisure class” worked only rarely and spent days enjoying their fortune, while hard working people stayed poor for their whole lives. But lately, an important change occurred: according to a Harvard Business survey, members of the elite social circles are working more and harder than ever before. More than 60% of individuals with high income work circa 50 hours per week, around 30% of them work more than 60 hours per week and the last 10% spend over 80 hours per week occupied with their work responsibilities. Also, by having access to the best possible education available since starting school, members from the top 1% of households prevail in the world leading universities around the world. The interaction of these elements creates unusual and never-seen-before living situation for members of the elite circles: by hard work, higher amount of hours spent at work and performing with higher skills obtained from the best universities, they gain respect and position of the “superordinate” working class while losing their unflattering label of "leisure class". As the author implies in his calculations, the income of a typical elite household is now from three quarters made up of earnings from labor instead of ancestors' heritage. Secondly, Markovits introduces the idea of "snowball inequality", which is basically an ongoing cycle of widening gap between elite workers and members of the middle class. While the high-profile individuals obtain exclusive positions thanks to higher level of their skills, they occupy jobs and oust middle class workers from the core of economic events. After that, the elites take advantage |
nationalism to anti-war internationalism, whose philosophical and political break was consequence of the internationalist–defencist schism among socialists, the Bolsheviks opposed the Great War (1914–1918). That nationalist betrayal of socialism was denounced by a small group of socialist leaders who opposed the Great War, including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Lenin, who said that the European socialists had failed the working classes for preferring patriotic war to proletarian internationalism. To debunk patriotism and national chauvinism, Lenin explained in the essay Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) that capitalist economic expansion leads to colonial imperialism which is then regulated with nationalist wars such as the Great War among the empires of Europe. To relieve strategic pressures from the Western Front (4 August 1914 – 11 November 1918), Imperial Germany impelled the withdrawal of Imperial Russia from the war's Eastern Front (17 August 1914 – 3 March 1918) by sending Lenin and his Bolshevik cohort in a diplomatically sealed train, anticipating them partaking in revolutionary activity. October Revolution and Russian Civil War (1917–1922) In March 1917, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II led to the Russian Provisional Government (March–July 1917), who then proclaimed the Russian Republic (September–November 1917). Later in the October Revolution, the Bolshevik's seizure of power against the Provisional Government resulted in their establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917–1991), yet parts of Russia remained occupied by the counter-revolutionary White Movement of anti-communists who had united to form the White Army to fight the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) against the Bolshevik government. Moreover, despite the White–Red civil war, Russia remained a combatant in the Great War that the Bolsheviks had quit with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which then provoked the Allied Intervention to the Russian Civil War by the armies of seventeen countries, featuring Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Imperial Japan. Elsewhere, the successful October Revolution in Russia had facilitated the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and revolutions and interventions in Hungary (1918–1920) which produced the First Hungarian Republic and the Hungarian Soviet Republic. In Berlin, the German government and their Freikorps mercenaries fought and defeated the Spartacist uprising which began as a general strike. In Munich, the local Freikorps fought and defeated the Bavarian Soviet Republic. In Hungary, the disorganised workers who had proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic were fought and defeated by the royal armies of the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as well as the army of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia. These communist forces were soon crushed by anti-communist forces and attempts to create an international communist revolution failed. However, a successful revolution occurred in Asia, when the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 established the Mongolian People's Republic (1924–1992). The percentage of Bolshevik delegates in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets increased from 13%, at the first congress in July 1917, to 66%, at the fifth congress in 1918. As promised to the Russian peoples in October 1917, the Bolsheviks quit Russia's participation in the Great War on 3 March 1918. That same year, the Bolsheviks consolidated government power by expelling the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. The Bolshevik government then established the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) secret police to eliminate anti–Bolshevik opposition in the country. Initially, there was strong opposition to the Bolshevik régime because they had not resolved the food shortages and material poverty of the Russian peoples as promised in October 1917. From that social discontent, the Cheka reported 118 uprisings, including the Kronstadt rebellion (7–17 March 1921) against the economic austerity of the War Communism imposed by the Bolsheviks. The principal obstacles to Russian economic development and modernisation were great material poverty and the lack of modern technology which were conditions that orthodox Marxism considered unfavourable to communist revolution. Agricultural Russia was sufficiently developed for establishing capitalism, but it was insufficiently developed for establishing socialism. For Bolshevik Russia, the 1921–1924 period featured the simultaneous occurrence of economic recovery, famine (1921–1922) and a financial crisis (1924). By 1924, considerable economic progress had been achieved and by 1926 the Bolshevik government had achieved economic production levels equal to Russia's production levels in 1913. Initial Bolshevik economic policies from 1917 to 1918 were cautious, with limited nationalisations of the means of production which had been private property of the Russian aristocracy during the Tsarist monarchy. Lenin was immediately committed to avoid antagonising the peasantry by making efforts to coax them away from the Socialist Revolutionaries, allowing a peasant takeover of nobles' estates while no immediate nationalisations were enacted on peasants' property. The Decree on Land (8 November 1917) fulfilled Lenin's promised redistribution of Russia's arable land to the peasants, who reclaimed their farmlands from the aristocrats, ensuring the peasants' loyalty to the Bolshevik party. To overcome the civil war's economic interruptions, the policy of War Communism (1918–1921), a regulated market, state-controlled means of distribution and nationalisation of large-scale farms, was adopted to requisite and distribute grain in order to feed industrial workers in the cities whilst the Red Army was fighting the White Army's attempted restoration of the Romanov dynasty as absolute monarchs of Russia. Moreover, the politically unpopular forced grain-requisitions discouraged peasants from farming resulted in reduced harvests and food shortages that provoked labour strikes and food riots. In the event, the Russian peoples created an economy of barter and black market to counter the Bolshevik government's voiding of the monetary economy. In 1921, the New Economic Policy restored some private enterprise to animate the Russian economy. As part of Lenin's pragmatic compromise with external financial interests in 1918, Bolshevik state capitalism temporarily returned 91% of industry to private ownership or trusts until the Soviet Russians learned the technology and the techniques required to operate and administrate industries. Importantly, Lenin declared that the development of socialism would not be able to be pursued in the manner originally thought by Marxists. A key aspect that affected the Bolshevik regime was the backward economic conditions in Russia that were considered unfavourable to orthodox Marxist theory of communist revolution. At the time, orthodox Marxists claimed that Russia was ripe for the development of capitalism, not yet for socialism. Lenin advocated the need of the development of a large corps of technical intelligentsia to assist the industrial development of Russia and advance the Marxist economic stages of development as it had too few technical experts at the time. In that vein, Lenin explained it as follows: "Our poverty is so great that we cannot, at one stroke, restore full-scale factory, state, socialist production." He added that the development of socialism would proceed according to the actual material and socio-economic conditions in Russia and not as abstractly described by Marx for industrialised Europe in the 19th century. To overcome the lack of educated Russians who could operate and administrate industry, Lenin advocated the development of a technical intelligentsia who would propel the industrial development of Russia to self-sufficiency. Stalin's rise to power (1922–1928) As he neared death after suffering strokes, Lenin's Testament of December 1922 named Trotsky and Stalin as the most able men in the Central Committee, but he harshly criticised them. Lenin said that Stalin should be removed from being the General Secretary of the party and that he be replaced with "some other person who is superior to Stalin only in one respect, namely, in being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades." Upon his death on 21 January 1924, Lenin's political testament was read aloud to the Central Committee, who choose to ignore Lenin's ordered removal of Stalin as General Secretary because enough members believed Stalin had been politically rehabilitated in 1923. Consequent to personally spiteful disputes about the praxis of Leninism, the October Revolution veterans Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev said that the true threat to the ideological integrity of the party was Trotsky, who was a personally charismatic political leader as well as the commanding officer of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War and revolutionary partner of Lenin. To thwart Trotsky's likely election to head the party, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev formed a troika that featured Stalin as General Secretary, the de facto centre of power in the party and the country. The direction of the party was decided in confrontations of politics and personality between Stalin's troika and Trotsky over which Marxist policy to pursue, either Trotsky's policy of permanent revolution or Stalin's policy of socialism in one country. Trotsky's permanent revolution advocated rapid industrialisation, elimination of private farming and having the Soviet Union promote the spread of communist revolution abroad. Stalin's socialism in one country stressed moderation and development of positive relations between the Soviet Union and other countries to increase trade and foreign investment. To politically isolate and oust Trotsky from the party, Stalin expediently advocated socialism in one country, a policy to which he was indifferent. In 1925, the 14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) chose Stalin's policy, defeating Trotsky as a possible leader of the party and of the Soviet Union. In the 1925–1927 period, Stalin dissolved the troika and disowned the centrist Kamenev and Zinoviev for an expedient alliance with the three most prominent leaders of the so-called Right Opposition, namely Alexei Rykov (Premier of Russia, 1924–1929; Premier of the Soviet Union, 1924–1930), Nikolai Bukharin (General Secretary of the Comintern, 1926–1929; Editor-in-Chief of Pravda, 1918–1929), and Mikhail Tomsky (Chairman of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions in the 1920s). In 1927, the party endorsed Stalin's policy of socialism in one country as the Soviet Union's national policy and expelled the leftist Trotsky and the centrists Kamenev and Zinoviev from the Politburo. In 1929, Stalin politically controlled the party and the Soviet Union by way of deception and administrative acumen. In that time, Stalin's centralised, socialism in one country régime had negatively associated Lenin's revolutionary Bolshevism with Stalinism, i.e. government by command-policy to realise projects such as the rapid industrialisation of cities and the collectivisation of agriculture. Such Stalinism also subordinated the interests (political, national and ideological) of Asian and European communist parties to the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union. In the 1928–1932 period of the first five-year plan, Stalin affected the dekulakisation of the farmlands of the Soviet Union, a politically radical dispossession of the kulak class of peasant-landlords from the Tsarist social order of monarchy. As Old Bolshevik revolutionaries, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky recommended amelioration of the dekulakisation to lessen the negative social impact in the relations between the Soviet peoples and the party, but Stalin took umbrage and then accused them of uncommunist philosophical deviations from Lenin and Marx. That implicit accusation of ideological deviationism licensed Stalin to accuse Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky of plotting against the party and the appearance of impropriety then compelled the resignations of the Old Bolsheviks from government and from the Politburo. Stalin then completed his political purging of the party by exiling Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929. Afterwards, the political opposition to the practical régime of Stalinism was denounced as Trotskyism (Bolshevik–Leninism), described as a deviation from Marxism–Leninism, the state ideology of the Soviet Union. Political developments in the Soviet Union included Stalin dismantling the remaining elements of democracy from the party by extending his control over its institutions and eliminating any possible rivals. The party's ranks grew in numbers, with the party modifying its organisation to include more trade unions and factories. The ranks and files of the party were populated with members from the trade unions and the factories, whom Stalin controlled because there were no other Old Bolsheviks to contradict Marxism–Leninism. In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union adopted the 1936 Soviet Constitution which ended weighted-voting preferences for workers, promulgated universal suffrage for every man and woman older than 18 years of age and organised the soviets (councils of workers) into two legislatures, namely the Soviet of the Union (representing electoral districts) and the Soviet of Nationalities (representing the ethnic groups of the country). By 1939, with the exception of Stalin himself, none of the original Bolsheviks of the October Revolution of 1917 remained in the party. Unquestioning loyalty to Stalin was expected by the regime of all citizens. Stalin exercised extensive personal control over the party and unleashed an unprecedented level of violence to eliminate any potential threat to his regime. While Stalin exercised major control over political initiatives, their implementation was in the control of localities, often with local leaders interpreting the policies in a way that served themselves best. This abuse of power by local leaders exacerbated the violent purges and terror campaigns carried out by Stalin against members of the party deemed to be traitors. With the Great Purge (1936–1938), Stalin rid himself of internal enemies in the party and rid the Soviet Union of any alleged socially dangerous and counterrevolutionary person who might have offered legitimate political opposition to Marxism–Leninism. Stalin allowed the secret police NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) to rise above the law and the GPU (State Political Directorate) to use political violence to eliminate any person who might be a threat, whether real, potential, or imagined. As an administrator, Stalin governed the Soviet Union by controlling the formulation of national policy, but he delegated implementation to subordinate functionaries. Such freedom of action allowed local communist functionaries much discretion to interpret the intent of orders from Moscow, but this allowed their corruption. To Stalin, the correction of such abuses of authority and economic corruption were responsibility of the NKVD. In the 1937–1938 period, the NKVD arrested 1.5 million people, purged from every stratum of Soviet society and every rank and file of the party, of which 681,692 people were killed as enemies of the state. To provide manpower (manual, intellectual and technical) to realise the construction of socialism in one country, the NKVD established the Gulag system of forced-labour camps for regular criminals and political dissidents, for culturally insubordinate artists and politically incorrect intellectuals and for homosexual people and religious anti-communists. Socialism in one country (1928–1944) Beginning in 1928, Stalin's five-year plans for the national economy of the Soviet Union achieved the rapid industrialisation (coal, iron and steel, electricity and petroleum, among others) and the collectivisation of agriculture. It achieved 23.6% of collectivisation within two years (1930) and 98.0% of collectivisation within thirteen years (1941). As the revolutionary vanguard, the communist party organised Russian society to realise rapid industrialisation programs as defence against Western interference with socialism in Bolshevik Russia. The five-year plans were prepared in the 1920s whilst the Bolshevik government fought the internal Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and repelled the external Allied intervention to the Russian Civil War (1918–1925). Vast industrialisation was initiated mostly based with a focus on heavy industry. During the 1930s, the rapid industrialisation of the country accelerated the Soviet people's sociological transition from poverty to relative plenty when politically illiterate peasants passed from Tsarist serfdom to self-determination and became politically aware urban citizens. The Marxist–Leninist economic régime modernised Russia from the illiterate, peasant society characteristic of monarchy to the literate, socialist society of educated farmers and industrial workers. Industrialisation led to a massive urbanisation in the country. Unemployment was virtually eliminated in the country during the 1930s. Social developments in the Soviet Union included the relinquishment of the relaxed social control and allowance of experimentation under Lenin to Stalin's promotion of a rigid and authoritarian society based upon discipline, mixing traditional Russian values with Stalin's interpretation of Marxism. Organised religion was repressed, especially minority religious groups. Education was transformed. Under Lenin, the education system allowed relaxed discipline in schools that became based upon Marxist theory, but Stalin reversed this in 1934 with a conservative approach taken with the reintroduction of formal learning, the use of examinations and grades, the assertion of full authority of the teacher and the introduction of school uniforms. Art and culture became strictly regulated under the principles of socialist realism and Russian traditions that Stalin admired were allowed to continue. Foreign policy in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1941 resulted in substantial changes in the Soviet Union's approach to its foreign policy. In 1933, the Marxist–Leninist geopolitical perspective was that the Soviet Union was surrounded by capitalist and anti-communist enemies. As a result, the election of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party government in Germany initially caused the Soviet Union to sever diplomatic relations that had been established in the 1920s. In 1938, Stalin accommodated the Nazis and the anti-communist West by not defending Czechoslovakia, allowing Hitler's threat of pre-emptive war for the Sudetenland to annex the land and "rescue the oppressed German peoples" living in Czecho. To challenge Nazi Germany's bid for European empire and hegemony, Stalin promoted anti-fascist front organisations to encourage European socialists and democrats to join the Soviet communists to fight throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, creating agreements with France to challenge Germany. After Germany and Britain signed the Munich Agreement (29 September 1938) which allowed the German occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938–1945), Stalin adopted pro-German policies for the Soviet Union's dealings with Nazi Germany. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed to the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939) and to jointly invade and partition Poland, by way of which Nazi Germany started the Second World War (1 September 1939). In the 1941–1942 period of the Great Patriotic War, the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa, 22 June 1941) was ineffectively opposed by the Red Army, who were poorly led, ill-trained and under-equipped. As a result, they fought poorly and suffered great losses of soldiers (killed, wounded and captured). The weakness of the Red Army was partly consequence of the Great Purge (1936–1938) of senior officers and career soldiers whom Stalin considered politically unreliable. Strategically, the Wehrmacht's extensive and effective attack threatened the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and the political integrity of Stalin's model of a Marxist–Leninist state, when the Nazis were initially welcomed as liberators by the anti-communist and nationalist populations in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The anti-Soviet nationalists' collaboration with the Nazi's lasted until the and the began their killings of the Jewish populations, the local communists, the civil and community leaders—the Holocaust meant to realise the Nazi German colonisation of Bolshevik Russia. In response, Stalin ordered the Red Army to fight a total war against the Germanic invaders who would exterminate Slavic Russia. Hitler's attack against the Soviet Union (Nazi Germany's erstwhile ally) realigned Stalin's political priorities, from the repression of internal enemies to the existential defence against external attack. The pragmatic Stalin then entered the Soviet Union to the Grand Alliance, a common front against the Axis Powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan). In the continental European countries occupied by the Axis powers, the native communist party usually led the armed resistance (guerrilla warfare and urban guerrilla warfare) against fascist military occupation. In Mediterranean Europe, the communist Yugoslav Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito effectively resisted the German Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation. In the 1943–1944 period, the Yugoslav Partisans liberated territories with Red Army assistance and established the communist political authority that became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. To end the Imperial Japanese occupation of China in continental Asia, Stalin ordered Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China to temporarily cease the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) against Chiang Kai-shek and the anti-communist Kuomintang as the Second United Front in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). In 1943, the Red Army began to repel the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, especially at the Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943) and at the Battle of Kursk (5 July – 23 August 1943). The Red Army then repelled the Nazi and Fascist occupation armies from Eastern Europe until the Red Army decisively defeated Nazi Germany in the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation (16 April–2 May 1945). On concluding the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), the Soviet Union was a military superpower with a say in determining the geopolitical order of the world. Apart from the failed Third Period policy in the early 1930s, Marxist–Leninists played an important role in anti-fascist resistance movements, with the Soviet Union contributing to the Allied victory in World War II. In accordance with the three-power Yalta Agreement (4–11 February 1945), the Soviet Union purged native fascist collaborators and these in collaboration with the Axis Powers from the Eastern European countries occupied by the Axis Powers and installed native Marxist–Leninist governments. Cold War, de-Stalinisation and Maoism (1944–1979) Upon Allied victory concluding the Second World War (1939–1945), the members of the Grand Alliance resumed their expediently suppressed, pre-war geopolitical rivalries and ideological tensions which disunity broke their anti-fascist wartime alliance through the concept of totalitarianism into the anti-communist Western Bloc and the Marxist–Leninist Eastern Bloc. The renewed competition for geopolitical hegemony resulted in the bi-polar Cold War (1947–1991), a protracted state of tension (military and diplomatic) between the United States and the Soviet Union which often threatened a Soviet–American nuclear war, but it usually featured proxy wars in the Third World. With the end of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War, anti-fascism became part of both the official ideology and language of Marxist–Leninist states, especially in East Germany. Fascist and anti-fascism, with the latter used to mean a general anti-capitalist struggle against the Western world and NATO, became epithets widely used by Marxist–Leninists to smear their opponents, including democratic socialists, libertarian socialists, social democrats and other anti-Stalinist leftists. The events that precipitated the Cold War in Europe were the Soviet and Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Albanian military interventions to the Greek Civil War (1944–1949) on behalf of the Communist Party of Greece; and the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949) by the Soviet Union. The event that precipitated the Cold War in continental Asia was the resumption of the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) fought between the anti-communist Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China. After military defeat exiled Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang nationalist government to Formosa island (Taiwan), Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949. In the late 1940s, the geopolitics of the Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet predominance featured an official-and-personal style of socialist diplomacy that failed Stalin and Tito when Tito refused to subordinating Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union. In 1948, circumstance and cultural personality aggravated the matter into the Yugoslav–Soviet split (1948–1955) that resulted from Tito's rejection of Stalin's demand to subordinate the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia to the geopolitical agenda (economic and military) of the Soviet Union, i.e. Tito at Stalin's disposal. Stalin punished Tito's refusal by denouncing him as an ideological revisionist of Marxism–Leninism; by denouncing Yugoslavia's practice of Titoism as socialism deviated from the cause of world communism; and by expelling the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). The break from the Eastern Bloc allowed the development of a socialism with Yugoslav characteristics which allowed doing business with the capitalist West to develop the socialist economy and the establishment of Yugoslavia's diplomatic and commercial relations with countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc. Yugoslavia's international relations matured into the Non-Aligned Movement (1961) of countries without political allegiance to any power bloc. At the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became leader of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then consolidated an anti-Stalinist government. In a secret meeting at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and Stalinism in the speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences (25 February 1956) in which he specified and condemned Stalin's dictatorial excesses and abuses of power such as the Great purge (1936–1938) and the cult of personality. Khrushchev introduced the de-Stalinisation of the party and of the Soviet Union. He realised this with the dismantling of the Gulag archipelago of forced-labour camps and freeing the prisoners as well as allowing Soviet civil society greater political freedom of expression, especially for public intellectuals of the intelligentsia such as the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose literature obliquely criticised Stalin and the Stalinist police state. De-Stalinisation also ended Stalin's national-purpose policy of socialism in one country and was replaced with proletarian internationalism, by way of which Khrushchev re-committed the Soviet Union to permanent revolution to realise world communism. In that geopolitical vein, Khrushchev presented de-Stalinisation as the restoration of Leninism as the state ideology of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union was ideological bad news for the People's Republic of China because Soviet and Russian interpretations and applications of Leninism and orthodox Marxism contradicted the Sinified Marxism–Leninism of Mao Zedong—his Chinese adaptations of Stalinist interpretation and praxis for establishing socialism in China. To realise that leap of Marxist faith in the development of Chinese socialism, the Communist Party of China developed Maoism as the official state ideology. As the specifically Chinese development of Marxism–Leninism, Maoism illuminated the cultural differences between the European-Russian and the Asian-Chinese interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism in each country. The political differences then provoked geopolitical, ideological and nationalist tensions, which derived from the different stages of development, between the urban society of the industrialised Soviet Union and the agricultural society of the pre-industrial China. The theory versus praxis arguments escalated to theoretic disputes about Marxist–Leninist revisionism and provoked the Sino-Soviet split (1956–1966) and the two countries broke their international relations (diplomatic, political, cultural and economic). In Eastern Asia, the Cold War produced the Korean War (1950–1953), the first proxy war between the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, resulted from dual origins, namely the nationalist Koreans' post-war resumption of their Korean Civil War and the imperial war for regional hegemony sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union. The international response to the North Korean invasion of South Korea was realised by the United Nations Security Council, who voted for war despite the absent Soviet Union and authorised an international military expedition to intervene, expel the northern invaders from the south of Korea and restore the geopolitical status quo ante of the Soviet and American division of Korea at the 38th Parallel of global latitude. Consequent to Chinese military intervention in behalf of North Korea, the magnitude of the infantry warfare reached operational and geographic stalemate (July 1951–July 1953). Afterwards, the shooting war was ended with the Korean Armistice Agreement (27 July 1953); and the superpower Cold War in Asia then resumed as the Korean Demilitarised Zone. Consequent to the Sino-Soviet split, the pragmatic China established politics of détente with the United States in an effort to publicly challenge the Soviet Union for leadership of the international Marxist–Leninist movement. Mao Zedong's pragmatism permitted geopolitical rapprochement and facilitated President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China which subsequently ended the policy of the existence to Two Chinas when the United States sponsored the People's Republic of China to replace the Republic of China (Taiwan) as the representative of the Chinese people at the United Nations. In the due course of Sino-American rapprochement, China also assumed membership in the Security Council of the United Nations. In the post-Mao period of Sino-American détente, the Deng Xiaoping government (1982–1987) affected policies of economic liberalisation that allowed continual growth for the Chinese economy. The ideological justification is socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Chinese adaptation of Marxism–Leninism. Communist revolution erupted in the Americas in this period, including revolutions in Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Grenada, Nicaragua, Peru and Uruguay. The Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara deposed the military dictatorship (1952–1959) of Fulgencio Batista and established the Republic of Cuba, a state formally recognised by the Soviet Union. In response, the United States launched a coup against the Castro government in 1961. However, the CIA's unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion (17 April 1961) by anti-communist Cuban exiles impelled the Republic of Cuba to side with the Soviet Union in the geopolitics of the bipolar Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis (22–28 October 1962) occurred when the United States opposed Cuba being armed with nuclear missiles by the Soviet Union. After a stalemate confrontation, the United States and the Soviet Union jointly resolved the nuclear-missile crisis by respectively removing United States missiles from Turkey and Italy and Soviet missiles from Cuba. Both Bolivia, Canada and Uruguay faced Marxist–Leninist revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. In Bolivia, this included Che Guevara as a leader until being killed there by government forces. In 1970, the October Crisis (5 October – 28 December 1970) occurred in Canada, a brief revolution in the province of Quebec, where the actions of the Marxist–Leninist and separatist Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) featured the kidnap of James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner in Canada; and the killing of Pierre Laporte, the Quebec government minister. The political manifesto of the FLQ condemned English-Canadian imperialism in French Quebec and called for an independent, socialist Quebec. The Canadian government's harsh response included the suspension of civil liberties in Quebec and compelled the FLQ leaders' flight to Cuba. Uruguay faced Marxist–Leninist revolution from the Tupamaros movement from the 1960s to the 1970s. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) led by Daniel Ortega won the Nicaraguan Revolution (1961–1990) against the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1 December 1974 – 17 July 1979) to establish a socialist Nicaragua. Within months, the government of Ronald Reagan sponsored the counter-revolutionary Contras in the secret Contra War (1979–1990) against the Sandinista government. In 1989, the Contra War concluded with the signing of the Tela Accord at the port of Tela, Honduras. The Tela Accord required the subsequent, voluntary demobilisation of the Contra guerrilla armies and the FSLN army. In 1990, a second national election installed to government a majority of non-Sandinista political parties, to whom the FSLN handed political power. Since 2006, the FSLN has returned to government, winning every legislative and presidential election in the process (2006, 2011 and 2016). The Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992) featured the popularly supported Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, an organisation of left-wing parties fighting against the right-wing military government of El Salvador. In 1983, the United States invasion of Grenada (25–29 October 1983) thwarted the assumption of power by the elected government of the New Jewel Movement (1973–1983), a Marxist–Leninist vanguard party led by Maurice Bishop. In Asia, the Vietnam War (1955–1975) was the second East–West war fought during the Cold War (1947–1991). In the First Indochina War (1946–1954), the Việt Minh led by Ho Chi Minh defeated the French re-establishment of European colonialism in Vietnam. To fill the geopolitical power vacuum caused by French defeat in southeast Asia, Vietnam was divided into South Vietnam and North Vietnam in 1954, and the United States then became the Western power supporting the client-state Republic of Vietnam (1955–1975) in the South headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-communist politician. Despite possessing military superiority, the United States failed to safeguard South Vietnam from the guerrilla warfare of the Viet Cong sponsored by North Vietnam. On 30 January 1968, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive (the General Offensive and Uprising of Tet Mau Than, 1968). Although a military failure for the guerrillas and the army, it was a successful psychological warfare operation that decisively turned international public opinion against the United States intervention to the Vietnamese civil war, with the military withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam in 1973 and the subsequent and consequent Fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese army on 30 April 1975. With the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam was reunited under Marxist-Leninlist government in 1976. Marxist–Leninist regimes were also established in Vietnam's neighbour states. This included Kampuchea and Laos. Consequent to the Cambodian Civil War (1968–1975), a coalition composed of Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1941–1955), the native Cambodian Marxist–Leninists and the Maoist Khmer Rouge (1951–1999) led by Pol Pot established Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1982), a Marxist–Leninist state that featured class warfare to restructure the society of old Cambodia and to be effected and realised with the abolishment of money and private property, the outlawing of religion, the killing of the intelligentsia and compulsory manual labour for the middle classes by way of death-squad state terrorism. To eliminate Western cultural influence, Kampuchea expelled all foreigners and effected the destruction of the urban bourgeoisie of old Cambodia, first by displacing the population of the capital city, Phnom Penh; and then by displacing the national populace to work farmlands to increase food supplies. Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge purged Kampuchea of internal enemies (social class and political, cultural and ethnic) at the Killing Fields, the scope of which became crimes against humanity for the deaths of 2,700,000 people by mass murder and genocide. That social restructuring of Cambodia into Kampuchea included attacks against the Vietnamese ethnic minority of the country which aggravated the historical, ethnic rivalries between the Viet and the Khmer peoples. Beginning in September 1977, Kampuchea and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam continually engaged in border clashes. In 1978, Vietnam invaded Kampuchea and captured Phnom Penh in January 1979, deposed the Maoist Khmer Rouge from government and established the Cambodian Liberation Front for National Renewal as the government of Cambodia. A new front of Marxist–Leninist revolution erupted in Africa between 1961 and 1979. Angola, Benin, Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Somalia became Marxist–Leninist states governed by their respective native peoples during the 1968–1980 period. Marxist–Leninist guerrillas fought the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974) in three countries, namely Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. In Ethiopia, a Marxist–Leninist revolution deposed the monarchy of Emperor Haile Selassie (1930–1974) and established the Derg government (1974–1987) of the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia. In Rhodesia (1965–1979), Robert Mugabe led the Zimbabwe War of Liberation (1964–1979) that deposed white-minority rule and then established the Republic of Zimbabwe. In Apartheid South Africa (1948–1994), the Afrikaner government of the Nationalist Party caused much geopolitical tension between the United States and the Soviet Union because of the Afrikaners' violent social control and political repression of the black and coloured populations of South Africa exercised under the guise of anti-communism and national security. The Soviet Union officially supported the overthrow of apartheid while the West and the United States in particular maintained official neutrality on the matter. In the 1976–1977 period of the Cold War, the United States and other Western countries found it morally untenable to politically support Apartheid South Africa, especially when the Afrikaner government killed 176 people (students and adults) in the police suppression of the Soweto uprising (June 1976), a political protest against Afrikaner cultural imperialism upon the non-white peoples of South Africa, specifically the imposition of the Germanic language of Afrikaans as the standard language for education which black South Africans were required to speak when addressing white people and Afrikaners; and the police assassination of Steven Biko (September 1977), a politically moderate leader of the internal resistance to apartheid in South Africa. Under President Jimmy Carter, the West joined the Soviet Union and others in enacting sanctions against weapons trade and weapons-grade material to South Africa. However, forceful actions by the United States against Apartheid South Africa were diminished under President Reagan as the Reagan administration feared the rise of revolution in South Africa as had happened in Zimbabwe against white minority rule. In 1979, the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan to establish a Marxist–Leninist state (existed until 1992), although the act was seen as an invasion by the West which responded to the Soviet military actions by boycotting the Moscow Olympics of 1980 and providing clandestine support to the Mujahideen, including Osama bin Laden, as a means to challenge the Soviet Union. The war became a Soviet equivalent of the Vietnam War to the United States and it remained a stalemate throughout the 1980s. Reform and collapse (1979–1991) Social resistance to the policies of Marxist–Leninist regimes in Eastern Europe accelerated in strength with the rise of the Solidarity, the first non-Marxist–Leninist controlled trade union in the Warsaw Pact that was formed in the People's Republic of Poland in 1980. In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the Soviet Union and began policies of radical political reform involving political liberalisation, called perestroika and glasnost. Gorbachev's policies were designed at dismantling authoritarian elements of the state that were developed by Stalin, aiming for a return to a supposed ideal Leninist state that retained one-party structure while allowing the democratic election of competing candidates within the party for political office. Gorbachev also aimed to seek détente with the West and end the Cold War that was no longer economically sustainable to be pursued by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union and the United States under President George H. W. Bush joined in pushing for the dismantlement of apartheid and oversaw the dismantlement of South African colonial rule over Namibia. Meanwhile, the Central and Eastern European Marxist–Leninist states politically deteriorated in response to the success of the Polish Solidarity movement and the possibility of Gorbachev-style political liberalisation. In 1989, revolts began across Central and Eastern Europe and China against Marxist–Leninist regimes. In China, the government refused to negotiate with student protestors, resulting in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre that stopped the revolts by force. The Pan-European Picnic, which was based on an idea by Otto von Habsburg to test the reaction of the Soviet Union, then triggered a peaceful chain reaction in August 1989, at the end of which there was no longer East Germany and the Iron Curtain and the Marxist–Leninist Eastern Bloc had collapsed. On the one hand, as a result of the Pan-European Picnic, the Marxist–Leninist rulers of the Eastern Bloc did not act decisively, but cracks appeared between them and on the other hand the media-informed Central and Eastern European population now noticed a steady loss of power in their governments. The revolts culminated with the revolt in East Germany against the Marxist–Leninist regime of Erich Honecker and demands for the Berlin Wall to be torn down. The event in East Germany developed into a popular mass revolt with sections of the Berlin Wall being torn down and East and West Berliners uniting. Gorbachev's refusal to use Soviet forces based in East Germany to suppress the revolt was seen as a sign that the Cold War had ended. Honecker was pressured to resign from office and the new government committed itself to reunification with West Germany. The Marxist–Leninist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania was forcefully overthrown in 1989 and Ceaușescu was executed. Almost Eastern Bloc regimes also fell during the Revolutions of 1989 (1988–1993). Unrest and eventual collapse of Marxism–Leninism also occurred in Yugoslavia, although for different reasons than those of the Warsaw Pact. The death of Josip Broz Tito in 1980 and the subsequent vacuum of strong leadership allowed the rise of rival ethnic nationalism in the multinational country. The first leader to exploit such nationalism for political purposes was | a more nuanced analysis of Marxist–Leninist rule, stating that anti-communist narratives have exaggerated the extent of political repression and censorship in Marxist–Leninist states and drawn comparisons with what they see as atrocities that were perpetrated by capitalist countries, particularly during the Cold War. These academics include Mark Aarons, Noam Chomsky, Jodi Dean, Kristen Ghodsee, Seumas Milne, and Michael Parenti. Ghodsee, Nathan J. Robinson, and Scott Sehon wrote about the merits of taking an anti anti-communist position that does not deny the atrocities but make a distinction between anti-authoritarian communist and other socialist currents, both of which have been victims of repression. History Bolsheviks, February Revolution, and Great War (1903–1917) Although Marxism–Leninism was created after Vladimir Lenin's death during the regime of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, continuing to be the official state ideology after de-Stalinisation and of other Marxist–Leninist states, the basis for elements of Marxism–Leninism predate this. The philosophy of Marxism–Leninism originated as the pro-active, political praxis of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in realising political change in Tsarist Russia. Lenin's leadership transformed the Bolsheviks into the party's political vanguard which was composed of professional revolutionaries who practised democratic centralism to elect leaders and officers as well as to determine policy through free discussion, then decisively realised through united action. The vanguardism of proactive, pragmatic commitment to achieving revolution was the Bolsheviks' advantage in out-manoeuvring the liberal and conservative political parties who advocated social democracy without a practical plan of action for the Russian society they wished to govern. Leninism allowed the Bolshevik party to assume command of the October Revolution in 1917. Twelve years before the October Revolution in 1917, the Bolsheviks had failed to assume control of the February Revolution of 1905 (22 January 1905 – 16 June 1907) because the centres of revolutionary action were too far apart for proper political coordination. To generate revolutionary momentum from the Tsarist army killings on Bloody Sunday (22 January 1905), the Bolsheviks encouraged workers to use political violence in order to compel the bourgeois social classes (the nobility, the gentry and the bourgeoisie) to join the proletarian revolution to overthrow the absolute monarchy of the Tsar of Russia. Most importantly, the experience of this revolution caused Lenin to conceive of the means of sponsoring socialist revolution through agitation, propaganda and a well-organised, disciplined and small political party. Despite secret-police persecution by the Okhrana (Department for Protecting the Public Security and Order), émigré Bolsheviks returned to Russia to agitate, organise and lead, but then they returned to exile when peoples' revolutionary fervour failed in 1907. The failure of the February Revolution exiled Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries and anarchists such as the Black Guards from Russia. Membership in both the Bolshevik and Menshevik ranks diminished from 1907 to 1908 while the number of people taking part in strikes in 1907 was 26% of the figure during the year of the Revolution of 1905, dropping to 6% in 1908 and 2% in 1910. The 1908–1917 period was one of disillusionment in the Bolshevik party over Lenin's leadership, with members opposing him for scandals involving his expropriations and methods of raising money for the party. This political defeat was aggravated by Tsar Nicholas II's political reformations of Imperial Russian government. In practise, the formalities of political participation (the electoral plurality of a multi-party system with the State Duma and the Russian Constitution of 1906) were the Tsar's piecemeal and cosmetic concessions to social progress because public office remained available only to the aristocracy, the gentry and the bourgeoisie. These reforms resolved neither the illiteracy, the poverty, nor malnutrition of the proletarian majority of Imperial Russia. In Swiss exile, Lenin developed Marx's philosophy and extrapolated decolonisation by colonial revolt as a reinforcement of proletarian revolution in Europe. In 1912, Lenin resolved a factional challenge to his ideological leadership of the RSDLP by the Forward Group in the party, usurping the all-party congress to transform the RSDLP into the Bolshevik party. In the early 1910s, Lenin remained highly unpopular and was so unpopular amongst international socialist movement that by 1914 it considered censoring him. Unlike the European socialists who chose bellicose nationalism to anti-war internationalism, whose philosophical and political break was consequence of the internationalist–defencist schism among socialists, the Bolsheviks opposed the Great War (1914–1918). That nationalist betrayal of socialism was denounced by a small group of socialist leaders who opposed the Great War, including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Lenin, who said that the European socialists had failed the working classes for preferring patriotic war to proletarian internationalism. To debunk patriotism and national chauvinism, Lenin explained in the essay Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) that capitalist economic expansion leads to colonial imperialism which is then regulated with nationalist wars such as the Great War among the empires of Europe. To relieve strategic pressures from the Western Front (4 August 1914 – 11 November 1918), Imperial Germany impelled the withdrawal of Imperial Russia from the war's Eastern Front (17 August 1914 – 3 March 1918) by sending Lenin and his Bolshevik cohort in a diplomatically sealed train, anticipating them partaking in revolutionary activity. October Revolution and Russian Civil War (1917–1922) In March 1917, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II led to the Russian Provisional Government (March–July 1917), who then proclaimed the Russian Republic (September–November 1917). Later in the October Revolution, the Bolshevik's seizure of power against the Provisional Government resulted in their establishment of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (1917–1991), yet parts of Russia remained occupied by the counter-revolutionary White Movement of anti-communists who had united to form the White Army to fight the Russian Civil War (1917–1922) against the Bolshevik government. Moreover, despite the White–Red civil war, Russia remained a combatant in the Great War that the Bolsheviks had quit with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk which then provoked the Allied Intervention to the Russian Civil War by the armies of seventeen countries, featuring Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Imperial Japan. Elsewhere, the successful October Revolution in Russia had facilitated the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and revolutions and interventions in Hungary (1918–1920) which produced the First Hungarian Republic and the Hungarian Soviet Republic. In Berlin, the German government and their Freikorps mercenaries fought and defeated the Spartacist uprising which began as a general strike. In Munich, the local Freikorps fought and defeated the Bavarian Soviet Republic. In Hungary, the disorganised workers who had proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic were fought and defeated by the royal armies of the Kingdom of Romania and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as well as the army of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia. These communist forces were soon crushed by anti-communist forces and attempts to create an international communist revolution failed. However, a successful revolution occurred in Asia, when the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 established the Mongolian People's Republic (1924–1992). The percentage of Bolshevik delegates in the All-Russian Congress of Soviets increased from 13%, at the first congress in July 1917, to 66%, at the fifth congress in 1918. As promised to the Russian peoples in October 1917, the Bolsheviks quit Russia's participation in the Great War on 3 March 1918. That same year, the Bolsheviks consolidated government power by expelling the Mensheviks, the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. The Bolshevik government then established the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission) secret police to eliminate anti–Bolshevik opposition in the country. Initially, there was strong opposition to the Bolshevik régime because they had not resolved the food shortages and material poverty of the Russian peoples as promised in October 1917. From that social discontent, the Cheka reported 118 uprisings, including the Kronstadt rebellion (7–17 March 1921) against the economic austerity of the War Communism imposed by the Bolsheviks. The principal obstacles to Russian economic development and modernisation were great material poverty and the lack of modern technology which were conditions that orthodox Marxism considered unfavourable to communist revolution. Agricultural Russia was sufficiently developed for establishing capitalism, but it was insufficiently developed for establishing socialism. For Bolshevik Russia, the 1921–1924 period featured the simultaneous occurrence of economic recovery, famine (1921–1922) and a financial crisis (1924). By 1924, considerable economic progress had been achieved and by 1926 the Bolshevik government had achieved economic production levels equal to Russia's production levels in 1913. Initial Bolshevik economic policies from 1917 to 1918 were cautious, with limited nationalisations of the means of production which had been private property of the Russian aristocracy during the Tsarist monarchy. Lenin was immediately committed to avoid antagonising the peasantry by making efforts to coax them away from the Socialist Revolutionaries, allowing a peasant takeover of nobles' estates while no immediate nationalisations were enacted on peasants' property. The Decree on Land (8 November 1917) fulfilled Lenin's promised redistribution of Russia's arable land to the peasants, who reclaimed their farmlands from the aristocrats, ensuring the peasants' loyalty to the Bolshevik party. To overcome the civil war's economic interruptions, the policy of War Communism (1918–1921), a regulated market, state-controlled means of distribution and nationalisation of large-scale farms, was adopted to requisite and distribute grain in order to feed industrial workers in the cities whilst the Red Army was fighting the White Army's attempted restoration of the Romanov dynasty as absolute monarchs of Russia. Moreover, the politically unpopular forced grain-requisitions discouraged peasants from farming resulted in reduced harvests and food shortages that provoked labour strikes and food riots. In the event, the Russian peoples created an economy of barter and black market to counter the Bolshevik government's voiding of the monetary economy. In 1921, the New Economic Policy restored some private enterprise to animate the Russian economy. As part of Lenin's pragmatic compromise with external financial interests in 1918, Bolshevik state capitalism temporarily returned 91% of industry to private ownership or trusts until the Soviet Russians learned the technology and the techniques required to operate and administrate industries. Importantly, Lenin declared that the development of socialism would not be able to be pursued in the manner originally thought by Marxists. A key aspect that affected the Bolshevik regime was the backward economic conditions in Russia that were considered unfavourable to orthodox Marxist theory of communist revolution. At the time, orthodox Marxists claimed that Russia was ripe for the development of capitalism, not yet for socialism. Lenin advocated the need of the development of a large corps of technical intelligentsia to assist the industrial development of Russia and advance the Marxist economic stages of development as it had too few technical experts at the time. In that vein, Lenin explained it as follows: "Our poverty is so great that we cannot, at one stroke, restore full-scale factory, state, socialist production." He added that the development of socialism would proceed according to the actual material and socio-economic conditions in Russia and not as abstractly described by Marx for industrialised Europe in the 19th century. To overcome the lack of educated Russians who could operate and administrate industry, Lenin advocated the development of a technical intelligentsia who would propel the industrial development of Russia to self-sufficiency. Stalin's rise to power (1922–1928) As he neared death after suffering strokes, Lenin's Testament of December 1922 named Trotsky and Stalin as the most able men in the Central Committee, but he harshly criticised them. Lenin said that Stalin should be removed from being the General Secretary of the party and that he be replaced with "some other person who is superior to Stalin only in one respect, namely, in being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite, and more attentive to comrades." Upon his death on 21 January 1924, Lenin's political testament was read aloud to the Central Committee, who choose to ignore Lenin's ordered removal of Stalin as General Secretary because enough members believed Stalin had been politically rehabilitated in 1923. Consequent to personally spiteful disputes about the praxis of Leninism, the October Revolution veterans Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev said that the true threat to the ideological integrity of the party was Trotsky, who was a personally charismatic political leader as well as the commanding officer of the Red Army in the Russian Civil War and revolutionary partner of Lenin. To thwart Trotsky's likely election to head the party, Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev formed a troika that featured Stalin as General Secretary, the de facto centre of power in the party and the country. The direction of the party was decided in confrontations of politics and personality between Stalin's troika and Trotsky over which Marxist policy to pursue, either Trotsky's policy of permanent revolution or Stalin's policy of socialism in one country. Trotsky's permanent revolution advocated rapid industrialisation, elimination of private farming and having the Soviet Union promote the spread of communist revolution abroad. Stalin's socialism in one country stressed moderation and development of positive relations between the Soviet Union and other countries to increase trade and foreign investment. To politically isolate and oust Trotsky from the party, Stalin expediently advocated socialism in one country, a policy to which he was indifferent. In 1925, the 14th Congress of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) chose Stalin's policy, defeating Trotsky as a possible leader of the party and of the Soviet Union. In the 1925–1927 period, Stalin dissolved the troika and disowned the centrist Kamenev and Zinoviev for an expedient alliance with the three most prominent leaders of the so-called Right Opposition, namely Alexei Rykov (Premier of Russia, 1924–1929; Premier of the Soviet Union, 1924–1930), Nikolai Bukharin (General Secretary of the Comintern, 1926–1929; Editor-in-Chief of Pravda, 1918–1929), and Mikhail Tomsky (Chairman of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions in the 1920s). In 1927, the party endorsed Stalin's policy of socialism in one country as the Soviet Union's national policy and expelled the leftist Trotsky and the centrists Kamenev and Zinoviev from the Politburo. In 1929, Stalin politically controlled the party and the Soviet Union by way of deception and administrative acumen. In that time, Stalin's centralised, socialism in one country régime had negatively associated Lenin's revolutionary Bolshevism with Stalinism, i.e. government by command-policy to realise projects such as the rapid industrialisation of cities and the collectivisation of agriculture. Such Stalinism also subordinated the interests (political, national and ideological) of Asian and European communist parties to the geopolitical interests of the Soviet Union. In the 1928–1932 period of the first five-year plan, Stalin affected the dekulakisation of the farmlands of the Soviet Union, a politically radical dispossession of the kulak class of peasant-landlords from the Tsarist social order of monarchy. As Old Bolshevik revolutionaries, Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky recommended amelioration of the dekulakisation to lessen the negative social impact in the relations between the Soviet peoples and the party, but Stalin took umbrage and then accused them of uncommunist philosophical deviations from Lenin and Marx. That implicit accusation of ideological deviationism licensed Stalin to accuse Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky of plotting against the party and the appearance of impropriety then compelled the resignations of the Old Bolsheviks from government and from the Politburo. Stalin then completed his political purging of the party by exiling Trotsky from the Soviet Union in 1929. Afterwards, the political opposition to the practical régime of Stalinism was denounced as Trotskyism (Bolshevik–Leninism), described as a deviation from Marxism–Leninism, the state ideology of the Soviet Union. Political developments in the Soviet Union included Stalin dismantling the remaining elements of democracy from the party by extending his control over its institutions and eliminating any possible rivals. The party's ranks grew in numbers, with the party modifying its organisation to include more trade unions and factories. The ranks and files of the party were populated with members from the trade unions and the factories, whom Stalin controlled because there were no other Old Bolsheviks to contradict Marxism–Leninism. In the late 1930s, the Soviet Union adopted the 1936 Soviet Constitution which ended weighted-voting preferences for workers, promulgated universal suffrage for every man and woman older than 18 years of age and organised the soviets (councils of workers) into two legislatures, namely the Soviet of the Union (representing electoral districts) and the Soviet of Nationalities (representing the ethnic groups of the country). By 1939, with the exception of Stalin himself, none of the original Bolsheviks of the October Revolution of 1917 remained in the party. Unquestioning loyalty to Stalin was expected by the regime of all citizens. Stalin exercised extensive personal control over the party and unleashed an unprecedented level of violence to eliminate any potential threat to his regime. While Stalin exercised major control over political initiatives, their implementation was in the control of localities, often with local leaders interpreting the policies in a way that served themselves best. This abuse of power by local leaders exacerbated the violent purges and terror campaigns carried out by Stalin against members of the party deemed to be traitors. With the Great Purge (1936–1938), Stalin rid himself of internal enemies in the party and rid the Soviet Union of any alleged socially dangerous and counterrevolutionary person who might have offered legitimate political opposition to Marxism–Leninism. Stalin allowed the secret police NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs) to rise above the law and the GPU (State Political Directorate) to use political violence to eliminate any person who might be a threat, whether real, potential, or imagined. As an administrator, Stalin governed the Soviet Union by controlling the formulation of national policy, but he delegated implementation to subordinate functionaries. Such freedom of action allowed local communist functionaries much discretion to interpret the intent of orders from Moscow, but this allowed their corruption. To Stalin, the correction of such abuses of authority and economic corruption were responsibility of the NKVD. In the 1937–1938 period, the NKVD arrested 1.5 million people, purged from every stratum of Soviet society and every rank and file of the party, of which 681,692 people were killed as enemies of the state. To provide manpower (manual, intellectual and technical) to realise the construction of socialism in one country, the NKVD established the Gulag system of forced-labour camps for regular criminals and political dissidents, for culturally insubordinate artists and politically incorrect intellectuals and for homosexual people and religious anti-communists. Socialism in one country (1928–1944) Beginning in 1928, Stalin's five-year plans for the national economy of the Soviet Union achieved the rapid industrialisation (coal, iron and steel, electricity and petroleum, among others) and the collectivisation of agriculture. It achieved 23.6% of collectivisation within two years (1930) and 98.0% of collectivisation within thirteen years (1941). As the revolutionary vanguard, the communist party organised Russian society to realise rapid industrialisation programs as defence against Western interference with socialism in Bolshevik Russia. The five-year plans were prepared in the 1920s whilst the Bolshevik government fought the internal Russian Civil War (1917–1922) and repelled the external Allied intervention to the Russian Civil War (1918–1925). Vast industrialisation was initiated mostly based with a focus on heavy industry. During the 1930s, the rapid industrialisation of the country accelerated the Soviet people's sociological transition from poverty to relative plenty when politically illiterate peasants passed from Tsarist serfdom to self-determination and became politically aware urban citizens. The Marxist–Leninist economic régime modernised Russia from the illiterate, peasant society characteristic of monarchy to the literate, socialist society of educated farmers and industrial workers. Industrialisation led to a massive urbanisation in the country. Unemployment was virtually eliminated in the country during the 1930s. Social developments in the Soviet Union included the relinquishment of the relaxed social control and allowance of experimentation under Lenin to Stalin's promotion of a rigid and authoritarian society based upon discipline, mixing traditional Russian values with Stalin's interpretation of Marxism. Organised religion was repressed, especially minority religious groups. Education was transformed. Under Lenin, the education system allowed relaxed discipline in schools that became based upon Marxist theory, but Stalin reversed this in 1934 with a conservative approach taken with the reintroduction of formal learning, the use of examinations and grades, the assertion of full authority of the teacher and the introduction of school uniforms. Art and culture became strictly regulated under the principles of socialist realism and Russian traditions that Stalin admired were allowed to continue. Foreign policy in the Soviet Union from 1929 to 1941 resulted in substantial changes in the Soviet Union's approach to its foreign policy. In 1933, the Marxist–Leninist geopolitical perspective was that the Soviet Union was surrounded by capitalist and anti-communist enemies. As a result, the election of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party government in Germany initially caused the Soviet Union to sever diplomatic relations that had been established in the 1920s. In 1938, Stalin accommodated the Nazis and the anti-communist West by not defending Czechoslovakia, allowing Hitler's threat of pre-emptive war for the Sudetenland to annex the land and "rescue the oppressed German peoples" living in Czecho. To challenge Nazi Germany's bid for European empire and hegemony, Stalin promoted anti-fascist front organisations to encourage European socialists and democrats to join the Soviet communists to fight throughout Nazi-occupied Europe, creating agreements with France to challenge Germany. After Germany and Britain signed the Munich Agreement (29 September 1938) which allowed the German occupation of Czechoslovakia (1938–1945), Stalin adopted pro-German policies for the Soviet Union's dealings with Nazi Germany. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany agreed to the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1939) and to jointly invade and partition Poland, by way of which Nazi Germany started the Second World War (1 September 1939). In the 1941–1942 period of the Great Patriotic War, the German invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa, 22 June 1941) was ineffectively opposed by the Red Army, who were poorly led, ill-trained and under-equipped. As a result, they fought poorly and suffered great losses of soldiers (killed, wounded and captured). The weakness of the Red Army was partly consequence of the Great Purge (1936–1938) of senior officers and career soldiers whom Stalin considered politically unreliable. Strategically, the Wehrmacht's extensive and effective attack threatened the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and the political integrity of Stalin's model of a Marxist–Leninist state, when the Nazis were initially welcomed as liberators by the anti-communist and nationalist populations in the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The anti-Soviet nationalists' collaboration with the Nazi's lasted until the and the began their killings of the Jewish populations, the local communists, the civil and community leaders—the Holocaust meant to realise the Nazi German colonisation of Bolshevik Russia. In response, Stalin ordered the Red Army to fight a total war against the Germanic invaders who would exterminate Slavic Russia. Hitler's attack against the Soviet Union (Nazi Germany's erstwhile ally) realigned Stalin's political priorities, from the repression of internal enemies to the existential defence against external attack. The pragmatic Stalin then entered the Soviet Union to the Grand Alliance, a common front against the Axis Powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan). In the continental European countries occupied by the Axis powers, the native communist party usually led the armed resistance (guerrilla warfare and urban guerrilla warfare) against fascist military occupation. In Mediterranean Europe, the communist Yugoslav Partisans led by Josip Broz Tito effectively resisted the German Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation. In the 1943–1944 period, the Yugoslav Partisans liberated territories with Red Army assistance and established the communist political authority that became the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. To end the Imperial Japanese occupation of China in continental Asia, Stalin ordered Mao Zedong and the Communist Party of China to temporarily cease the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) against Chiang Kai-shek and the anti-communist Kuomintang as the Second United Front in the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). In 1943, the Red Army began to repel the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, especially at the Battle of Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943) and at the Battle of Kursk (5 July – 23 August 1943). The Red Army then repelled the Nazi and Fascist occupation armies from Eastern Europe until the Red Army decisively defeated Nazi Germany in the Berlin Strategic Offensive Operation (16 April–2 May 1945). On concluding the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945), the Soviet Union was a military superpower with a say in determining the geopolitical order of the world. Apart from the failed Third Period policy in the early 1930s, Marxist–Leninists played an important role in anti-fascist resistance movements, with the Soviet Union contributing to the Allied victory in World War II. In accordance with the three-power Yalta Agreement (4–11 February 1945), the Soviet Union purged native fascist collaborators and these in collaboration with the Axis Powers from the Eastern European countries occupied by the Axis Powers and installed native Marxist–Leninist governments. Cold War, de-Stalinisation and Maoism (1944–1979) Upon Allied victory concluding the Second World War (1939–1945), the members of the Grand Alliance resumed their expediently suppressed, pre-war geopolitical rivalries and ideological tensions which disunity broke their anti-fascist wartime alliance through the concept of totalitarianism into the anti-communist Western Bloc and the Marxist–Leninist Eastern Bloc. The renewed competition for geopolitical hegemony resulted in the bi-polar Cold War (1947–1991), a protracted state of tension (military and diplomatic) between the United States and the Soviet Union which often threatened a Soviet–American nuclear war, but it usually featured proxy wars in the Third World. With the end of the Grand Alliance and the start of the Cold War, anti-fascism became part of both the official ideology and language of Marxist–Leninist states, especially in East Germany. Fascist and anti-fascism, with the latter used to mean a general anti-capitalist struggle against the Western world and NATO, became epithets widely used by Marxist–Leninists to smear their opponents, including democratic socialists, libertarian socialists, social democrats and other anti-Stalinist leftists. The events that precipitated the Cold War in Europe were the Soviet and Yugoslav, Bulgarian and Albanian military interventions to the Greek Civil War (1944–1949) on behalf of the Communist Party of Greece; and the Berlin Blockade (1948–1949) by the Soviet Union. The event that precipitated the Cold War in continental Asia was the resumption of the Chinese Civil War (1927–1949) fought between the anti-communist Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China. After military defeat exiled Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang nationalist government to Formosa island (Taiwan), Mao Zedong established the People's Republic of China on 1 October 1949. In the late 1940s, the geopolitics of the Eastern Bloc countries under Soviet predominance featured an official-and-personal style of socialist diplomacy that failed Stalin and Tito when Tito refused to subordinating Yugoslavia to the Soviet Union. In 1948, circumstance and cultural personality aggravated the matter into the Yugoslav–Soviet split (1948–1955) that resulted from Tito's rejection of Stalin's demand to subordinate the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia to the geopolitical agenda (economic and military) of the Soviet Union, i.e. Tito at Stalin's disposal. Stalin punished Tito's refusal by denouncing him as an ideological revisionist of Marxism–Leninism; by denouncing Yugoslavia's practice of Titoism as socialism deviated from the cause of world communism; and by expelling the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform). The break from the Eastern Bloc allowed the development of a socialism with Yugoslav characteristics which allowed doing business with the capitalist West to develop the socialist economy and the establishment of Yugoslavia's diplomatic and commercial relations with countries of the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc. Yugoslavia's international relations matured into the Non-Aligned Movement (1961) of countries without political allegiance to any power bloc. At the death of Stalin in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev became leader of the Soviet Union and of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and then consolidated an anti-Stalinist government. In a secret meeting at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev denounced Stalin and Stalinism in the speech On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences (25 February 1956) in which he specified and condemned Stalin's dictatorial excesses and abuses of power such as the Great purge (1936–1938) and the cult of personality. Khrushchev introduced the de-Stalinisation of the party and of the Soviet Union. He realised this with the dismantling of the Gulag archipelago of forced-labour camps and freeing the prisoners as well as allowing Soviet civil society greater political freedom of expression, especially for public intellectuals of the intelligentsia such as the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose literature obliquely criticised Stalin and the Stalinist police state. De-Stalinisation also ended Stalin's national-purpose policy of socialism in one country and was replaced with proletarian internationalism, by way of which Khrushchev re-committed the Soviet Union to permanent revolution to realise world communism. In that geopolitical vein, Khrushchev presented de-Stalinisation as the restoration of Leninism as the state ideology of the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, the de-Stalinisation of the Soviet Union was ideological bad news for the People's Republic of China because Soviet and Russian interpretations and applications of Leninism and orthodox Marxism contradicted the Sinified Marxism–Leninism of Mao Zedong—his Chinese adaptations of Stalinist interpretation and praxis for establishing socialism in China. To realise that leap of Marxist faith in the development of Chinese socialism, the Communist Party of China developed Maoism as the official state ideology. As the specifically Chinese development of Marxism–Leninism, Maoism illuminated the cultural differences between the European-Russian and the Asian-Chinese interpretations and practical applications of Marxism–Leninism in each country. The political differences then provoked geopolitical, ideological and nationalist tensions, which derived from the different stages of development, between the urban society of the industrialised Soviet Union and the agricultural society of the pre-industrial China. The theory versus praxis arguments escalated to theoretic disputes about Marxist–Leninist revisionism and provoked the Sino-Soviet split (1956–1966) and the two countries broke their international relations (diplomatic, political, cultural and economic). In Eastern Asia, the Cold War produced the Korean War (1950–1953), the first proxy war between the Eastern Bloc and the Western Bloc, resulted from dual origins, namely the nationalist Koreans' post-war resumption of their Korean Civil War and the imperial war for regional hegemony sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union. The international response to the North Korean invasion of South Korea was realised by the United Nations Security Council, who voted for war despite the absent Soviet Union and authorised an international military expedition to intervene, expel the northern invaders from the south of Korea and restore the geopolitical status quo ante of the Soviet and American division of Korea at the 38th Parallel of global latitude. Consequent to Chinese military intervention in behalf of North Korea, the magnitude of the infantry warfare reached operational and geographic stalemate (July 1951–July 1953). Afterwards, the shooting war was ended with the Korean Armistice Agreement (27 July 1953); and the superpower Cold War in Asia then resumed as the Korean Demilitarised Zone. Consequent to the Sino-Soviet split, the pragmatic China established politics of détente with the United States in an effort to publicly challenge the Soviet Union for leadership of the international Marxist–Leninist movement. Mao Zedong's pragmatism permitted geopolitical rapprochement and facilitated President Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China which subsequently ended the policy of the existence to Two Chinas when the United States sponsored the People's Republic of China to replace the Republic of China (Taiwan) as the representative of the Chinese people at the United Nations. In the due course of Sino-American rapprochement, China also assumed membership in the Security Council of the United Nations. In the post-Mao period of Sino-American détente, the Deng Xiaoping government (1982–1987) affected policies of economic liberalisation that allowed continual growth for the Chinese economy. The ideological justification is socialism with Chinese characteristics, the Chinese adaptation of Marxism–Leninism. Communist revolution erupted in the Americas in this period, including revolutions in Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador, Grenada, Nicaragua, Peru and Uruguay. The Cuban Revolution (1953–1959) led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara deposed the military dictatorship (1952–1959) of Fulgencio Batista and established the Republic of Cuba, a state formally recognised by the Soviet Union. In response, the United States launched a coup against the Castro government in 1961. However, the CIA's unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion (17 April 1961) by anti-communist Cuban exiles impelled the Republic of Cuba to side with the Soviet Union in the geopolitics of the bipolar Cold War. The Cuban Missile Crisis (22–28 October 1962) occurred when the United States opposed Cuba being armed with nuclear missiles by the Soviet Union. After a stalemate confrontation, the United States and the Soviet Union jointly resolved the nuclear-missile crisis by respectively removing United States missiles from Turkey and Italy and Soviet missiles from Cuba. Both Bolivia, Canada and Uruguay faced Marxist–Leninist revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. In Bolivia, this included Che Guevara as a leader until being killed there by government forces. In 1970, the October Crisis (5 October – 28 December 1970) occurred in Canada, a brief revolution in the province of Quebec, where the actions of the Marxist–Leninist and separatist Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) featured the kidnap of James Cross, the British Trade Commissioner in Canada; and the killing of Pierre Laporte, the Quebec government minister. The political manifesto of the FLQ condemned English-Canadian imperialism in French Quebec and called for an independent, socialist Quebec. The Canadian government's harsh response included the suspension of civil liberties in Quebec and compelled the FLQ leaders' flight to Cuba. Uruguay faced Marxist–Leninist revolution from the Tupamaros movement from the 1960s to the 1970s. In 1979, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) led by Daniel Ortega won the Nicaraguan Revolution (1961–1990) against the government of Anastasio Somoza Debayle (1 December 1974 – 17 July 1979) to establish a socialist Nicaragua. Within months, the government of Ronald Reagan sponsored the counter-revolutionary Contras in the secret Contra War (1979–1990) against the Sandinista government. In 1989, the Contra War concluded with the signing of the Tela Accord at the port of Tela, Honduras. The Tela Accord required the subsequent, voluntary demobilisation of the Contra guerrilla armies and the FSLN army. In 1990, a second national election installed to government a majority of non-Sandinista political parties, to whom the FSLN handed political power. Since 2006, the FSLN has returned to government, winning every legislative and presidential election in the process (2006, 2011 and 2016). The Salvadoran Civil War (1979–1992) featured the popularly supported Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, an organisation of left-wing parties fighting against the right-wing military government of El Salvador. In 1983, the United States invasion of Grenada (25–29 October 1983) thwarted the assumption of power by the elected government of the New Jewel Movement (1973–1983), a Marxist–Leninist vanguard party led by Maurice Bishop. In Asia, the Vietnam War (1955–1975) was the second East–West war fought during the Cold War (1947–1991). In the First Indochina War (1946–1954), the Việt Minh led by Ho Chi Minh defeated the French re-establishment of European colonialism in Vietnam. To fill the geopolitical power vacuum caused by French defeat in southeast Asia, Vietnam was divided into South Vietnam and North Vietnam in 1954, and the United States then became the Western power supporting the client-state Republic of Vietnam (1955–1975) in the South headed by Ngo Dinh Diem, an anti-communist politician. Despite possessing military superiority, the United States failed to safeguard South Vietnam from the guerrilla warfare of the Viet Cong sponsored by North Vietnam. On 30 January 1968, North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive (the General Offensive and Uprising of Tet Mau Than, 1968). Although a military failure for the guerrillas and the army, it was a successful psychological warfare operation that decisively turned international public opinion against the United States intervention to the Vietnamese civil war, with the military withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam in 1973 and the subsequent and consequent Fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese army on 30 April 1975. With the end of the Vietnam War, Vietnam was reunited under Marxist-Leninlist government in 1976. Marxist–Leninist regimes were also established in Vietnam's neighbour states. This included Kampuchea and Laos. Consequent to the Cambodian Civil War (1968–1975), a coalition composed of Prince Norodom Sihanouk (1941–1955), the native Cambodian Marxist–Leninists and the Maoist Khmer Rouge (1951–1999) led by Pol Pot established Democratic Kampuchea (1975–1982), a Marxist–Leninist state that featured class warfare |
Modulo may refer to: Mathematics and computer science Modulo (mathematics), a word with multiple distinct meanings in mathematics Modular arithmetic, a part of a system of arithmetic for integers, where numbers "wrap around" upon reaching | where numbers "wrap around" upon reaching a certain value—the modulus Modulo operation, a division operation with a remainder as result Other uses Módulo, a Brazilian company specializing in |
Medal (for Indian Army) Meritorious Service Medal (Natal) Meritorious Service Medal (New Zealand) Meritorious Service Medal (South Africa) Meritorious Service Medal (United Kingdom) Meritorious Service Medal (United States) Meritorious Service Medal (Vietnam) NATO Meritorious Service Medal Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Meritorious Services Medal) from Singapore, awarded to civilians Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Tentera) (Meritorious Services Medal | (Natal) Meritorious Service Medal (New Zealand) Meritorious Service Medal (South Africa) Meritorious Service Medal (United Kingdom) Meritorious Service Medal (United States) Meritorious Service Medal (Vietnam) NATO Meritorious Service Medal Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Meritorious Services Medal) from Singapore, awarded to civilians Pingat Jasa Gemilang (Tentera) (Meritorious Services Medal (Military)) |
the 23 heads of department in the secretariat were replaced. Doing so, Gorbachev secured dominance in the Politburo within a year, faster than either Stalin, Khrushchev, or Brezhnev had achieved. Domestic policies Gorbachev recurrently employed the term perestroika, first used publicly in March 1984. He saw perestroika as encompassing a complex series of reforms to restructure society and the economy. He was concerned by the country's low productivity, poor work ethic, and inferior quality goods; like several economists, he feared this would lead to the country becoming a second-rate power. The first stage of Gorbachev's perestroika was uskoreniye ("acceleration"), a term he used regularly in the first two years of his leadership. The Soviet Union was behind the United States in many areas of production, but Gorbachev claimed that it would accelerate industrial output to match that of the U.S. by 2000. The Five Year Plan of 1985–90 was targeted to expand machine building by 50 to 100%. To boost agricultural productivity, he merged five ministries and a state committee into a single entity, Agroprom, although by late 1986 acknowledged this merger as a failure. The purpose of reform was to prop up the centrally planned economy—not to transition to market socialism. Speaking in late summer 1985 to the secretaries for economic affairs of the central committees of the East European communist parties, Gorbachev said: "Many of you see the solution to your problems in resorting to market mechanisms in place of direct planning. Some of you look at the market as a lifesaver for your economies. But, comrades, you should not think about lifesavers but about the ship, and the ship is socialism." Gorbachev's perestroika also entailed attempts to move away from technocratic management of the economy by increasingly involving the labor force in industrial production. He was of the view that once freed from the strong control of central planners, state-owned enterprises would act as market agents. Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders did not anticipate opposition to the perestroika reforms; according to their interpretation of Marxism, they believed that in a socialist society like the Soviet Union there would not be "antagonistic contradictions". However, there would come to be a public perception in the country that many bureaucrats were paying lip service to the reforms while trying to undermine them. He also initiated the concept of gospriyomka (state acceptance of production) during his time as leader, which represented quality control. In April 1986, he introduced an agrarian reform which linked salaries to output and allowed collective farms to sell 30% of their produce directly to shops or co-operatives rather than giving it all to the state for distribution. In a September 1986 speech, he embraced the idea of reintroducing market economics to the country alongside limited private enterprise, citing Lenin's New Economic Policy as a precedent; he nevertheless stressed that he did not regard this as a return to capitalism. In the Soviet Union, alcohol consumption had risen steadily between 1950 and 1985. By the 1980s, drunkenness was a major social problem and Andropov had planned a major campaign to limit alcohol consumption. Encouraged by his wife, Gorbachev—who believed the campaign would improve health and work efficiency—oversaw its implementation. Alcohol production was reduced by around 40%, the legal drinking age rose from 18 to 21, alcohol prices were increased, stores were banned from selling it before 2 P.M., and tougher penalties were introduced for workplace or public drunkenness and home production of alcohol. The All-Union Voluntary Society for the Struggle for Temperance was formed to promote sobriety; it had over 14 million members within three years. As a result, crime rates fell and life expectancy grew slightly between 1986 and 1987. However, moonshine production rose considerably, and the reform had significant costs to the Soviet economy, resulting in losses of up to US$100 billion between 1985 and 1990. Gorbachev later considered the campaign to have been an error, and it was terminated in October 1988. After it ended, it took several years for production to return to previous levels, after which alcohol consumption soared in Russia between 1990 and 1993. In the second year of his leadership, Gorbachev began speaking of glasnost, or "openness". According to Doder and Branston, this meant "greater openness and candour in government affairs and for an interplay of different and sometimes conflicting views in political debates, in the press, and in Soviet culture." Encouraging reformers into prominent media positions, he brought in Sergei Zalygin as head of Novy Mir magazine and Yegor Yakovlev as editor-in-chief of Moscow News. He made the historian Yuri Afanasiev dean of the State Historical Archive Faculty, from where Afansiev could press for the opening of secret archives and the reassessment of Soviet history. Prominent dissidents like Andrei Sakharov were freed from internal exile or prison. Gorbachev saw glasnost as a necessary measure to ensure perestroika by alerting the Soviet populace to the nature of the country's problems in the hope that they would support his efforts to fix them. Particularly popular among the Soviet intelligentsia, who became key Gorbachev supporters, glasnost boosted his domestic popularity but alarmed many Communist Party hardliners. For many Soviet citizens, this newfound level of freedom of speech and press—and its accompanying revelations about the country's past—was uncomfortable. Some in the party thought Gorbachev was not going far enough in his reforms; a prominent liberal critic was Yeltsin. He had risen rapidly since 1985, attaining the role of Moscow city boss. Like many members of the government, Gorbachev was skeptical of Yeltsin, believing that he engaged in too much self-promotion. Yeltsin was also critical of Gorbachev, regarding him as patronizing. In early 1986, Yeltsin began sniping at Gorbachev in Politburo meetings. At the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February, Yeltsin called for more far-reaching reforms than Gorbachev was initiating and criticized the party leadership, although did not cite Gorbachev by name, claiming that a new cult of personality was forming. Gorbachev then opened the floor to responses, after which attendees publicly criticized Yeltsin for several hours. After this, Gorbachev also criticized Yeltsin, claiming that he only cared for himself and was "politically illiterate". Yeltsin then resigned as both Moscow boss and as a member of the Politburo. From this point, tensions between the two men developed into a mutual hatred. In April 1986 the Chernobyl disaster occurred. In the immediate aftermath, officials fed Gorbachev incorrect information to downplay the incident. As the scale of the disaster became apparent, 336,000 people were evacuated from the area around Chernobyl. Taubman noted that the disaster marked "a turning point for Gorbachev and the Soviet regime". Several days after it occurred, he gave a televised report to the nation. He cited the disaster as evidence for what he regarded as widespread problems in Soviet society, such as shoddy workmanship and workplace inertia. Gorbachev later described the incident as one which made him appreciate the scale of incompetence and cover-ups in the Soviet Union. From April to the end of the year, Gorbachev became increasingly open in his criticism of the Soviet system, including food production, state bureaucracy, the military draft, and the large size of the prison population. Foreign policy In a May 1985 speech given to the Soviet Foreign Ministry—the first time a Soviet leader had directly addressed his country's diplomats—Gorbachev spoke of a "radical restructuring" of foreign policy. A major issue facing his leadership was Soviet involvement in the Afghan Civil War, which had then been going on for over five years. Over the course of the war, the Soviet Army took heavy casualties and there was much opposition to Soviet involvement among both the public and military. On becoming leader, Gorbachev saw withdrawal from the war as a key priority. In October 1985, he met with Afghan Marxist leader Babrak Karmal, urging him to acknowledge the lack of widespread public support for his government and pursue a power sharing agreement with the opposition. That month, the Politburo approved Gorbachev's decision to withdraw combat troops from Afghanistan, although the last troops did not leave until February 1989. Gorbachev had inherited a renewed period of high tension in the Cold War. He believed strongly in the need to sharply improve relations with the United States; he was appalled at the prospect of nuclear war, was aware that the Soviet Union was unlikely to win the arms race, and thought that the continued focus on high military spending was detrimental to his desire for domestic reform. Although privately also appalled at the prospect of nuclear war, U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly appeared to not want a de-escalation of tensions, having scrapped détente and arms controls, initiating a military build-up, and calling the Soviet Union the "evil empire". Both Gorbachev and Reagan wanted a summit to discuss the Cold War, but each faced some opposition to such a move within their respective governments. They agreed to hold a summit in Geneva, Switzerland in November 1985. In the buildup to this, Gorbachev sought to improve relations with the U.S.'s NATO allies, visiting France in October 1985 to meet with President François Mitterrand. At the Geneva summit, discussions between Gorbachev and Reagan were sometimes heated, and Gorbachev was initially frustrated that his U.S. counterpart "does not seem to hear what I am trying to say". As well as discussing the Cold War proxy conflicts in Afghanistan and Nicaragua and human rights issues, the pair discussed the U.S.'s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), to which Gorbachev was strongly opposed. The duo's wives also met and spent time together at the summit. The summit ended with a joint commitment to avoiding nuclear war and to meet for two further summits: in Washington D.C. in 1986 and in Moscow in 1987. Following the conference, Gorbachev traveled to Prague to inform other Warsaw Pact leaders of developments. In January 1986, Gorbachev publicly proposed a three-stage programme for abolishing the world's nuclear weapons by the end of the 20th century. An agreement was then reached to meet with Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland in October 1986. Gorbachev wanted to secure guarantees that SDI would not be implemented, and in return was willing to offer concessions, including a 50% reduction in Soviet long range nuclear missiles. Both leaders agreed with the shared goal of abolishing nuclear weapons, but Reagan refused to terminate the SDI program and no deal was reached. After the summit, many of Reagan's allies criticized him for going along with the idea of abolishing nuclear weapons. Gorbachev meanwhile told the Politburo that Reagan was "extraordinarily primitive, troglodyte, and intellectually feeble". In his relations with the developing world, Gorbachev found many of the leaders professing revolutionary socialist credentials or a pro-Soviet attitude—such as Libya's Muammar Gaddafi and Syria's Hafez al-Assad—frustrating, and his best personal relationship was instead with India's Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. He thought that the "socialist camp" of Marxist–Leninist governed states—the Eastern Bloc countries, North Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba—were a drain on the Soviet economy, receiving a far greater amount of goods from the Soviet Union than they collectively gave in return. He sought improved relations with China, a country whose Marxist government had severed ties with the Soviets in the Sino-Soviet Split and had since undergone its own structural reform. In June 1985 he signed a US$14 billion five-year trade agreement with the country and in July 1986, he proposed troop reductions along the Soviet-Chinese border, hailing China as "a great socialist country". He made clear his desire for Soviet membership of the Asian Development Bank and for greater ties to Pacific countries, especially China and Japan. Further reform: 1987–1989 Domestic reforms In January 1987, Gorbachev attended a Central Committee plenum where he talked about perestroika and democratization while criticizing widespread corruption. He considered putting a proposal to allow multi-party elections into his speech, but decided against doing so. After the plenum, he focused his attentions on economic reform, holding discussions with government officials and economists. Many economists proposed reducing ministerial controls on the economy and allowing state-owned enterprises to set their own targets; Ryzhkov and other government figures were skeptical. In June, Gorbachev finished his report on economic reform. It reflected a compromise: ministers would retain the ability to set output targets but these would not be considered binding. That month, a plenum accepted his recommendations and the Supreme Soviet passed a "law on enterprises" implementing the changes. Economic problems remained: by the late 1980s there were still widespread shortages of basic goods, rising inflation, and declining living standards. These stoked a number of miners' strikes in 1989. By 1987, the ethos of glasnost had spread through Soviet society: journalists were writing increasingly openly, many economic problems were being publicly revealed, and studies appeared that critically reassessed Soviet history. Gorbachev was broadly supportive, describing glasnost as "the crucial, irreplaceable weapon of perestroika". He nevertheless insisted that people should use the newfound freedom responsibly, stating that journalists and writers should avoid "sensationalism" and be "completely objective" in their reporting. Nearly two hundred previously restricted Soviet films were publicly released, and a range of Western films were also made available. In 1989, Soviet responsibility for the 1940 Katyn massacre was finally revealed. In September 1987, the government stopped jamming the signal of the British Broadcasting Corporation and Voice of America. The reforms also included greater tolerance of religion; an Easter service was broadcast on Soviet television for the first time and the millennium celebrations of the Russian Orthodox Church were given media attention. Independent organizations appeared, most supportive of Gorbachev, although the largest, Pamyat, was ultra-nationalist and anti-Semitic in nature. Gorbachev also announced that Soviet Jews wishing to migrate to Israel would be allowed to do so, something previously prohibited. In August 1987, Gorbachev holidayed in Nizhniaia Oreanda, Ukraine, there writing Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and Our World at the suggestion of U.S. publishers. For the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917—which brought Lenin and the Communist Party to power—Gorbachev produced a speech on "October and Perestroika: The Revolution Continues". Delivered to a ceremonial joint session of the Central Committee and the Supreme Soviet in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, it praised Lenin but criticized Stalin for overseeing mass human rights abuses. Party hardliners thought the speech went too far; liberalisers thought it did not go far enough. In March 1988, the magazine Sovetskaya Rossiya published an open letter by the teacher Nina Andreyeva. It criticized elements of Gorbachev's reforms, attacking what she regarded as the denigration of the Stalinist era and arguing that a reformer clique—whom she implied were mostly Jews and ethnic minorities—were to blame. Over 900 Soviet newspapers reprinted it and anti-reformists rallied around it; many reformers panicked, fearing a backlash against perestroika. On returning from Yugoslavia, Gorbachev called a Politburo meeting to discuss the letter, at which he confronted those hardliners supporting its sentiment. Ultimately, the Politburo arrived at a unanimous decision to express disapproval of Andreyeva's letter and publish a rebuttal in Pravda. Yakovlev and Gorbachev's rebuttal claimed that those who "look everywhere for internal enemies" were "not patriots" and presented Stalin's "guilt for massive repressions and lawlessness" as "enormous and unforgiveable". Forming the Congress of People's Deputies Although the next party congress was not scheduled until 1991, Gorbachev convened the 19th Party Conference in its place in June 1988. He hoped that by allowing a broader range of people to attend than at previous conferences, he would gain additional support for his reforms. With sympathetic officials and academics, Gorbachev drafted plans for reforms that would shift power away from the Politburo and towards the soviets. While the soviets had become largely powerless bodies that rubber-stamped Politburo policies, he wanted them to become year-round legislatures. He proposed the formation of a new institution, the Congress of People's Deputies, whose members were to be elected in a largely free vote. This congress would in turn elect a USSR Supreme Soviet, which would do most of the legislating. These proposals reflected Gorbachev's desire for more democracy; however, in his view there was a major impediment in that the Soviet people had developed a "slave psychology" after centuries of Tsarist autocracy and Marxist–Leninist authoritarianism. Held at the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, the conference brought together 5,000 delegates and featured arguments between hardliners and liberalisers. The proceedings were televised, and for the first time since the 1920s, voting was not unanimous. In the months following the conference, Gorbachev focused on redesigning and streamlining the party apparatus; the Central Committee staff—which then numbered around 3,000—was halved, while various Central Committee departments were merged to cut down the overall number from twenty to nine. In March and April 1989, elections to the new Congress were held. Of the 2,250 legislators to be elected, one hundred — termed the "Red Hundred" by the press — were directly chosen by the Communist Party, with Gorbachev ensuring many were reformists. Although over 85% of elected deputies were party members, many of those elected—including Sakharov and Yeltsin—were liberalisers. Gorbachev was happy with the result, describing it as "an enormous political victory under extraordinarily difficult circumstances". The new Congress convened in May 1989. Gorbachev was then elected its chair – the new de facto head of state – with 2,123 votes in favor to 87 against. Its sessions were televised live, and its members elected the new Supreme Soviet. At the Congress, Sakharov spoke repeatedly, exasperating Gorbachev with his calls for greater liberalization and the introduction of private property. When Sakharov died shortly after, Yeltsin became the figurehead of the liberal opposition. Relations with China and Western states Gorbachev tried to improve relations with the UK, France, and West Germany; like previous Soviet leaders, he was interested in pulling Western Europe away from U.S. influence. Calling for greater pan-European co-operation, he publicly spoke of a "Common European Home" and of a Europe "from the Atlantic to the Urals". In March 1987, Thatcher visited Gorbachev in Moscow; despite their ideological differences, they liked one another. In April 1989 he visited London, lunching with Elizabeth II. In May 1987, Gorbachev again visited France, and in November 1988 Mitterrand visited him in Moscow. The West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl had initially offended Gorbachev by comparing him to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, although later informally apologized and in October 1988 visited Moscow. In June 1989 Gorbachev then visited Kohl in West Germany. In November 1989 he also visited Italy, meeting with Pope John Paul II. Gorbachev's relationships with these West European leaders were typically far warmer than those he had with their Eastern Bloc counterparts. Gorbachev continued to pursue good relations with China to heal the Sino-Soviet Split. In May 1989 he visited Beijing and there met its leader Deng Xiaoping; Deng shared Gorbachev's belief in economic reform but rejected calls for democratization. Pro-democracy students had amassed in Tiananmen Square during Gorbachev's visit but after he left were massacred by troops. Gorbachev did not condemn the massacre publicly but it reinforced his commitment not to use violent force in dealing with pro-democracy protests in the Eastern Bloc. Following the failures of earlier talks with the U.S., in February 1987, Gorbachev held a conference in Moscow, titled "For a World without Nuclear Weapons, for Mankind's Survival", which was attended by various international celebrities and politicians. By publicly pushing for nuclear disarmament, Gorbachev sought to give the Soviet Union the moral high ground and weaken the West's self-perception of moral superiority. Aware that Reagan would not budge on SDI, Gorbachev focused on reducing "Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces", to which Reagan was receptive. In April 1987, Gorbachev discussed the issue with U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz in Moscow; he agreed to eliminate the Soviets' SS-23 rockets and allow U.S. inspectors to visit Soviet military facilities to ensure compliance. There was hostility to such compromises from the Soviet military, but following the May 1987 Mathias Rust incident—in which a West German teenager was able to fly undetected from Finland and land in Red Square—Gorbachev fired many senior military figures for incompetence. In December 1987, Gorbachev visited Washington D.C., where he and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Taubman called it "one of the highest points of Gorbachev's career". A second U.S.-Soviet summit occurred in Moscow in May–June 1988, which Gorbachev expected to be largely symbolic. Again, he and Reagan criticized each other's countries—Reagan raising Soviet restrictions on religious freedom; Gorbachev highlighting poverty and racial discrimination in the U.S., but Gorbachev related that they spoke "on friendly terms". They reached an agreement on notifying each other before conducting ballistic missile tests and made agreements on transport, fishing, and radio navigation. At the summit, Reagan told reporters that he no longer considered the Soviet Union an "evil empire" and the duo revealed that they considered themselves friends. The third summit was held in New York City in December. Arriving there, Gorbachev gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly where he announced a unilateral reduction in the Soviet armed forces by 500,000; he also announced that 50,000 troops would be withdrawn from Central and Eastern Europe. He then met with Reagan and President-elect George H. W. Bush; he rushed home, skipping a planned visit to Cuba, to deal with the Armenian earthquake. On becoming U.S. president, Bush appeared interested in continuing talks with Gorbachev but wanted to appear tougher on the Soviets than Reagan had to allay criticism from the right wing of his Republican Party. In December 1989, Gorbachev and Bush met at the Malta Summit. Bush offered to assist the Soviet economy by suspending the Jackson-Vanik Amendment and repealing the Stevenson and Baird Amendments. There, the duo agreed to a joint press conference, the first time that a U.S. and Soviet leader had done so. Gorbachev also urged Bush to normalize relations with Cuba and meet its president, Fidel Castro, although Bush refused to do so. Nationality question and the Eastern Bloc On taking power, Gorbachev found some unrest among different national groups within the Soviet Union. In December 1986, riots broke out in several Kazakh cities after a Russian was appointed head of the region. In 1987, Crimean Tatars protested in Moscow to demand resettlement in Crimea, the area from which they had been deported on Stalin's orders in 1944. Gorbachev ordered a commission, headed by Gromyko, to examine their situation. Gromyko's report opposed calls for assisting Tatar resettlement in Crimea. By 1988, the Soviet "nationality question" was increasingly pressing. In February, the administration of the Nagorno-Karabakh region officially requested that it be transferred from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic to the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic; the majority of the region's population were ethnically Armenian and wanted unification with other majority Armenian areas. As rival Armenian and Azerbaijani demonstrations took place in Nagorno-Karabakh, Gorbachev called an emergency meeting of the Politburo. Ultimately, Gorbachev promised greater autonomy for Nagorno-Karabakh but refused the transfer, fearing that it would set off similar ethnic tensions and demands throughout the Soviet Union. That month, in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait, Azerbaijani gangs began killing members of the Armenian minority. Local troops tried to quell the unrest but were attacked by mobs. The Politburo ordered additional troops into the city, but in contrast to those like Ligachev who wanted a massive display of force, Gorbachev urged restraint. He believed that the situation could be resolved through a political solution, urging talks between the Armenian and Azerbaijani Communist Parties. Further anti-Armenian violence broke out in Baku in 1990. Problems also emerged in the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic; in April 1989, Georgian nationalists demanding independence clashed with troops in Tbilisi, resulting in various deaths. Independence sentiment was also rising in the Baltic states; the Supreme Soviets of the Estonian, Lithuanian, and Latvian Soviet Socialist Republics declared their economic "autonomy" from Russia and introduced measures to restrict Russian immigration. In August 1989, protesters formed the Baltic Way, a human chain across the three republics to symbolize their wish for independence. That month, the Lithuanian Supreme Soviet ruled the 1940 Soviet annexation of their country to be illegal; in January 1990, Gorbachev visited the republic to encourage it to remain part of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev rejected the "Brezhnev Doctrine", the idea that the Soviet Union had the right to intervene militarily in other Marxist–Leninist countries if their governments were threatened. In December 1987 he announced the withdrawal of 500,000 Soviet troops from Central and Eastern Europe. While pursuing domestic reforms, he did not publicly support reformers elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Hoping instead to lead by example, he later related that he did not want to interfere in their internal affairs, but he may have feared that pushing reform in Central and Eastern Europe would have angered his own hardliners too much. Some Eastern Bloc leaders, like Hungary's János Kádár and Poland's Wojciech Jaruzelski, were sympathetic to reform; others, like Romania's Nicolae Ceaușescu, were hostile to it. In May 1987 Gorbachev visited Romania, where he was appalled by the state of the country, later telling the Politburo that there "human dignity has absolutely no value". He and Ceaușescu disliked each other, and argued over Gorbachev's reforms. In August 1989, the Pan-European Picnic, which Otto von Habsburg planned as a test of Gorbachev, resulted in a large mass exodus of East German refugees. According to the Sinatra doctrine, the Soviet Union did not interfere and the media-informed Eastern European population realized that on the one hand their rulers were increasingly losing power and on the other hand the Iron Curtain was falling apart as a bracket for the Eastern Bloc. Unraveling of the USSR In the Revolutions of 1989, most of the Marxist–Leninist states of Central and Eastern Europe held multi-party elections resulting in regime change. In most countries, like Poland and Hungary, this was achieved peacefully, but in Romania the revolution turned violent and led to Ceaușescu's overthrow and execution. Gorbachev was too preoccupied with domestic problems to pay much attention to these events. He believed that democratic elections would not lead Eastern European countries into abandoning their commitment to socialism. In 1989, he visited East Germany for the fortieth anniversary of its founding; shortly after, in November, the East German government allowed its citizens to cross the Berlin Wall, a decision Gorbachev praised. Over the following years, much of the wall was demolished. Neither Gorbachev nor Thatcher or Mitterrand wanted a swift reunification of Germany, aware that it would likely become the dominant European power. Gorbachev wanted a gradual process of German integration but Kohl began calling for rapid reunification. With Germany reunified, many observers declared the Cold War over. Presidency of the Soviet Union: 1990–1991 In February 1990, both liberalisers and Marxist–Leninist hardliners intensified their attacks on Gorbachev. A liberalizer march took part in Moscow criticizing Communist Party rule, while at a Central Committee meeting, the hardliner Vladimir Brovikov accused Gorbachev of reducing the country to "anarchy" and "ruin" and of pursuing Western approval at the expense of the Soviet Union and the Marxist–Leninist cause. Gorbachev was aware that the Central Committee could still oust him as General Secretary, and so decided to reformulate the role of head of government to a presidency from which he could not be removed. He decided that the presidential election should be held by the Congress of People's Deputies. He chose this over a public vote because he thought the latter would escalate tensions and feared that he might lose it; a spring 1990 poll nevertheless still showed him as the most popular politician in the country. In March, the Congress of People's Deputies held the first (and only) Soviet presidential election, in which Gorbachev was the only candidate. He secured 1,329 in favor to 495 against; 313 votes were invalid or absent. He therefore became the first executive President of the Soviet Union. A new 18-member Presidential Council de facto replaced the Politburo. At the same Congress meeting, he presented the idea of repealing Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which had ratified the Communist Party as the "ruling party" of the Soviet Union. The Congress passed the reform, undermining the de jure nature of the one-party state. In the 1990 elections for the Russian Supreme Soviet, the Communist Party faced challengers from an alliance of liberalisers known as "Democratic Russia"; the latter did particularly well in urban centers. Yeltsin was elected the parliament's chair, something Gorbachev was unhappy about. That year, opinion polls showed Yeltsin overtaking Gorbachev as the most popular politician in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev struggled to understand Yeltsin's growing popularity, commenting: "he drinks like a fish... he's inarticulate, he comes up with the devil knows what, he's like a worn-out record." The Russian Supreme Soviet was now out of Gorbachev's control; in June 1990, it declared that in the Russian Republic, its laws took precedence over those of the Soviet central government. Amid a growth in Russian nationalist sentiment, Gorbachev had reluctantly allowed the formation of a Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as a branch of the larger Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev attended its first congress in June, but soon found it dominated by hardliners who opposed his reformist stance. German reunification and the Gulf War In January 1990, Gorbachev privately agreed to permit East German reunification with West Germany, but rejected the idea that a unified Germany could retain West Germany's NATO membership. His compromise that Germany might retain both NATO and Warsaw Pact memberships did not attract support. In May 1990, he visited the U.S. for talks with President Bush; there, he agreed that an independent Germany would have the right to choose its international alliances. He later revealed that he had agreed to do so because U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised that NATO troops would not be posted to eastern Germany and that the military alliance would not expand into Eastern Europe. Privately, Bush ignored Baker's assurances and later pushed for NATO expansion. More recently, Gorbachev and others have rejected claims that Gorbachev was given any assurances that NATO would not expand eastward. On the trip, the U.S. informed Gorbachev of its evidence that the Soviet military—possibly unbeknownst to Gorbachev—had been pursuing a biological weapons program in contravention of the 1987 Biological Weapons Convention. In July, Kohl visited Moscow and Gorbachev informed him that the Soviets would not oppose a reunified Germany being part of NATO. Domestically, Gorbachev's critics accused him of betraying the national interest; more broadly, they were angry that Gorbachev had allowed the Eastern Bloc to move away from direct Soviet influence. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government invaded Kuwait; Gorbachev endorsed President Bush's condemnation of it. This brought criticism from many in the Soviet state apparatus, who saw Hussein as a key ally in the Persian Gulf and feared for the safety of the 9,000 Soviet citizens in Iraq, although Gorbachev argued that the Iraqis were the clear aggressors in the situation. In November the Soviets endorsed a UN Resolution permitting force to be used in expelling the Iraqi Army from Kuwait. Gorbachev later called it a "watershed" in world politics, "the first time the superpowers acted together in a regional crisis." However, when the U.S. announced plans for a ground invasion, Gorbachev opposed it, urging instead a peaceful solution. In October 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; he was flattered but acknowledged "mixed feelings" about the accolade. Polls indicated that 90% of Soviet citizens disapproved of the award, which was widely seen as a Western and anti-Soviet accolade. With the Soviet budget deficit climbing and no domestic money markets to provide the state with loans, Gorbachev looked elsewhere. Throughout 1991, Gorbachev requested sizable loans from Western countries and Japan, hoping to keep the Soviet economy afloat and ensure the success of perestroika. Although the Soviet Union had been excluded from the G7, Gorbachev secured an invitation to its London summit in July 1991. There, he continued to call for financial assistance; Mitterrand and Kohl backed him, while Thatcher—no longer in office— also urged Western leaders to agree. Most G7 members were reluctant, instead offering technical assistance and proposing the Soviets receive "special associate" status—rather than full membership—of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Gorbachev was frustrated that the U.S. would spend $100 billion on | In most countries, like Poland and Hungary, this was achieved peacefully, but in Romania the revolution turned violent and led to Ceaușescu's overthrow and execution. Gorbachev was too preoccupied with domestic problems to pay much attention to these events. He believed that democratic elections would not lead Eastern European countries into abandoning their commitment to socialism. In 1989, he visited East Germany for the fortieth anniversary of its founding; shortly after, in November, the East German government allowed its citizens to cross the Berlin Wall, a decision Gorbachev praised. Over the following years, much of the wall was demolished. Neither Gorbachev nor Thatcher or Mitterrand wanted a swift reunification of Germany, aware that it would likely become the dominant European power. Gorbachev wanted a gradual process of German integration but Kohl began calling for rapid reunification. With Germany reunified, many observers declared the Cold War over. Presidency of the Soviet Union: 1990–1991 In February 1990, both liberalisers and Marxist–Leninist hardliners intensified their attacks on Gorbachev. A liberalizer march took part in Moscow criticizing Communist Party rule, while at a Central Committee meeting, the hardliner Vladimir Brovikov accused Gorbachev of reducing the country to "anarchy" and "ruin" and of pursuing Western approval at the expense of the Soviet Union and the Marxist–Leninist cause. Gorbachev was aware that the Central Committee could still oust him as General Secretary, and so decided to reformulate the role of head of government to a presidency from which he could not be removed. He decided that the presidential election should be held by the Congress of People's Deputies. He chose this over a public vote because he thought the latter would escalate tensions and feared that he might lose it; a spring 1990 poll nevertheless still showed him as the most popular politician in the country. In March, the Congress of People's Deputies held the first (and only) Soviet presidential election, in which Gorbachev was the only candidate. He secured 1,329 in favor to 495 against; 313 votes were invalid or absent. He therefore became the first executive President of the Soviet Union. A new 18-member Presidential Council de facto replaced the Politburo. At the same Congress meeting, he presented the idea of repealing Article 6 of the Soviet constitution, which had ratified the Communist Party as the "ruling party" of the Soviet Union. The Congress passed the reform, undermining the de jure nature of the one-party state. In the 1990 elections for the Russian Supreme Soviet, the Communist Party faced challengers from an alliance of liberalisers known as "Democratic Russia"; the latter did particularly well in urban centers. Yeltsin was elected the parliament's chair, something Gorbachev was unhappy about. That year, opinion polls showed Yeltsin overtaking Gorbachev as the most popular politician in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev struggled to understand Yeltsin's growing popularity, commenting: "he drinks like a fish... he's inarticulate, he comes up with the devil knows what, he's like a worn-out record." The Russian Supreme Soviet was now out of Gorbachev's control; in June 1990, it declared that in the Russian Republic, its laws took precedence over those of the Soviet central government. Amid a growth in Russian nationalist sentiment, Gorbachev had reluctantly allowed the formation of a Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as a branch of the larger Soviet Communist Party. Gorbachev attended its first congress in June, but soon found it dominated by hardliners who opposed his reformist stance. German reunification and the Gulf War In January 1990, Gorbachev privately agreed to permit East German reunification with West Germany, but rejected the idea that a unified Germany could retain West Germany's NATO membership. His compromise that Germany might retain both NATO and Warsaw Pact memberships did not attract support. In May 1990, he visited the U.S. for talks with President Bush; there, he agreed that an independent Germany would have the right to choose its international alliances. He later revealed that he had agreed to do so because U.S. Secretary of State James Baker promised that NATO troops would not be posted to eastern Germany and that the military alliance would not expand into Eastern Europe. Privately, Bush ignored Baker's assurances and later pushed for NATO expansion. More recently, Gorbachev and others have rejected claims that Gorbachev was given any assurances that NATO would not expand eastward. On the trip, the U.S. informed Gorbachev of its evidence that the Soviet military—possibly unbeknownst to Gorbachev—had been pursuing a biological weapons program in contravention of the 1987 Biological Weapons Convention. In July, Kohl visited Moscow and Gorbachev informed him that the Soviets would not oppose a reunified Germany being part of NATO. Domestically, Gorbachev's critics accused him of betraying the national interest; more broadly, they were angry that Gorbachev had allowed the Eastern Bloc to move away from direct Soviet influence. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government invaded Kuwait; Gorbachev endorsed President Bush's condemnation of it. This brought criticism from many in the Soviet state apparatus, who saw Hussein as a key ally in the Persian Gulf and feared for the safety of the 9,000 Soviet citizens in Iraq, although Gorbachev argued that the Iraqis were the clear aggressors in the situation. In November the Soviets endorsed a UN Resolution permitting force to be used in expelling the Iraqi Army from Kuwait. Gorbachev later called it a "watershed" in world politics, "the first time the superpowers acted together in a regional crisis." However, when the U.S. announced plans for a ground invasion, Gorbachev opposed it, urging instead a peaceful solution. In October 1990, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; he was flattered but acknowledged "mixed feelings" about the accolade. Polls indicated that 90% of Soviet citizens disapproved of the award, which was widely seen as a Western and anti-Soviet accolade. With the Soviet budget deficit climbing and no domestic money markets to provide the state with loans, Gorbachev looked elsewhere. Throughout 1991, Gorbachev requested sizable loans from Western countries and Japan, hoping to keep the Soviet economy afloat and ensure the success of perestroika. Although the Soviet Union had been excluded from the G7, Gorbachev secured an invitation to its London summit in July 1991. There, he continued to call for financial assistance; Mitterrand and Kohl backed him, while Thatcher—no longer in office— also urged Western leaders to agree. Most G7 members were reluctant, instead offering technical assistance and proposing the Soviets receive "special associate" status—rather than full membership—of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Gorbachev was frustrated that the U.S. would spend $100 billion on the Gulf War but would not offer his country loans. Other countries were more forthcoming; West Germany had given the Soviets DM60 billion by mid-1991. Later that month, Bush visited Moscow, where he and Gorbachev signed the START I treaty, a bilateral agreement on the reduction and limitation of strategic offensive arms, after ten years of negotiation. August putsch and government crises At the 28th Communist Party Congress in July 1990, hardliners criticized the reformists but Gorbachev was re-elected party leader with the support of three-quarters of delegates and his choice of Deputy General Secretary, Vladimir Ivashko, was also elected. Seeking compromise with the liberalizers, Gorbachev assembled a team of both his own and Yeltsin's advisers to come up with an economic reform package: the result was the "500 Days" programme. This called for further decentralization and some privatization. Gorbachev described the plan as "modern socialism" rather than a return to capitalism but had many doubts about it. In September, Yeltsin presented the plan to the Russian Supreme Soviet, which backed it. Many in the Communist Party and state apparatus warned against it, arguing that it would create marketplace chaos, rampant inflation, and unprecedented levels of unemployment. The 500 Days plan was abandoned. At this, Yeltsin rallied against Gorbachev in an October speech, claiming that Russia would no longer accept a subordinate position to the Soviet government. By mid-November 1990, much of the press was calling for Gorbachev to resign and predicting civil war. Hardliners were urging Gorbachev to disband the presidential council and arrest vocal liberals in the media. In November, he addressed the Supreme Soviet where he announced an eight-point program, which included governmental reforms, among them the abolition of the presidential council. By this point, Gorbachev was isolated from many of his former close allies and aides. Yakovlev had moved out of his inner circle and Shevardnadze had resigned. His support among the intelligentsia was declining, and by the end of 1990 his approval ratings had plummeted. Amid growing dissent in the Baltics, especially Lithuania, in January 1991 Gorbachev demanded that the Lithuanian Supreme Council rescind its pro-independence reforms. Soviet troops occupied several Vilnius buildings and clashed with protesters, 15 of whom were killed. Gorbachev was widely blamed by liberalizers, with Yeltsin calling for his resignation. Gorbachev denied sanctioning the military operation, although some in the military claimed that he had; the truth of the matter was never clearly established. Fearing more civil disturbances, that month Gorbachev banned demonstrations and ordered troops to patrol Soviet cities alongside the police. This further alienated the liberalizers but was not enough to win over hardliners. Wanting to preserve the Union, in April Gorbachev and the leaders of nine Soviet republics jointly pledged to prepare a treaty that would renew the federation under a new constitution; but six of the republics—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Georgia, and Armenia—did not endorse this. A referendum on the issue brought 76.4% in favor of continued federation but the six rebellious republics had not taken part. Negotiations took place to decide what form the new constitution would take, again bringing together Gorbachev and Yeltsin in discussion; it was planned to be formally signed in August. In August, Gorbachev and his family holidayed at their dacha, "Zarya" ('Dawn') in Foros, Crimea. Two weeks into his holiday, a group of senior Communist Party figures—the "Gang of Eight"—calling themselves the State Committee on the State of Emergency launched a coup d'état to seize control of the Soviet Union. The phone lines to his dacha were cut and a group arrived, including Boldin, Shenin, Baklanov, and General Varennikov, informing him of the take-over. The coup leaders demanded that Gorbachev formally declare a state of emergency in the country, but he refused. Gorbachev and his family were kept under house arrest in their dacha. The coup plotters publicly announced that Gorbachev was ill and thus Vice President Yanayev would take charge of the country. Yeltsin, now President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, went inside the Moscow White House. Tens of thousands of protesters amassed outside it to prevent troops storming the building to arrest him. Gorbachev feared that the coup plotters would order him killed, so had his guards barricade his dacha. However, the coup's leaders realized that they lacked sufficient support and ended their efforts. On 21 August, Vladimir Kryuchkov, Dmitry Yazov, Oleg Baklanov, Anatoly Lukyanov, and Vladimir Ivashko arrived at Gorbachev's dacha to inform him that they were doing so. That evening, Gorbachev returned to Moscow, where he thanked Yeltsin and the protesters for helping to undermine the coup. At a subsequent press conference, he pledged to reform the Soviet Communist Party. Two days later, he resigned as its General Secretary and called on the Central Committee to dissolve. Several members of the coup committed suicide; others were fired. Gorbachev attended a session of the Russian Supreme Soviet on 23 August, where Yeltsin aggressively criticized him for having appointed and promoted many of the coup members to start with. Yeltsin then announced the suspension of the activities of the Russian Communist Party. Final collapse On 29 August 1991, the Supreme Soviet indefinitely suspended all Communist Party activity, effectively ending Communist rule in the Soviet Union (On 6 November, Yeltsin issued a decree banning all Communist Party activities in Russia). From then on, the Soviet Union collapsed with dramatic speed. By the end of September, Gorbachev had lost the ability to influence events outside of Moscow. On 30 October, Gorbachev attended a conference in Madrid trying to revive the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. The event was co-sponsored by the U.S. and Soviet Union, one of the first examples of such cooperation between the two countries. There, he again met with Bush. En route home, he traveled to France where he stayed with Mitterrand at the latter's home near Bayonne. After the coup, Yeltsin had suspended all Communist Party activities on Russian soil by shutting down the Central Committee offices in Staraya Square along with raising of the imperial Russian tricolor flag alongside the Soviet flag at Red Square. By the final weeks of 1991, Yeltsin began to take over the remnants of the Soviet government including the Kremlin itself. To keep unity within the country, Gorbachev continued to pursue plans for a new union treaty but found increasing opposition to the idea of a continued federal state as the leaders of various Soviet republics bowed to growing nationalist pressure. Yeltsin stated that he would veto any idea of a unified state, instead favoring a confederation with little central authority. Only the leaders of Kazakhstan and Kirghizia supported Gorbachev's approach. The referendum in Ukraine on 1 December with a 90% turnout for secession from the Union was a fatal blow; Gorbachev had expected Ukrainians to reject independence. Without Gorbachev's knowledge, Yeltsin met with Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk and Belarusian President Stanislav Shushkevich in Belovezha Forest, near Brest, Belarus, on 8 December and signed the Belavezha Accords, which declared the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and formed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as its successor. Gorbachev only learned of this development when Shushkevich phoned him; Gorbachev was furious. He desperately looked for an opportunity to preserve the Soviet Union, hoping in vain that the media and intelligentsia might rally against the idea of its dissolution. Ukrainian, Belarusian, and Russian Supreme Soviets then ratified the establishment of the CIS. On 9 December, he issued a statement calling the CIS agreement "illegal and dangerous". On 20 December, the leaders of 11 of the 12 remaining republics–all except Georgia–met in Alma-Ata and signed the Alma-Ata Protocol, agreeing to dismantle the Soviet Union and formally establish the CIS. They also provisionally accepted Gorbachev's resignation as president of what remained of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev revealed that he would resign as soon as he saw that the CIS was a reality. Accepting the fait accompli of the Soviet Union's dissolution, Gorbachev reached a deal with Yeltsin that called for Gorbachev to formally announce his resignation as Soviet President and Commander-in-Chief on 25 December, before vacating the Kremlin by 29 December. Yakovlev, Chernyaev, and Shevardnadze joined Gorbachev to help him write a resignation speech. Gorbachev then gave his speech in the Kremlin in front of television cameras, allowing for international broadcast. In it, he announced, "I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." He expressed regret for the breakup of the Soviet Union but cited what he saw as the achievements of his administration: political and religious freedom, the end of totalitarianism, the introduction of democracy and a market economy, and an end to the arms race and Cold War. Gorbachev was only the third Soviet leader, after Malenkov and Khrushchev, not to die in office. The following day, 26 December, the Council of the Republics, the upper house of the Supreme Soviet, formally voted the Soviet Union out of existence. The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist at midnight on 31 December 1991; as of that date, all Soviet institutions that had not been taken over by Russia ceased to function. Post-presidency Initial years: 1991–1999 Out of office, Gorbachev had more time to spend with his wife and family. He and Raisa initially lived in their dilapidated dacha on Rublevskoe Shosse, and were also allowed to privatise their smaller apartment on Kosygin Street. He focused on establishing his International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies, or "Gorbachev Foundation", launched in March 1992; Yakovlev and Revenko were its first Vice Presidents. Its initial tasks were in analyzing and publishing material on the history of perestroika, as well as defending the policy from what it called "slander and falsifications". The foundation also tasked itself with monitoring and critiquing life in post-Soviet Russia, presenting alternative development forms to those pursued by Yeltsin. To finance his foundation, Gorbachev began lecturing internationally, charging large fees to do so. On a visit to Japan, he was well received and given multiple honorary degrees. In 1992, he toured the U.S. in a Forbes private jet to raise money for his foundation. During the trip he met up with the Reagans for a social visit. From there he went to Spain, where he attended the Expo '92 world fair in Seville and met with Prime Minister Felipe González, who had become a friend of his. He further visited Israel and Germany, where he was received warmly by many politicians who praised his role in facilitating German reunification. To supplement his lecture fees and book sales, Gorbachev appeared in commercials such as a television advertisement for Pizza Hut, another for the ÖBB and a photograph advertisement for Louis Vuitton, enabling him to keep the foundation afloat. With his wife's assistance, Gorbachev worked on his memoirs, which were published in Russian in 1995 and in English the following year. He also began writing a monthly syndicated column for The New York Times. In 1993, Gorbachev launched Green Cross International, which focused on encouraging sustainable futures, and then the World Political Forum. In 1995, he initiated the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. Gorbachev had promised to refrain from criticizing Yeltsin while the latter pursued democratic reforms, but soon the two men were publicly criticizing each other again. After Yeltsin's decision to lift price caps generated massive inflation and plunged many Russians into poverty, Gorbachev openly criticized him, comparing the reform to Stalin's policy of forced collectivization. After pro-Yeltsin parties did poorly in the 1993 legislative election, Gorbachev called on him to resign. In 1995, his foundation held a conference on "The Intelligentsia and Perestroika". It was there that Gorbachev proposed to the Duma a law that would reduce many of the presidential powers established by Yeltsin's 1993 constitution. Gorbachev continued to defend perestroika but acknowledged that he had made tactical errors as Soviet leader. While he still believed that Russia was undergoing a process of democratization, he concluded that it would take decades rather than years, as he had previously thought. In contrast to her husband's political activities, Raisa had focused on campaigning for children's charities. In 1997, she founded a sub-division of the Gorbachev Foundation known as Raisa Maksimovna's Club to focus on improving women's welfare in Russia. The Foundation had initially been housed in the former Social Science Institute building, but Yeltsin introduced limits to the number of rooms it could use there; the American philanthropist Ted Turner then donated over $1 million to enable the foundation to build new premises on the Leningradsky Prospekt. In 1999, Gorbachev made his first visit to Australia, where he gave a speech to the country's parliament. Shortly after, in July, Raisa was diagnosed with leukemia. With the assistance of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, she was transferred to a cancer center in Münster, Germany and there underwent chemotherapy. In September she fell into a coma and died. After Raisa's passing, Gorbachev's daughter Irina and his two granddaughters moved into his Moscow home to live with him. When questioned by journalists, he said that he would never remarry. 1996 presidential campaign The Russian presidential elections were scheduled for June 1996, and although his wife and most of his friends urged him not to run, Gorbachev decided to do so. He hated the idea that the election would result in a run-off between Yeltsin and Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation candidate whom Yeltsin saw as a Stalinist hardliner. He never expected to win outright but thought a centrist bloc could be formed around either himself or one of the other candidates with similar views, such as Grigory Yavlinsky, Svyatoslav Fyodorov, or Alexander Lebed. After securing the necessary one million signatures of nomination, he announced his candidacy in March. Launching his campaign, he traveled across Russia giving rallies in twenty cities. He repeatedly faced anti-Gorbachev protesters, while some pro-Yeltsin local officials tried to hamper his campaign by banning local media from covering it or by refusing him access to venues. In the election, Gorbachev came seventh with approximately 386,000 votes, or around 0.5% of the total. Yeltsin and Zyuganov went through to the second round, where the former was victorious. Promoting social democracy in Putin's Russia: 1999–2008 In December 1999, Yeltsin resigned and was succeeded by his deputy, Vladimir Putin, who then won the March 2000 presidential election. Gorbachev attended Putin's inauguration ceremony in May, the first time he had entered the Kremlin since 1991. Gorbachev initially welcomed Putin's rise, seeing him as an anti-Yeltsin figure. Although he spoke out against some of the Putin government's actions, Gorbachev also had praise for the new government; in 2002, he said: "I've been in the same skin. That's what allows me to say that what [Putin] has done is in the interest of the majority." At the time, he believed Putin to be a committed democrat who nevertheless had to use "a certain dose of authoritarianism" to stabilize the economy and rebuild the state after the Yeltsin era. At Putin's request, Gorbachev became co-chair of the "Petersburg Dialogue" project between high-ranking Russians and Germans. In 2000, Gorbachev helped form the Russian United Social Democratic Party. In June 2002 he participated in a meeting with Putin, who praised the venture, suggesting that a center-left party could be good for Russia and that he would be open to working with it. In 2003, Gorbachev's party merged with the Social Democratic Party to form the Social Democratic Party of Russia — which, however, faced much internal division and failed to gain traction with voters. Gorbachev resigned as party leader in May 2004 following a disagreement with the party's chairman over the direction taken in the 2003 election campaign. The party was later banned in 2007 by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation due to its failure to establish local offices with at least 500 members in the majority of Russian regions, which is required by Russian law for a political organization to be listed as a party. Later that year, Gorbachev founded a new movement, the Union of Social Democrats. Stating that it would not contest the forthcoming elections, Gorbachev declared: "We are fighting for power, but only for power over people's minds". Gorbachev was critical of U.S. hostility to Putin, arguing that the U.S. government "doesn't want Russia to rise" again as a global power and wants "to continue as the sole superpower in charge of the world". More broadly, Gorbachev was critical of U.S. policy following the Cold War, arguing that the West had attempted to "turn [Russia] into some kind of backwater". He rejected the idea – expressed by Bush – that the U.S. had "won" the Cold War, arguing that both sides had cooperated to end the conflict. He declared that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S., rather than cooperating with Russia, had conspired to build a "new empire headed by themselves". He was critical of how the U.S. had expanded NATO right up to Russia's borders despite their initial assurances that they would not do so, citing this as evidence that the U.S. government could not be trusted. He spoke out against the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia because it lacked UN backing, as well as the 2003 invasion of Iraq led by the U.S. In June 2004 Gorbachev nevertheless attended Reagan's state funeral, and in 2007 visited New Orleans to see the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina. Growing criticism of Putin and foreign policy remarks: since 2008 Barred by the constitution from serving more than two consecutive terms as president, Putin stood down in 2008 and was succeeded by his Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, who reached out to Gorbachev in ways that Putin had not. In September 2008, Gorbachev and business oligarch Alexander Lebedev announced they would form the Independent Democratic Party of Russia, and in May 2009 Gorbachev announced that the launch was imminent. After the outbreak of the 2008 South Ossetia war between Russia and South Ossetian separatists on one side and Georgia on the other, Gorbachev spoke out against U.S. support for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili and for moving to bring the Caucasus into the sphere of its national interest. Gorbachev nevertheless remained critical of Russia's government and criticized the 2011 parliamentary elections as being rigged in favor of the governing party, United Russia, and called for them to be re-held. After protests broke out in Moscow over the election, Gorbachev praised the protesters. In 2009, Gorbachev released Songs for Raisa, an album of Russian romantic ballads, sung by him and accompanied by musician Andrei Makarevich, to raise money for a charity devoted to his late wife. That year he also met with U.S. President Barack Obama in efforts to "reset" strained U.S.-Russian relations, and attended an event in Berlin commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 2011, an eightieth birthday gala for him was held at London's Royal Albert Hall, featuring tributes from Simon Peres, Lech Wałęsa, Michel Rocard, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Proceeds from the event went to the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation. That year, Medvedev awarded him the Order of St Andrew the Apostle the First-Called. In 2012, Putin announced that he was standing again as president, something Gorbachev was critical of. He complained that Putin's new measures had "tightened the screws" on Russia and that the president was trying to "completely subordinate society", adding that United Russia now "embodied the worst bureaucratic features of the Soviet Communist party". Gorbachev was in increasingly poor health; in 2011, he had a spinal operation and, in 2014, oral surgery. In 2015, Gorbachev ceased his frequent international traveling. He continued to speak out on issues affecting Russia and the world. In 2014, he defended the Crimean status referendum that led to Russia's annexation of Crimea. He noted that while Crimea was transferred from Russia to Ukraine in 1954, when both were part of the Soviet Union, the Crimean people had not been asked at the time, whereas in the 2014 referendum they had. After sanctions were placed on Russia as a result of the annexation, Gorbachev spoke out against them. His comments led to Ukraine banning him from entering the country for five years. At a November 2014 event marking 25 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev warned that the ongoing war in Donbas had brought the world to the brink of a new cold war, and he accused Western powers, particularly the U.S., of adopting an attitude of "triumphalism" towards Russia. In July 2016, Gorbachev criticized NATO for deploying more troops to Eastern Europe amid escalating tensions between the military alliance and Russia. In June 2018, he welcomed the 2018 Russia–United States summit between Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump, although in October criticized Trump's threat to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, saying the move "is not the work of a great mind." He added: "all agreements aimed at nuclear disarmament and the limitation of nuclear weapons must be preserved, for the sake of life on Earth." After the 2021 United States Capitol attack, Gorbachev declared: "The storming of the capitol was clearly planned in advance, and it's obvious by whom." He did not clarify to whom he was referring. Gorbachev also said that the attack "called into question the future fate of the United States as a nation". In an interview with Russian news agency TASS on 20 January 2021, Gorbachev said that relations between the United States and Russia are of "great concern", and called on U.S. President Joe Biden to begin talks with the Kremlin in order to make the two countries' "intentions and actions clearer" and "in order to normalize relations." On 24 December 2021, Gorbachev said that the United States "grew arrogant and self-confident" after the collapse of the Soviet Union, resulting in "a new empire. Hence the idea of NATO expansion". He also endorsed the upcoming security talks between the United States and Russia, saying "I hope there will be a result". Political ideology According to his university friend Zdeněk Mlynář, in the early 1950s "Gorbachev, like everyone else at the time, was a Stalinist." Mlynář noted, however, that unlike most other Soviet students, Gorbachev did not view Marxism simply as "a collection of axioms to be committed to memory." Biographers Doder and Branson related that after Stalin's death, Gorbachev's "ideology would never be doctrinal again", but noted that he remained "a true believer" in the Soviet system. Doder and Branson noted that at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in 1986, Gorbachev was seen to be an orthodox Marxist–Leninist; that year, the biographer Zhores Medvedev stated that "Gorbachev is neither a liberal nor a bold reformist". By the mid-1980s, when Gorbachev took power, many analysts were arguing that the Soviet Union was declining to the status of a Third World country. In this context, Gorbachev argued that the Communist Party had to adapt and engage in creative thinking much as Lenin had creatively interpreted and adapted the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to the situation of early 20th century Russia. For instance, he thought that rhetoric about global revolution and overthrowing the bourgeoisie—which had been integral to Leninist politics—had become too dangerous in an era where nuclear warfare could obliterate humanity. He began to move away from the Marxist–Leninist belief in class struggle as the engine of political change, instead viewing politics as a ways of co-ordinating the interests of all classes. However, as Gooding noted, the changes that Gorbachev proposed were "expressed wholly within the terms of Marxist-Leninist ideology". According to Doder and Branson, Gorbachev also wanted to "dismantle the hierarchical military society at home and abandon the grand-style, costly, imperialism abroad". However, Jonathan Steele argued that Gorbachev failed to appreciate why the Baltic nations wanted independence and "at heart he was, and remains, a Russian imperialist." Gooding thought that Gorbachev was "committed to democracy", something marking him out as different from his predecessors. Gooding also suggested that when in power, Gorbachev came to see socialism not as a place on the path to communism, but a destination in itself. Gorbachev's political outlook was shaped by the 23 years he served as a party official in Stavropol. Doder and Branson thought that throughout most of his political career prior to becoming General Secretary, "his publicly expressed views almost certainly reflected a politician's understanding of what should be said, rather than his personal philosophy. Otherwise he could not have survived politically." Like many Russians, Gorbachev sometimes thought of the Soviet Union as being largely synonymous with Russia and in various speeches described it as "Russia"; in one incident he had to correct himself after calling the USSR "Russia" while giving a speech in Kyiv, Ukraine. McCauley noted that perestroika was "an elusive concept", one which "evolved and eventually meant something radically different over time." McCauley stated that the concept originally referred to "radical reform of the economic and political system" as part of Gorbachev's attempt to motivate the labor force and make management more effective. It was only after initial measures to achieve this proved unsuccessful that Gorbachev began to consider market mechanisms and co-operatives, albeit with the state sector remaining dominant. The political scientist John Gooding suggested that had the perestroika reforms succeeded, the Soviet Union would have "exchanged totalitarian controls for milder authoritarian ones" although not become "democratic in the Western sense". With perestroika, Gorbachev had wanted to improve the existing Marxist–Leninist system but ultimately ended up destroying it. In this, he brought an end to state socialism in the Soviet Union and paved the way for a transition to liberal democracy. Taubman nevertheless thought Gorbachev remained a socialist. He described Gorbachev as "a true believer—not in the Soviet system as it functioned (or didn't) in 1985 but in its potential to live up to what he deemed its original ideals." He added that "until the end, Gorbachev reiterated his belief in socialism, insisting that it wasn't worthy of the name unless it was truly democratic." As Soviet leader, Gorbachev believed in incremental reform rather than a radical transformation; he later referred to this as a "revolution by evolutionary means". Doder and Branson noted that over the course of the 1980s, his thought underwent a "radical evolution". Taubman noted that by 1989 or 1990, Gorbachev had transformed into a social democrat. McCauley suggested that by at least June 1991 Gorbachev was a "post-Leninist", having "liberated himself" from Marxism–Leninism. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly formed Communist Party of the Russian Federation would have nothing to do with him. However, in 2006, he expressed his continued belief in Lenin's ideas: "I trusted him then and I still do". He claimed that "the essence of Lenin" was a desire to develop "the living creative activity of the masses". Taubman believed that Gorbachev identified with Lenin on a psychological level. Personal life Reaching an adult height of , Gorbachev has a distinctive port-wine stain on the top of his head. By 1955 his hair was thinning, and by the late 1960s he was bald. Throughout the 1960s he struggled against obesity and dieted to control the problem; Doder and Branson characterized him as "stocky but not fat". He speaks in a southern Russian accent, and is known to sing both folk and pop songs. Throughout his life, he tried to dress fashionably. Having an aversion to hard liquor, he drank sparingly and did not smoke. He was protective of his private life and avoided inviting people to his home. Gorbachev cherished his wife, who in turn was protective of him. He was an involved parent and grandparent. He sent his daughter, his only child, to a local school in Stavropol rather than to a school set aside for the children of party elites. Unlike many of his contemporaries in the Soviet administration, he was not a womanizer and was known for treating women respectfully. Gorbachev was baptized Russian Orthodox and when he was growing up, his grandparents had been practising Christians. In 2008, there was some press speculation that he was a practising Christian after he visited the tomb of St Francis of Assisi, to which he publicly clarified that he was an atheist. Since studying at university, Gorbachev considered himself an intellectual; Doder and Branson thought that "his intellectualism was slightly self-conscious", noting that unlike most Russian intelligentsia, Gorbachev was not closely connected "to the world of science, culture, the arts, or education". When living in Stavropol he and his wife collected hundreds of books. Among his favorite authors were Arthur Miller, Dostoevsky, and Chinghiz Aitmatov, while he also enjoyed reading detective fiction. He enjoyed going for walks, having a love of natural environments, and was also a fan of association football. He favored small gatherings where the assembled discussed topics like art and philosophy rather than the large, alcohol-fueled parties common among Soviet officials. Personality Gorbachev's university friend, Mlynář, described him as "loyal and personally honest". He was self-confident, polite, and tactful; he had a happy and optimistic temperament. He used self-deprecating humour, and sometimes profanities, and often referred to himself in the third person. He was a skilled manager, and had a good memory. A hard worker or workaholic, as General Secretary, he would rise at 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning and not go to bed until 1:00 or 2:00. Taubman called him "a remarkably decent man"; he thought Gorbachev to have "high moral standards". Zhores Medvedev thought him a talented orator, in 1986 stating that "Gorbachev is probably the best speaker there has been in the top Party echelons" since Leon Trotsky. Medvedev also considered Gorbachev "a charismatic leader", something Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko had not been. Doder and Branson called him "a charmer capable of intellectually seducing doubters, always trying to co-opt them, or at least blunt the edge of their criticism". McCauley thought Gorbachev displayed "great tactical skill" in maneuvering successfully between hardline Marxist–Leninists and liberalisers for most of his time as leader, adding, though, that he was "much more skilled at tactical, short-term policy than strategic, long-term thinking", in part because he was "given to making policy on the hoof". Doder and Branson thought Gorbachev "a Russian to the core, intensely patriotic as only people living in the border regions can be." Taubman also noted that the former Soviet leader has a "sense of self-importance and self-righteousness" as well as a "need for attention and admiration" which grated on some of his colleagues. He was sensitive to personal criticism and easily took offense. Colleagues were often frustrated that he would leave tasks unfinished, and sometimes also felt underappreciated and discarded by him. Biographers Doder and Branson thought that Gorbachev was "a puritan" with "a proclivity for order in his personal life". Taubman noted that he was "capable of blowing up for calculated effect". He also thought that by 1990, when his domestic popularity was waning, Gorbachev become "psychologically dependent on being lionized abroad", a trait for which he was criticized in the Soviet Union. McCauley was of the view that "one of his weaknesses was an inability to foresee the consequences of his actions". Reception and legacy Opinions on Gorbachev are deeply divided. According to a 2017 survey carried out by the independent institute Levada Center, 46% of Russian citizens have a negative opinion towards Gorbachev, 30% are indifferent, while only 15% have a positive opinion. Many, particularly in Western countries, see him as the greatest statesman of the second half of the 20th century. U.S. press referred to the presence of "Gorbymania" in Western countries during the late 1980s and early 1990s, as represented by large crowds that turned out to greet his visits, with Time magazine naming him its "Man of the Decade" in the 1980s. In the Soviet Union itself, opinion polls indicated that Gorbachev was the most popular politician from 1985 through to late 1989. For his domestic supporters, Gorbachev was seen as a reformer trying to modernise the Soviet Union, and to build a form of democratic socialism. Taubman characterized Gorbachev as "a visionary who changed his country and the world—though neither as much as he wished." Taubman regarded Gorbachev as being "exceptional... as a Russian ruler and a world statesman", highlighting that he avoided the "traditional, authoritarian, anti-Western norm" of both predecessors like Brezhnev and successors like Putin. McCauley thought that in allowing the Soviet Union to move away from Marxism–Leninism, Gorbachev gave the Soviet people "something precious, the right to think and manage their lives for themselves", with all the uncertainty and risk that that entailed. Gorbachev's negotiations with the U.S. helped bring an end to the Cold War and reduced the threat of nuclear conflict. His decision to allow the Eastern Bloc to break apart prevented significant bloodshed in Central and Eastern Europe; as Taubman noted, this meant that the "Soviet Empire" ended in a far more peaceful manner than the British Empire several decades before. Similarly, under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union broke apart without falling into civil war, as happened during the breakup of Yugoslavia at the same time. McCauley noted that in facilitating the merger of East and West Germany, Gorbachev was "a co-father of German unification", assuring him long-term popularity among the German people. He also faced domestic criticism during his rule. During his career, Gorbachev attracted the admiration of some colleagues, but others came to hate him. Across society more broadly, his inability to reverse the decline in the Soviet economy brought discontent. Liberals thought he lacked the radicalism to really break from Marxism–Leninism and establish a free market liberal democracy. Conversely, many of his Communist Party critics thought his reforms were reckless and threatened the survival of Soviet socialism; some believed he should have followed the example of China's Communist Party and restricted himself to economic rather than governmental reforms. Many Russians saw his emphasis on persuasion rather than force as a sign of weakness. For much of the Communist Party nomenklatura, the Soviet Union's dissolution was disastrous as it resulted in their loss of power. In Russia, he is widely despised for his role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing economic collapse. General Varennikov, one of those who orchestrated the 1991 coup attempt against Gorbachev, for instance called him "a renegade and traitor to your own people". Many of his critics attacked him for allowing the Marxist–Leninist governments across Eastern Europe to fall, and for allowing a reunited Germany to join NATO, something they deem to be contrary to Russia's national interest. The historian Mark Galeotti stressed the connection between Gorbachev and his predecessor, Andropov. In Galeotti's view, Andropov was "the godfather of the Gorbachev revolution", because—as a former head of the KGB—he was able to put forward the case for reform without having his loyalty to the Soviet cause questioned, an approach that Gorbachev was able to build on and follow through with. According to McCauley, Gorbachev "set reforms in motion without understanding where they could lead. Never in his worst nightmare could he have imagined that perestroika would lead to the destruction of the Soviet Union". Orders, decorations, and honors In 1988, India awarded Gorbachev the Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development; in 1990, he was given the Nobel Peace Prize for "his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community". Out of office he continued to receive honors. In 1992, he was the first recipient of the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award, and in 1994 was given the Grawemeyer Award by the University of Louisville, Kentucky. In 1995, he was awarded the Grand-Cross of the Order of Liberty by Portuguese President Mário Soares, and in 1998 the Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. In 2000, he was presented with the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement at an awards ceremony at Hampton Court Palace near London. In 2002, Gorbachev received the Freedom of the City of Dublin from Dublin City Council. In 2002, Gorbachev was awarded the Charles V Prize by the European Academy of Yuste Foundation. Gorbachev, together with Bill Clinton and Sophia Loren, were awarded the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children for their recording of Sergei Prokofiev's 1936 Peter and the Wolf for Pentatone. In 2005, Gorbachev was awarded the Point Alpha Prize for his role in supporting German |
children were found alive. Josephus presumably based his narration upon the field commentaries of the Roman commanders that were accessible to him. There are discrepancies between archaeological findings and Josephus' writings. Josephus mentions only one of the two palaces that have been excavated, refers only to one fire, though many buildings show fire damage, and claims that 960 people were killed, though the remains of at most 28 bodies have been found. Some of the other details that Josephus gives, were correct – for instance, he describes the baths that were built there, the fact that the floors in some of the buildings ‘were paved with stones of several colours’, and that many pits were cut into the living rock to serve as cisterns. Josephus must be referring to the sort of mosaics that Yadin found still partially intact on some of the floors. Byzantine monastery of Marda Masada was last occupied during the Byzantine period, when a small church was established at the site. The church was part of a monastic settlement identified with the monastery of Marda known from hagiographical literature. This identification is generally accepted by researchers. The Aramaic common noun marda, "fortress", corresponds in meaning to the Greek name of another desert monastery of the time, Kastellion, and is used to describe that site in the vita (biography) of St Sabbas, but it is used as a proper name only for the monastery at Masada, as can be seen from the vita of St Euthymius. Archaeology Chalcolithic period An almost inaccessible cave, dubbed Yoram Cave, located on the sheer southern cliff face 100 m below the plateau, has been found to contain numerous plant remains, of which 6,000-year-old barley seeds were in such good state of preservation that their genome could be sequenced. This is the first time that this succeeded with a Chalcolithic plant genome, which is also the oldest one sequenced so far. The result helped determine that the earliest domestication of barley, dated elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent to 10,000 years ago, happened further north up the Jordan Rift Valley, namely in the Upper Jordan Valley in northern Israel. The Yoram Cave seeds were found to be fairly different from the wild variety, proof for an already advanced process of domestication, but very similar to the types of barley still cultivated in the region – an indication for remarkable constancy. Considering the difficulty in reaching the cave, whose mouth opens some 4 m above the exposed access path, the researchers have speculated that it was a place of short-term refuge for Chalcolithic people fleeing an unknown catastrophe. Identification and initial digs The site of Masada was identified in 1838 by Americans Edward Robinson and Eli Smith, and in 1842, American missionary Samuel W. Wolcott and the English painter W. Tipping were the first moderns to climb it. After visiting the site several times in the 1930s and 1940s, Shmarya Guttman conducted an initial probe excavation of the site in 1959. Yigael Yadin expedition Masada was extensively excavated between 1963 and 1965 by an expedition led by Israeli archaeologist and former military Chief-of-Staff Yigael Yadin. Due to the remoteness from human habitation and its arid environment, the site remained largely untouched by humans or nature for two millennia. Many of the ancient buildings have been restored from their remains, as have the wall paintings of Herod's two main palaces, and the Roman-style bathhouses that he built. The synagogue, storehouses, and houses of the Jewish rebels have also been identified and restored. Water cisterns two-thirds of the way up the cliff drain the nearby wadis by an elaborate system of channels, which explains how the rebels managed to conserve enough water for such a long time. The Roman attack ramp still stands on the western side and can be climbed on foot. The meter-high circumvallation wall that the Romans built around Masada can be seen, together with eight Roman siege camps just outside this wall. The Roman siege installations as a whole, especially the attack ramp, are the best preserved of their kind, and the reason for declaring Masada a UNESCO World Heritage site. Epigraphic findings Inside the synagogue, an ostracon bearing the inscription me'aser cohen (, tithe for the priest) was found, as were fragments of two scrolls: parts of Deuteronomy and of the Book of Ezekiel including the vision of the "dry bones" ( and ), found hidden in pits dug under the floor of a small room built inside the synagogue. In other loci, fragments were found of the books of Genesis, Leviticus, Psalms, and Sirach, as well as of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. In the area in front of the Northern Palace, 11 small ostraca were recovered, each bearing a single name. One reads "ben Ya'ir" () and could be short for Eleazar ben Ya'ir, the commander of the fortress. The other 10 names may be those of the men chosen by lot to kill the others and then themselves, as recounted by Josephus. Human remains The remains of a maximum of 28 people were unearthed at Masada, possibly 29 including a foetus. The skeletal remains of 25 individuals were found in a cave outside and below the southern wall. The remains of another two males and a female were found in the bathhouse of the Northern Palace. Of the bathhouse remains, the males were variously and unconvincingly assessed to have been of an age of either 40 and 20–22, or 22 and 11–12, but the dental remains of both seem to be between 16–18 of age; and the female was described as 17–18 years old. However, the skeletal remains of the males were incomplete, and only the hair (a full head of hair with braids) but no bones of the female were found. Forensic analysis showed the hair had been cut from the woman's head with a sharp instrument while she was still alive, a practice prescribed for captured women in the Bible () and the 2nd-century BCE Temple Scroll, while the braids indicate that she was married. Based on the evidence, anthropologist Joe Zias and forensic scientist Azriel Gorski believe the remains may have been Romans whom the rebels captured when they seized the garrison. As to the sparse remains of 24 people found in the southern cave at the base of the cliff, excavator Yigael Yadin was unsure of their ethnicity; however, the rabbinical establishment concluded that they were remains of the Jewish defenders, and in July 1969, they were reburied as Jews in a state ceremony. Carbon dating of textiles found with the remains in the cave indicate they are contemporaneous with the period of the revolt, and pig bones were also present (occasionally occurring for Roman burials due to pig sacrifices); this indicates that the remains may belong to non-Jewish Roman soldiers or civilians who occupied the site before or after the siege. Zias also questioned whether as many as 24 individuals were present, since only 4% of that number of bones was recovered. Roman-period palm seed A 2,000-year-old Judean date palm seed discovered during archaeological excavations in the early 1960s was successfully germinated into a date plant, popularly known as "Methuselah" after the longest-living figure in the Hebrew Bible. At the time, | Yoram Cave, located on the sheer southern cliff face 100 m below the plateau, has been found to contain numerous plant remains, of which 6,000-year-old barley seeds were in such good state of preservation that their genome could be sequenced. This is the first time that this succeeded with a Chalcolithic plant genome, which is also the oldest one sequenced so far. The result helped determine that the earliest domestication of barley, dated elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent to 10,000 years ago, happened further north up the Jordan Rift Valley, namely in the Upper Jordan Valley in northern Israel. The Yoram Cave seeds were found to be fairly different from the wild variety, proof for an already advanced process of domestication, but very similar to the types of barley still cultivated in the region – an indication for remarkable constancy. Considering the difficulty in reaching the cave, whose mouth opens some 4 m above the exposed access path, the researchers have speculated that it was a place of short-term refuge for Chalcolithic people fleeing an unknown catastrophe. Identification and initial digs The site of Masada was identified in 1838 by Americans Edward Robinson and Eli Smith, and in 1842, American missionary Samuel W. Wolcott and the English painter W. Tipping were the first moderns to climb it. After visiting the site several times in the 1930s and 1940s, Shmarya Guttman conducted an initial probe excavation of the site in 1959. Yigael Yadin expedition Masada was extensively excavated between 1963 and 1965 by an expedition led by Israeli archaeologist and former military Chief-of-Staff Yigael Yadin. Due to the remoteness from human habitation and its arid environment, the site remained largely untouched by humans or nature for two millennia. Many of the ancient buildings have been restored from their remains, as have the wall paintings of Herod's two main palaces, and the Roman-style bathhouses that he built. The synagogue, storehouses, and houses of the Jewish rebels have also been identified and restored. Water cisterns two-thirds of the way up the cliff drain the nearby wadis by an elaborate system of channels, which explains how the rebels managed to conserve enough water for such a long time. The Roman attack ramp still stands on the western side and can be climbed on foot. The meter-high circumvallation wall that the Romans built around Masada can be seen, together with eight Roman siege camps just outside this wall. The Roman siege installations as a whole, especially the attack ramp, are the best preserved of their kind, and the reason for declaring Masada a UNESCO World Heritage site. Epigraphic findings Inside the synagogue, an ostracon bearing the inscription me'aser cohen (, tithe for the priest) was found, as were fragments of two scrolls: parts of Deuteronomy and of the Book of Ezekiel including the vision of the "dry bones" ( and ), found hidden in pits dug under the floor of a small room built inside the synagogue. In other loci, fragments were found of the books of Genesis, Leviticus, Psalms, and Sirach, as well as of the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice. In the area in front of the Northern Palace, 11 small ostraca were recovered, each bearing a single name. One reads "ben Ya'ir" () and could be short for Eleazar ben Ya'ir, the commander of the fortress. The other 10 names may be those of the men chosen by lot to kill the others and then themselves, as recounted by Josephus. Human remains The remains of a maximum of 28 people were unearthed at Masada, possibly 29 including a foetus. The skeletal remains of 25 individuals were found in a cave outside and below the southern wall. The remains of another two males and a female were found in the bathhouse of the Northern Palace. Of the bathhouse remains, the males were variously and unconvincingly assessed to have been of an age of either 40 and 20–22, or 22 and 11–12, but the dental remains of both seem to be between 16–18 of age; and the female was described as 17–18 years old. However, the skeletal remains of the males were incomplete, and only the hair (a full head of hair with braids) but no bones of the female were found. Forensic analysis showed the hair had been cut from the woman's head with a sharp instrument while she was still alive, a practice prescribed for captured women in the Bible () and the 2nd-century BCE Temple Scroll, while the braids indicate that she was married. Based on the evidence, anthropologist Joe Zias and forensic scientist Azriel Gorski believe the remains may have been Romans whom the rebels captured when they seized the garrison. As to the sparse remains of 24 people found in the southern cave at the base of the cliff, excavator Yigael Yadin was unsure of their ethnicity; however, the rabbinical establishment concluded that they were remains of the Jewish defenders, and in July 1969, they were reburied as Jews in a state ceremony. Carbon dating of textiles found with the remains in the cave indicate they are contemporaneous with the period of the revolt, and pig bones were also present (occasionally occurring for Roman burials due to pig sacrifices); this indicates that the remains may belong to non-Jewish Roman soldiers or civilians who occupied the site before or after the siege. Zias also questioned whether as many as 24 individuals were present, since only 4% of that number of bones was recovered. Roman-period palm seed A 2,000-year-old Judean date palm seed discovered during archaeological excavations in the early 1960s was successfully germinated into a date plant, popularly known as "Methuselah" after the longest-living figure in the Hebrew Bible. At the time, it was the oldest known germination, remaining so until a new record was set in 2012. As of September 2016, it remains the oldest germination from a seed. Byzantine monastery The remnants of a Byzantine church dating from the fifth and sixth centuries have been excavated on the plateau. Archaeology vs. Josephus No Hasmonean buildings found Yadin's team could detect no architectural remains of the Hasmonean period, the only findings firmly dated to this period being the numerous coins of Alexander Jannaeus. Researchers have speculated |
may also be said concerning the DC Universe. This is one method of explaining the various crossover stories co-published by the two companies. Pop culture characters such as Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster exist in the Marvel Universe. This is usually justified as a second-hand account of events as told to credited authors Bram Stoker and Mary Shelley, although the general public continues to believe them to be fictional. Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, Kull the Conqueror, and Solomon Kane also have real-life existences in the Marvel Universe. The Hyborian Era of Conan and Kull is considered part of Earth-616 pre-recorded history. However, they rarely encounter modern Marvel superhero characters. This is most likely possible due to the uncertain legal status of Howard's works before 2006 when they became public domain. As of 2019, Conan the Barbarian, as well as Kull the Conqueror and Solomon Kane, have been firmly integrated, thanks to Marvel regaining the publishing rights to the characters. Other licensed works that have been incorporated into the Marvel Universe include Godzilla, the Transformers, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (in the character of Machine Man), Rom the Spaceknight, the Micronauts, and the Shogun Warriors. In most cases, such material is either restricted from use after the license expires or the characters redesigned or renamed to avoid copyright infringement. Costumed superheroes and supervillains Within the fictional history of the Marvel Universe, the tradition of using costumed secret identities to fight or commit evil had long existed, but it came into prominence during the days of the American "Wild West" with heroes such as Carter Slade/the Phantom Rider. During the 20th century, the tradition was reinvigorated by Steve Rogers/Captain America and the Invaders in the 1940s, who fought for the Allies of World War II. Unlike the DC Universe, few of Marvel's Golden Age characters have risen to prominence in modern publications; Captain America is one exception, and to a lesser extent, his contemporary, Namor the Sub-Mariner, primarily because both of these characters were reintroduced to readers and the Marvel Universe during the 1960s. Marvel's most prominent heroes were created during the Silver Age of Comic Books in the 1960s to early 1970s, including Peter Parker/Spider-Man, Tony Stark/Iron Man, Thor, Bruce Banner/the Hulk, Stephen Strange/Doctor Strange, Matt Murdock/Daredevil, Ant-Man and the Wasp (Hank Pym and Janet van Dyne), Natasha Romanoff/the Black Widow, Clint Barton/Hawkeye, Pietro Maxmioff/Quicksilver, Wanda Maximoff/the Scarlet Witch, the Vision, Simon Williams/Wonder Man, Hercules, Kevin Plunder/Ka-Zar, Groot, Nick Fury, T'Challa/the Black Panther, Mar-Vell (the first Captain Marvel), Carol Danvers (also known as the first Ms. Marvel, Binary, Warbird, and the current Captain Marvel), Sam Wilson/the Falcon, Dane Whitman/the Black Knight, Norrin Radd/the Silver Surfer, Jane Foster (also known as the second Thor), Warren Worthington III/the Angel-Archangel, Hank McCoy/the Beast, Scott Summers/Cyclops, Robert "Bobby" Drake/the Iceman, Jean Grey (also known as Marvel Girl and Phoenix), Charles Xavier/Professor X, Lorna Dane/Polaris, Alex Summers/Havok, Sean Cassidy/the Banshee, Reed Richards/Mister Fantastic, Susan Storm/the Invisible Woman, Johnny Storm/the Human Torch, Ben Grimm/the Thing, Brunnhilde/the Valkyrie, the Inhumans (composed of Blackagar Boltagon, Medusalith Amaquelin-Boltagon, Crystalia Amaquelin-Boltagon/Crystal, Gorgon, Karnak Mandel-Azur/Karnak the Shatterer, Triton and Lockjaw) and Alexi Shostakov/the Red Guardian. Other notable heroes from the Bronze Age and Modern Age from the early-to-mid 1970s to the early 1990s include James "Logan" Howlett/Wolverine, Ororo Munroe/Storm, Piotr "Peter" Rasputin/Colossus, Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler, Luke Cage (also known as Power-Man), Danny Rand/Iron Fist, Misty Knight, Colleen Wing, Barbara "Bobbi" Morse/Mockingbird, the White Tiger (Hector Ayala), Shang-Chi, Greer Grant Nelson/Tigra, Jessica Drew (also known as Spider-Woman), the Ghost Rider (Johnny Blaze), Daimon Hellstrom, Satana Hellstrom, Theodore "Ted" Sallis/the Man-Thing, Eric Brooks/Blade the Vampire-Slayer, Michael Morbius/Morbius the Living Vampire, Howard the Duck, Monica Rambeau (also known as Photon, Pulsar, Spectrum and the second Captain Marvel), Moondragon, Drax the Destroyer, Peter Quill/Star-Lord, Gamora, Rocket Raccoon, Frank Castle/the Punisher, Marc Spector/the Moon Knight, the Eternals (composed of Ikaris, Thena, Ajak, Makkari, Kingo, Phastos, Gilgamesh and Sprite), War Machine, Nova (Richard Rider), Adam Warlock, Power Pack, Betsy Braddock, Scott Lang (the second Ant-Man), Felicia Hardy/the Black Cat, Silver Sable, Katherine "Kitty" Pryde (also known as Shadowcat, Ariel, Sprite, Star-Lord and the Red Queen), Emma Frost (also known as the White Queen), Jennifer Walters/the She-Hulk, Tyrone Johnson/Cloak and Tandy Bowen/Dagger, Brian Braddock/Captain Britain, Doreen Green/Squirrel Girl, Elektra Natchios, the New Mutants (composed of Illyana Rasputin/Magik, Xi'an Coy Minh/Karma, Danielle Moonstar/Mirage, Sam Guthrie/Cannonball, Rahne Sinclair/Wolfsbane, Doug Ramsey/Cypher, Warlock and others), the New Warriors, David Haller/Legion, John Proudstar/Warpath-Thunderbird, Anna Marie LeBeau/Rogue and Jubilation Lee/Jubilee. Some of Marvel's more recent creations from the mid-to-late 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, such as Wade Wilson/Deadpool, Remy LeBeau/Gambit, Nathan Summers/Cable, Neena Thurman/Domino, Clarice Fong/Blink, the Thunderbolts, Yelena Belova (also known as the second Black Widow), the Runaways, the modern Guardians of the Galaxy, the modern Defenders (based on the Netflix MCU version of the same name), Laura Kinney/X-23 (a.k.a. the second Wolverine), Shuri, the Dora Milaje, Daisy Johnson (also known as Quake), Phil Coulson, Melinda May, Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier, Maria Hill, Miles Morales (the second Spider-Man of the Ultimate Marvel Universe), Hope van Dyne (also known as the Red Queen and the second Wasp), Cassandra Lang (also known as Stature, Stinger, Ant-Girl and Giant-Girl), the Stepford Cuckoos, Amadeus Cho (also known as the second Hulk), Kamala Khan (also known as the second Ms. Marvel), Kate Bishop (also known as the third Hawkeye), Lunaella Lafayette/Moon Girl, America Chavez (also known as the second Miss America), Robbie Reyes (also known as the fourth Ghost Rider), Riri Williams/Ironheart and Spider-Gwen (Gwen Stacy of Earth-65) have become popular characters in their own right. Prominent teams of superheroes include the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Defenders, the Inhumans, S.H.I.E.L.D., the Howling Commandos, the Guardians of the Galaxy, the Runaways, the Midnight Sons and the Thunderbolts. All these groups have varying lineups; the Avengers have included Marvel's major heroes as members at one time or another. The X-Men are a team of mutants led by Professor X and include many of Marvel's most popular characters, such as Wolverine and others. The Fantastic Four are viewed as "Marvel's First Family" of superheroes, usually consisting of Mister Fantastic, the Invisible Woman, the Human Torch and the Thing, as well as siblings Franklin and Valeria Richards. The Defenders were an ad hoc team usually brought together by Doctor Strange which has included the Hulk, Namor the Sub-Mariner and the Silver Surfer, while the most recent incarnation of the team consists of street-level New York City heroes Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Iron Fist. The Guardians of the Galaxy include Marvel's cosmic characters such as Adam Warlock, Star-Lord, Gamora, Drax the Destroyer, Rocket Raccoon and Groot, but the team has also introduced other heroes into the roster such as Kitty Pryde, the Silver Surfer, the Thing and Nova. The Inhumans are a royal family consisting of Black Bolt, Medusa, Crystal, Gorgon, Triton, Karnak and Lockjaw, who rule the city of Attilan. The Runaways are a group of teenagers and a dinosaur consisting of Alex Wilder, Nico Minoru, Karolina Dean, Chase Stein, Molly Hayes, Gert Yorkes and Old Lace who rebel against their evil parents known as the Pride. The Midnight Sons consist of supernatural heroes such as Blade, Ghost Rider, Moon Knight, Elsa Bloodstone, Hellstrom, the Werewolf and the Man-Thing. The Thunderbolts' original incarnation were supervillains disguised as superheroes consisting of Citizen V (a.k.a. Helmut Zemo), MACH-IV (a.k.a. the Beetle), Songbird (a.k.a. Screaming Mimi), Moonstone (a.k.a. Meteorite), Techno/the Ogre (a.k.a. the Fixer) and Jolt, while the current incarnation of the team is made up of reformed supervillains/anti-heroes working for the government: Deadpool, the Punisher, the Red Hulk, the Winter Soldier and the Ghost. Although teams of supervillains are few and far between, notable examples include the Masters of Evil, the Emissaries of Evil, the Brotherhood of Mutants, the Sinister Six, the Frightful Four, the Lethal Legion, the Legion of the Unliving, the Black Order, the Annihilation Wave, and the Cabal. Origin of superhuman powers Most of the superhumans in Marvel's Earth owe their powers to the Celestials, cosmic entities who visited Earth millions of years ago and experimented on our prehistoric ancestors (a process they also carried out on several other planets). This resulted in the creation of two hidden races, the godlike Eternals and the genetically unstable Deviants, in addition to giving some humans an "x-factor" in their genes, which sometimes activates naturally, resulting in sometimes superpowered, sometimes disfigured individuals called mutants. Others require other factors (such as radiation) for their powers to come forth. Depending on the genetic profile, individuals who are exposed to different chemicals or radiation will often suffer death or injury, while in others it will cause superhuman abilities to manifest. Except for psionic abilities, these powers are usually random; rarely do two people have the same set of powers. It is not clear why the Celestials did this, although it is known that they continue to observe humanity's evolution. A Marvel series titled Earth X explored one possible reason for this: that superhumans are meant to protect a Celestial embryo that grows inside Earth against any planetary threats and have done so for eons. An X-Men villain that is known as Vargas claims to be a new direction in human evolution, as he is born with superpowers even though his genetic profile said he was an ordinary human being. The majority of the public is unaware of what may cause superhuman powers. Other possible origins for superhuman powers include magic, genetic manipulation and/or bionic implants. Some heroes and villains have no powers at all but depend instead on hand-to-hand combat training or advanced technological equipment. In the Marvel Universe, technology is considerably more advanced than in the real world; this is due to unique individuals of genius-level intelligence, such as Reed Richards (Mister Fantastic) of the Fantastic Four. However, most of the advanced devices (such as powered armor and death rays) are too expensive for the common citizen, and are usually in the hands of government organizations like S.H.I.E.L.D., or powerful criminal organizations like A.I.M. One major company producing these devices is Stark Industries, owned by Tony Stark (Iron Man), but there are others. Advanced technology has also been given to humans by hidden races, aliens, or time travelers like Kang the Conqueror, who is known to have influenced the robotics industry in the past. In superhumans, the energy required for their superpowers either comes from within using their own body as a source or, if the demand of energy exceeds what their body is capable to deliver, comes from another source. Marvel tries to explain most superpowers and their sources "scientifically", usually through the use of fictional science-like concepts, such as: Energy absorption (the battery effect); the cells in the body have the same function as batteries, being charged with energy that comes from an outer source. This is most often seen in gamma ray-exposed individuals such as the Hulk, who get their powers from this stored energy. The powers will remain as long as the energy is present, and can even be increased by filling the "batteries" even more. If the energy is emptied, the powers will fade away. The Power Primordial is a leftover force from Big Bang and is controlled by the Elders of the Universe. The Phoenix Force is a force of incredible power. It channels energy from life itself and has been shown to favor mutant telepaths like Jean Grey. Psionic energy, which is assumed to be an invisible, unknown form of energy generated by living brains that can manipulate other forms of matter and energy. Apparently, it creates the universal psionic field, which is present everywhere in the universe, but only those with abilities to connect to it can make use of its energy. The Enigma Force is suspected to be connected to the Microverse and is also the source of its counterpart on Earth the Uni-Power, which transforms an individual into Captain Universe. Extradimensional space: dimensions that can be tapped to pull mass from them (to add to objects on Earth) or taken away from those objects and be stored in those "pocket dimensions" to be retrieved later. This is how characters like the Hulk can grow and shrink with no visible absorption of mass. A type of subatomic particles called Pym particles can be used for these effects (Note: many giant-sized characters have a limited ability to manipulate gravity to handle their increased weight). The change in mass can be in the form of a density change instead, allowing a character to become | Earth has interacted with many of them because a major "hyperspace warp" happens to exist in the Solar System. The three major space empires are: the Kree, who rule the Kree Empire (in the Greater Magellanic Cloud) the Skrulls, who rule the Skrull Empire (in the Andromeda Galaxy) the Shi'ar, who rule the Shi'ar Empire (no known real-world counterpart for its galaxy, but it might be in the Triangulum Galaxy) The three are often in direct or indirect conflict, which occasionally involves Earth humans; in particular, the Kree and Skrulls are ancient enemies, and the Kree-Skrull War has involved humans on several occasions. The Skrulls have also been known to be in a long and consistent war against the Majesdanians, who live on a milky planet named Majesdane. The war between the two had started after two Majesdanians, Frank and Leslie Dean of the Pride had been kicked out for criminal activities; the two traveled to Earth, where Frank and Leslie stopped the war against Earth in exchange for giving the Skrulls the location of Majesdane, which was hidden behind the corona of a white dwarf. The war had gone on for 16 years minimum; it ended abruptly after the Skrulls shot a barrage of missiles at Majesdane, who retaliated. Another prominent alien race is the Watchers, immortal and wise beings who watch over the Marvel Universe and have taken a sacred vow not to intervene in events, though the Watcher assigned to Earth, Uatu, has violated this oath on several occasions. The Elders of the Universe are ancient aliens who have often had a great impact on many worlds for billions of years, acting alone or as a group. A power called the Power Primordial is channeled through them. Many other races exist and have formed an "Intergalactic Council" to have their say on matters that affect them all, such as interference from Earth humans in their affairs. Supernatural creatures Also abundant in the Marvel Universe are legendary creatures such as gods, demons and vampires. The 'gods' of most polytheistic pantheons are powerful, immortal human-like races residing in other dimensions who visited Earth in ancient times, and became the basis of many legends. However, all of these 'gods' share a common ancestry and connection to Earth due to Gaea, the primeval Elder Goddess that infused her life essence into all living things on Earth. Gaea is known by various names and appearances in other cultures and among the various pantheons, but she is the same being. As a result, she is a member of every polytheistic pantheon of 'gods' worshiped by humans. Besides mythological gods, many deities made up by Marvel writers exist as well, such as the Dark Gods, enemies of the Asgardians. The Dark Gods are a race of 'gods' that have been worshiped by extraterrestrial races. Well-known alien races like the Shi'ar and Skrulls also have beings they worship as 'gods', though little has been revealed about them. Many persons and beings have falsely pretended to be gods or demons during history; in particular, none of the ones claiming to be major figures from Judeo-Christian beliefs have turned out to be the real article, although several angels have appeared in recent years, as well as an apparent true rebellion and expulsion of angels from a higher realm known as Paradise, proving that some form of Heaven and Hell do exist in this Universe, seemingly like those in keeping with common real-world religious belief. Similarly, demons are evil magical beings who take affairs in the matters of the universe. Some of the most powerful are Blackheart, Mephisto, Nightmare, Satannish, Thog the Nether-Spawn and Zom. There are also powerful benevolent mystical entities such as the Vishanti; or amoral and malevolent entities who are not truly demonic, such as Dormammu and the Octessence, or ones heavily drawing upon the mythologies of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. Some supernatural beings, entities and human characters created by Lovecraft and Howard, who were friends and influenced each other's work, have been adapted by Marvel and include Abdul Alhazred, Conan the Barbarian Nyarlathotep and Set. Some deities or demonic beings that are original characters of Marvel have been heavily influenced by these mythologies, such as Shuma-Gorath. Most of the current generation of gods have been revealed to be the descendants of the Elder Goddess Gaea. The two most featured pantheons are the Asgardians (of whom Thor is a member) and the Olympians (of whom Hercules is a member). The lords of the various pantheons sometimes gather in groups known as either the Council of Godheads or the Council of Skyfathers. The gods were forced to stop meddling with humanity (at least openly) a thousand years ago by the Celestials, and most people today believe them to be fictional. Other pantheons have been depicted in the Marvel Universe that is still actively worshiped in the real world, including those worshiped by the Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia, the gods of Hinduism, the Shinto gods and the gods of Zoroastrianism. These deities are rarely depicted, however. One such appearance generated a good deal of controversy as the depiction involved a fight between Marvel's incarnation of Thor and the Hindu god Shiva, a battle which Shiva lost. As Shiva is one of the principal deities of Hindu religion, his defeat offended some followers of Hinduism. This battle was retconned later as having been the deity Indra, the Hindu god of thunder, who was posing as Shiva, that met defeat. To avoid offending the believers of still active religions, Marvel features such deities as characters in the background or who make very brief cameo appearances. Marvel's depiction of vampires has been heavily influenced by various interpretations of popular media, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula. As with many other supernatural creatures, Marvel entwined the origin of vampires with aspects of the mythologies created by Lovecraft and Howard. They were created by magical rites performed by priests of Atlantis before the Great Cataclysm that destroyed much of the world, with Varnae becoming the first vampire. Marvel would depict vampires as frequent antagonists during the Hyborian Age to Howard characters such as Kull and Conan. In recent years, Marvel's depiction of vampires has altered greatly by creating various subspecies of vampires that exist in clans that greatly differ in appearance and belief. All vampires are depicted with varying degrees of superhuman strength, speed, stamina, agility, reflexes and accelerated healing. Many are capable of transforming into animals such as bats or wolves; some can transform into a mist-like substance; some of the most powerful are capable of controlling the weather to a somewhat limited degree. All vampires must ingest blood to maintain their survival and physical vitality. So long as they do so regularly, they cease to age and are immune to diseases. They retain the well-known vulnerabilities common to vampires in other media interpretations, including sunlight, garlic, religious icons and weapons made of silver. Vampires can be killed by a wooden stake driven through the heart, though they return to life if the stake is removed. Vampires are highly allergic to silver and can be killed with it. While they normally heal rapidly, injuries inflicted by silver weapons heal at a much slower rate if the injuries are not fatal. Vampires can also be killed by decapitation or being burned with fire, with burning them to ashes and then scattering the ashes being the most effective means of ensuring their demise (scattering the ashes is done so that the vampire cannot be mystically resurrected). Cosmic entities The cosmic entities are beings of unbelievably great levels of power (the weakest of whom can destroy entire planets) who exist to perform duties that maintain the existence of the universe. Most do not care at all about "lesser beings" such as humans, and as a consequence, their acts are recurrently dangerous to mortals. When dire threats threaten the universe, it is not uncommon for these beings to gather together to discuss the threat and even act on it. Most conceptual entities are simply interested in furthering their essential function or to keep the balance with an opposing force. However, certain cosmic entities, such as Galactus, the In-Betweener, the Maelstrom, or the Stranger have demonstrated personality, motivations, or (except for the first one mentioned) even ambitions beyond their functions, but often maintain the perspective that morality is entirely relative, or that destroying civilizations of "lesser" beings is no eviler than if these beings destroyed an anthill. Others such as Uatu the Watcher, Eon, or the Celestials, Ashema and Tiamut are aberrations in the sense of sympathizing with, and occasionally coming to the defense of, humanity. The Phoenix Force first received personification in Jean Grey. The Phoenix Force is composed of the psionic energy from all living beings' past, present, and future, and is an embodiment of rebirth and destructive transformation through "burning away what doesn't work", and helped to restart the universe before the Big Bang. 'The "Fulcrum" is a comparatively recent addition to the hierarchy, that "all" cosmic entities allegedly serve, of a level of raw power stated to far surpass the might of the Watchers and the Celestials. Unlike most other entities, it is capable of conscience, compassion, and even a sense of humor, and has stated that it wants other cosmic beings to develop such as well. He is a possible manifestation/avatar of the One-Above-All. The mentioned One-Above-All is believed to be the supreme, omnipotent being, who solely created the Marvel Multiverse, and possibly acted beyond. He also brought to life the Living Tribunal, an extremely powerful cosmic entity, who serves to maintain balance within the Multiverse. Cosmology The Marvel Universe is part of a Multiverse, with various universes coexisting simultaneously, usually without affecting each other directly. At the beginning there was only one universe, The First Firmament, but due to actions of Celestials existing there, it diverged. Then, the Multiverse went through several incarnations and eventually the Big Bang caused the existence of the Seventh Cosmos, where most well-known heroes originated. The seventh iteration of the Multiverse was destroyed as a consequence of the phenomena known as incursions and was eventually reborn as the eighth thanks to Reed Richards. According to him the ultimate fate of the Multiverse is to perish in all-encompassing heat death. Even the Marvel Multiverse, however, is only a part of the Omniverse, which consists of all of fiction and reality combined, including all the works that are outside of Marvel's copyright restrictions. As such, there can logically only be one Omniverse, as anything and everything that currently exists, existed in the past, can potentially exist at any time or may exist in the future is a part of it. Universes/Earths/continuities The action of most of the Marvel Comics titles takes place in a continuity known as Earth-616. This continuity exists in a multiverse alongside trillions of alternative continuities. Alternative continuities in the Marvel Multiverse are generally defined in terms of their differences from Earth-616. Continuities besides Earth-616 include the following (for a complete listing see Multiverse (Marvel Comics)): In addition, multiple continuities are visited in the comic book series What If, What The--?! (formerly Not Brand Echh) and Exiles. The concept of continuity is not the same as a "dimension" or a "universe"; for example, characters like Mephisto and Dormammu hail from parallel dimensions and Galactus from the universe that existed before the Big Bang which began the current universe, but they all nevertheless belong to the Earth-616 continuity (where all the parallel dimensions and alternate universes seem to be connected to the same main timeline). A continuity should also not be confused with an imprint; for example, while the titles of some imprints, such as Ultimate Marvel, take place in a different continuity, some or all publications in other imprints, such as Epic Comics, Marvel MAX, and Marvel UK, take place within the Earth-616 continuity. Dimensions Within and sometimes between continuities, there exist a variety of dimensions, sometimes called pocket dimensions, which typically are not depicted as separate continuities, but rather part of one, typically Earth-616. There is a score of such dimensions, ranging from the Earth-like to the alien. Some are magical and others are scientific; some are inhabited and others are not. These include realities like the Microverse, the Darkforce Dimension, Limbo, the Mojoverse, and many more. The Astral Plane is a dimensional plane that is the source of telekinesis and various other psychic powers. It is a dimension created by the Elder Goddess Oshtur that is sometimes referred to as the "Temple of Oshtur" or the "Realm of the Mind". Despite various contradictions, the term dimension is sometimes interchangeable with universe or reality. Every reality of the Marvel Universe has numerous interconnected dimensions, with each dimension differing from those of other realities; for example, the Ultimate Asgard has clearly been shown to be distinct from the Asgard known to Earth-616 characters. Some so-called dimensions, unlike Asgard or the Dark Dimension, are not "pocket dimensions" as they reside completely outside the boundaries of a specific reality instead of within, technically as a completely separate one. Time One cannot normally alter the Marvel Universe's history; if a time-traveler should cause an alteration to the established flow of events at some point in the past, a divergent universe will simply "branch out" from the existing timeline, and the time-traveler will still return to his or her unaltered original universe. Those realities can also spawn realities of their own. There exist hundreds, probably thousands of such realities. It is unknown why this happens, though a warp known as the Nexus of All Realities exists in a swamp in the Florida Everglades of Earth-616. For the most part, this does not matter, as most beings are unaware that this occurs, or even that their universes were recently "born" from another. However, individuals and organizations exist that try to monitor or manipulate the various realities. These include Immortus, the Captain Britain Corps, the Time Variance Authority, the Timebreakers/Exiles, and Kang the Conqueror's forces. It is possible to travel through time without creating a new alternative universe, instead of altering events in the future, but this seems to have devastating and very far-reaching repercussions, as depicted in Marvel 1602 (it almost destroyed the whole multiverse, including the afterlife). Also, time itself passes much differently within the confines of the Marvel Universe than it does in the real world. Despite various characters having appeared within company publications for decades, few, if any, have aged to any appreciable degree. For example, the patriotic hero Captain America was created in 1941 but stopped appearing in titles soon after the end of World War II. The character was revived more than 20 years later, explained as having been frozen in a block of ice though believed to be dead, to lead Marvel's latest team of superheroes the Avengers. This first Avengers team featured several characters that would go on to be some of the company's most famous and most popular. Although the characters would be portrayed in hundreds and even thousands of adventures over the decades, they have been portrayed as having aged little or not at all. Naturally, this tendency is purely due to story conveniences (or a somewhat haphazardly shifting patchwork pattern of authors), and mainly that the fictional "continuity" has been maintained and expanded far beyond what Stan Lee and others originally planned or hoped for. Hence, the passing of time was more discernible in the very early years, such as the graduation of Spider-Man; and what started as children or teenaged characters, such as Kitty Pryde, Franklin Richards, Valeria Richards, Power Pack, or the New Mutants are all allowed to age at wildly shifting rates (in the second case even backward at times), whereas surrounding characters somewhat dependent on a certain age limit do not change at all. This recurrently creates inherently contradictory effects, as events are routinely described to have happened several years ago, even in cases when this would mean that some of the involved characters would have been toddlers. Different approaches also exist regarding allowing "second-generation" descendants of heroes or villains, full-grown over 18 years after an event (for example, Hulkling, other members of the Young Avengers, the Runaways, and the Secret Warriors), whereas other books, such as Young Allies use the inherent contradiction to debunk similar claims. If a past storyline wherein a direct depiction of a then-current president or similar is referred to in |
shot him through his cheek and then forced him to help them find more hostages. Leading the intruders past Apartment 2, Weinberg lied by telling them that the residents of the apartment were not Israelis. Instead, Weinberg led them to Apartment 3, where the gunmen corralled six wrestlers and weightlifters as additional hostages. It is possible that Weinberg had hoped that the stronger men would have a better chance of fighting off the attackers than those in Apartment 2, but they were all surprised in their sleep. As the athletes from Apartment 3 were marched back to the coaches' apartment, the wounded Weinberg again attacked the gunmen, allowing one of his wrestlers, Gad Tsobari, to escape via the underground parking garage. Weinberg knocked unconscious one of the intruders and slashed at another with a fruit knife but failed to draw blood before being shot to death. Weightlifter Yossef Romano, a veteran of the 1967 Six-Day War, also attacked and wounded one of the intruders before being shot and killed. In its publication of 1 December 2015, The New York Times reported that Romano was castrated after he was shot. The gunmen were left with nine hostages. They were, in addition to Gutfreund, sharpshooting coach Kehat Shorr, track and field coach Amitzur Shapira, fencing master Andre Spitzer, weightlifting judge Yakov Springer, wrestlers Eliezer Halfin and Mark Slavin, and weightlifters David Berger and Ze'ev Friedman. Berger was an expatriate American with dual citizenship; Slavin, at 18 the youngest of the hostages, had only arrived in Israel from the Soviet Union four months before the Olympic Games began. Gutfreund, physically the largest of the hostages, was bound to a chair (Groussard describes him as being tied up like a mummy); the rest were lined up four apiece on the two beds in Springer and Shapira's room, and bound at the wrists and ankles and then to each other. Romano's bullet-riddled corpse was left at his bound comrades' feet as a warning. Several of the hostages were beaten during the stand-off, with some suffering broken bones as a result. Of the other members of Israel's team, racewalker Shaul Ladany had been jolted awake in Apartment 2 by Gutfreund's screams. He jumped from the second-story balcony of his room and fled to the American dormitory, awakening U.S. track coach Bill Bowerman and informing him of the attack. Ladany, a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, was the first person to spread the alert. The other four residents of Apartment 2 (sharpshooters Henry Hershkowitz and Zelig Shtroch, fencers Dan Alon and Yehuda Weisenstein), plus chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin and the two team doctors, hid and eventually fled the besieged building. The two female members of Israel's Olympic team, sprinter and hurdler Esther Shahamorov and swimmer Shlomit Nir, were housed in a separate part of the Olympic Village. Three more members of Israel's Olympic team, two sailors and their manager, were housed in Kiel, from Munich. The attackers were reported to be Palestinian terrorists from refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. They were identified as Luttif Afif (using the codename Issa), the leader (three of Issa's brothers were also reportedly members of Black September, two of them in Israeli jails), his deputy Yusuf Nazzal ("Tony"), and junior members Afif Ahmed Hamid ("Paolo"), Khalid Jawad ("Salah"), Ahmed Chic Thaa ("Abu Halla"), Mohammed Safady ("Badran"), Adnan Al-Gashey ("Denawi"), and Al-Gashey's cousin, Jamal Al-Gashey ("Samir"). According to author Simon Reeve, Afif (the son of a Jewish mother and Christian father), Nazzal, and one of their confederates, had all worked in various capacities in the Olympic Village, and had spent a couple of weeks scouting for their potential target. A member of the Uruguayan Olympic delegation, which shared housing with the Israelis, claimed that he found Nazzal inside 31 Connollystraße less than 24 hours before the attack, but since he was recognized as a worker in the Village, nothing was thought of it at the time. The other members of the group entered Munich via train and plane in the days before the attack. All the members of the Uruguay and Hong Kong Olympic teams, which also shared the building with the Israelis, were released unharmed during the attack. International reaction On 5 September, Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, appealed to other countries to "save our citizens and condemn the unspeakable criminal acts committed." She also stated, "if we [Israel] should give in, then no Israeli anywhere in the world shall feel that his life is safe... it's blackmail of the worst kind." King Hussein of Jordan, the only leader of an Arab country to denounce the attack publicly, called it a "savage crime against civilization ... perpetrated by sick minds." U.S. President Richard Nixon privately discussed a number of possible American responses, such as declaring a national day of mourning (favored by Secretary of State William P. Rogers), or having Nixon fly to the athletes' funerals. Nixon and U.S National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger decided instead to press the United Nations to take steps against international terrorism. Negotiations The hostage-takers demanded the release of 234 Palestinians and non-Arabs jailed in Israel, along with two West German insurgents held by the West German penitentiary system, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, who were founders of the West German Red Army Faction. The hostage-takers threw the body of Weinberg out of the front door of the residence to demonstrate their resolve. Israel's response was immediate and absolute: there would be no negotiation. Israel's official policy at the time was to refuse to negotiate with terrorists under any circumstances, as according to the Israeli government such negotiations would give an incentive to future attacks. It has been claimed that the German authorities, under the leadership of Chancellor Willy Brandt and Minister for the Interior Hans-Dietrich Genscher, rejected Israel's offer to send an Israeli special forces unit to West Germany. The Bavarian interior minister Bruno Merk, who headed the crisis centre jointly with Genscher and Munich's police chief Manfred Schreiber, denies that such an Israeli offer ever existed. According to journalist John K. Cooley, the hostage situation presented an extremely difficult political situation for the Germans because the hostages were Jewish. Cooley reported that the Germans offered the Palestinians an unlimited amount of money for the release of the athletes, as well as the substitution by high-ranking Germans. However, the kidnappers refused both offers. Along with Essen chief detective Anneliese Graes, Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber and Bruno Merk, interior minister of Bavaria, negotiated directly with the kidnappers, repeating the offer of an unlimited amount of money. According to Cooley, the reply was that "money means nothing to us; our lives mean nothing to us." Magdi Gohary and Mohammad Khadif, both Egyptian advisers to the Arab League, and A.D. Touny, an Egyptian member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) also helped try to win concessions from the kidnappers, but to no avail. However, the negotiators apparently were able to convince the terrorists that their demands were being considered, as "Issa" granted a total of five deadline extensions. Elsewhere in the village, athletes carried on as normal, seemingly oblivious of the events unfolding nearby. The Games continued until mounting pressure on the IOC forced a suspension some 12 hours after the first athlete had been murdered. United States marathon runner Frank Shorter, observing the unfolding events from the balcony of his nearby lodging, was quoted as saying, "Imagine those poor guys over there. Every five minutes a psycho with a machine gun says, 'Let's kill 'em now,' and someone else says, 'No, let's wait a while.' How long could you stand that?" At 4:30 pm, a squad of 38 West German police officers was dispatched to the Olympic Village. Dressed in Olympic sweatsuits (some also wearing Stahlhelme and carrying Walther MP sub-machine guns), they were members of the German border police, although according to former Munich policeman Heinz Hohensinn they were regular Munich police officers, with no experience in combat or hostage rescue. Their plan was to crawl down from the ventilation shafts and kill the terrorists. The police took up positions awaiting the codeword "Sunshine", which upon hearing, they were to begin the assault. In the meantime, camera crews filmed the actions of the officers from the German apartments, and broadcast the images live on television. Thus, the terrorists were able to watch the police prepare to attack. Footage shows one of the kidnappers peering from the balcony door while one of the police officers stood on the roof less than from him. In the end, after "Issa" threatened to kill two of the hostages, the police retreated from the premises. At one point during the crisis, the negotiators demanded direct contact with the hostages to satisfy themselves the Israelis were still alive. Fencing coach Andre Spitzer, who spoke fluent German, and shooting coach Kehat Shorr, the senior member of the Israeli delegation, had a brief conversation with West German officials while standing at the second-floor window of the besieged building, with two kidnappers holding guns on them. When Spitzer attempted to answer a question, he was clubbed with the butt of an AK-47 in full view of international television cameras and pulled away from the window. A few minutes later, Hans-Dietrich Genscher and Walter Tröger, the mayor of the Olympic Village, were briefly allowed into the apartments to speak with the hostages. Tröger spoke of being very moved by the dignity with which the Israelis held themselves, and that they seemed resigned to their fate. Tröger noticed that several of the hostages, especially Gutfreund, showed signs of having suffered physical abuse at the hands of the kidnappers, and that David Berger had been shot in his left shoulder. While being debriefed by the crisis team, Genscher and Tröger told them that they had seen "four or five" attackers inside the apartment. Fatefully, these numbers were accepted as definitive. While Genscher and Tröger were talking with the hostages, Kehat Shorr had told the West Germans that the Israelis would not object to being flown to an Arab country, provided that strict guarantees for their safety were made by the Germans and whichever nation they landed in. At 6 pm Munich time, the Palestinians issued a new dictate, demanding transportation to Cairo. Failed rescue Ambush plan The authorities feigned agreement to the Cairo demand (although Egyptian Prime Minister Aziz Sedki had already told the West German authorities that the Egyptians did not wish to become involved in the hostage crisis). Two Bell UH-1 military helicopters were to transport the terrorists and hostages to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck, a NATO airbase. Initially, the perpetrators' plan was to go to Riem, which was the international airport near Munich at the time, but the negotiators convinced them that Fürstenfeldbruck would be more practical. The authorities, who preceded the Black Septemberists and hostages in a third helicopter, had an ulterior motive: they planned an armed assault at the airport. Realizing that the Palestinians and Israelis had to walk 200 metres through the underground garages to reach the helicopters, the West German police saw another opportunity to ambush the perpetrators, and placed sharpshooters there. But "Issa" insisted on checking the route first. He and some other Palestinians walked pointing their AK-47s at Schreiber, Tröger and Genscher. At that time, the police snipers were lying behind cars in the sidestreets, and when they approached the latter crawled away, making noise in the process. Thus the terrorists were immediately alerted of the dangerous presence, and they decided to use a bus instead of walking. The bus arrived at 10:00 pm and drove the contingent to the helicopters. "Issa" checked them with a flashlight before boarding in groups. Five West German policemen were deployed around the airport in sniper roles—three on the roof of the control tower, one hidden behind a service truck and one behind a small signal tower at ground level. However, none of them had any special sniper training, nor any special weapon (being equipped with the H&K G3, the ordinary battle rifle of the German Armed Forces without optics or night vision devices). The officers were selected because they shot competitively on weekends. During a subsequent German investigation, an officer identified as "Sniper No. 2" stated: "I am of the opinion that I am not a sharpshooter." The members of the crisis teamSchreiber, Genscher, Merk and Schreiber's deputy Georg Wolfsupervised and observed the attempted rescue from the airport control tower. Cooley, Reeve and Groussard all place Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and Victor Cohen, one of Zamir's senior assistants, at the scene as well, but as observers only. Zamir has stated repeatedly in interviews over the years that he was never consulted by the Germans at any time during the rescue attempt and thought that his presence actually made the Germans uncomfortable. A Boeing 727 jet was positioned on the tarmac with sixteen West German police inside dressed as flight crew. It was agreed that "Issa" and "Tony" would inspect the plane. The plan was that the West Germans would overpower them as they boarded, giving the snipers a chance to kill the remaining terrorists at the helicopters. These were believed to number no more than two or three, according to what Genscher and Tröger had seen inside 31 Connollystraße. However, during the transfer from the bus to the helicopters, the crisis team discovered that there were actually eight of them. Failure At the last minute, as the helicopters were arriving at Fürstenfeldbruck, the West German police aboard the airplane voted to abandon their mission, without consulting the central command. This left only the five sharpshooters to try to overpower a larger and more heavily armed group. At that point, Colonel Ulrich Wegener, Genscher's senior aide and later the founder of the elite German counter-terrorist unit GSG 9, said "I'm sure this will blow the whole affair!". The helicopters landed just after 10:30 pm and the four pilots and six of the kidnappers emerged. While four of the Black September members held the pilots at gunpoint (breaking an earlier promise that they would not take any Germans hostage), Issa and Tony walked over to inspect the jet, only to find it empty. Realizing they had been lured into a trap, they sprinted back toward the helicopters. As they ran past the control tower, Sniper 3 took one last opportunity to eliminate "Issa", which would have left the group leaderless. However, due to the poor lighting, he struggled to see his target and missed, hitting "Tony" in the thigh instead. Meanwhile, the West German authorities gave the order for snipers positioned nearby to open fire, which occurred around 11:00 pm. In the ensuing chaos, Ahmed Chic Thaa and Afif Ahmed Hamid, the two kidnappers holding the helicopter pilots, were killed while the remaining gunmensome possibly already woundedscrambled to safety, returning fire from behind and beneath the helicopters, out of the snipers' line of sight, shooting out many of the airport lights. A West German policeman in the control tower, Anton Fliegerbauer, was killed by the gunfire. The helicopter pilots fled; the hostages, tied up inside the craft, could not. During the gun battle, the hostages secretly worked on loosening their bonds and teethmarks were found on some of the ropes after the gunfire had ended. Massacre The West Germans had not arranged for armored personnel carriers ahead of time and only at this point were they called in to break the deadlock. Since the roads to the airport had not been cleared, the carriers became stuck in traffic and finally arrived around midnight. With their appearance, the kidnappers felt the shift in the status quo, and possibly panicked at the thought of the failure of their operation. At four minutes past midnight of 6 September, one of the terrorists (likely Issa) turned on the hostages in the eastern helicopter and fired at them with a Kalashnikov assault rifle from point-blank range. Springer, Halfin and Friedman were killed instantly; Berger, shot twice in | subsequent fire. Three of the remaining terrorists lay on the ground, one of them feigning death, and were captured by police. Jamal Al-Gashey had been shot through his right wrist, and Mohammed Safady had sustained a flesh wound to his leg. Adnan Al-Gashey had escaped injury completely. Yusuf Nazzal ("Tony") escaped the scene, but was tracked down with police dogs 40 minutes later in an airbase parking lot. Cornered and bombarded with tear gas, he was shot dead after a brief gunfight. By around 1:30 am on 6 September, the battle was over. Outcome Initial news reports, published all over the world, indicated that all the hostages were alive, and that all the attackers had been killed. Only later did a representative for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) suggest that "initial reports were overly optimistic." Jim McKay, who was covering the Olympics that year for the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), had taken on the job of reporting the events as Roone Arledge fed them into his earpiece. At 3:24 am, McKay received the official confirmation: Several sources listed Ladany as having been killed. Ladany recalled later: Criticism Author Simon Reeve, among others, writes that the shootout with the well-trained Black September members showed an egregious lack of preparation on the part of the German authorities. They were not prepared to deal with this sort of situation. This costly lesson led directly to the founding, less than two months later, of police counter-terrorism branch GSG 9. German authorities made a number of mistakes. First, because of restrictions in the post-war West German constitution, the army could not participate in the attempted rescue, as the German armed forces are not allowed to operate inside Germany during peacetime. The responsibility was entirely in the hands of the Munich police and the Bavarian authorities. It was known a half-hour before the hostages and kidnappers had even arrived at Fürstenfeldbruck that the number of the latter was larger than first believed. Despite this new information, Schreiber decided to continue with the rescue operation as originally planned and the new information could not reach the snipers since they had no radios. It is a basic tenet of sniping operations that there are enough snipers (at least two for each known target, or in this case a minimum of ten) deployed to neutralize as many of the attackers as possible with the first volley of shots. The 2006 National Geographic Channel's Seconds From Disaster profile on the massacre stated that the helicopters were supposed to land sideways and to the west of the control tower, a maneuver which would have allowed the snipers clear shots into them as the kidnappers threw open the helicopter doors. Instead, the helicopters were landed facing the control tower and at the centre of the airstrip. This not only gave them a place to hide after the gunfight began, but put Snipers 1 and 2 in the line of fire of the other three snipers on the control tower. The snipers were denied valuable shooting opportunities as a result of the positioning of the helicopters, stacking the odds against what were effectively three snipers versus eight heavily armed gunmen. According to the same program, the crisis committee delegated to make decisions on how to deal with the incident consisted of Bruno Merk (the Bavarian interior minister), Hans-Dietrich Genscher (the West German interior minister) and Manfred Schreiber (Munich's Chief of Police); in other words, two politicians and one tactician. The program mentioned that a year before the Games, Schreiber had participated in another hostage crisis (a failed bank robbery) in which he ordered a marksman to shoot one of the perpetrators, managing only to wound the robber. As a result, the robbers shot an innocent woman dead. Schreiber was consequently charged with involuntary manslaughter. An investigation ultimately cleared him of any wrongdoing, but the program suggested that the prior incident affected his judgment in the subsequent Olympic hostage crisis. As mentioned earlier, the five German snipers at Fürstenfeldbruck did not have radio contact with one another (nor with the German authorities conducting the rescue operation) and therefore were unable to coordinate their fire. The only contact the snipers had with the operational leadership was with Georg Wolf, who was lying next to the three snipers on the control tower giving orders directly to them. The two snipers at ground level had been given vague instructions to shoot when the other snipers began shooting, and were basically left to fend for themselves. In addition, the snipers did not have the proper equipment for this hostage rescue operation. The Heckler & Koch G3 battle rifles used were considered by several experts to be inadequate for the distance at which the snipers were trying to shoot. The G3, the standard service rifle of the Bundeswehr at that time, had a barrel; at the distances the snipers were required to shoot, a barrel would have ensured far greater accuracy. None of the rifles were equipped with telescopic or infrared sights. Additionally, none of the snipers were equipped with a steel helmet or bullet-proof vest. No armored vehicles were at the scene at Fürstenfeldbruck, and were only called in after the gunfight was well underway. There were also numerous tactical errors. As mentioned earlier, "Sniper 2", who was stationed behind the signal tower, wound up directly in the line of fire of his fellow snipers on the control tower, without any protective gear and without any other police being aware of his location. Because of this, "Sniper 2" didn't fire a single shot until late in the gunfight, when hostage-taker Khalid Jawad attempted to escape on foot and ran right at the exposed sniper. "Sniper 2" killed the fleeing perpetrator but was in turn badly wounded by a fellow police officer, who was unaware that he was shooting at one of his own men. One of the helicopter pilots, Gunnar Ebel, was lying near "Sniper 2" and was also wounded by friendly fire. Both Ebel and the sniper recovered from their injuries. Many of the errors made by the Germans during the rescue attempt were ultimately detailed by Heinz Hohensinn, who had participated in Operation Sunshine earlier that day. He stated in One Day in September that he had been selected to pose as a crew member. He and his fellow policemen understood that it was a suicide mission, so the group unanimously voted to flee the plane. None of them were reprimanded for that desertion. Aftermath The bodies of the five Palestinian attackers—Afif, Nazzal, Chic Thaa, Hamid and Jawad—killed during the Fürstenfeldbruck gun battle were delivered to Libya, where they received heroes' funerals and were buried with full military honours. On 8 September, Israeli planes bombed ten PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon in response to the massacre, killing a reported 200 militants and 11 civilians. The three surviving Black September gunmen had been arrested after the Fürstenfeldbruck gunfight, and were being held in a Munich prison for trial. On 29 October, Lufthansa Flight 615 was hijacked and threatened to be blown up if the Munich attackers were not released. Safady and the Al-Gasheys were immediately released by West Germany, receiving a tumultuous welcome when they touched down in Libya and (as seen in One Day in September) giving their own firsthand account of their operation at a press conference broadcast worldwide. Further international investigations into the Lufthansa Flight 615 incident have produced theories of a secret agreement between the German government and Black September release of the surviving terrorists in exchange for assurances of no further attacks on Germany. Effect on the Games In the wake of the hostage-taking, competition was suspended for 34 hours, for the first time in modern Olympic history, after public criticism of the Olympic Committee's decision to continue the games. On 6 September, a memorial service attended by 80,000 spectators and 3,000 athletes was held in the Olympic Stadium. IOC President Avery Brundage made little reference to the murdered athletes during a speech praising the strength of the Olympic movement and equating the attack on the Israeli sportsmen with the recent arguments about encroaching professionalism and disallowing Rhodesia's participation in the Games, which outraged many listeners. The victims' families were represented by Andre Spitzer's widow Ankie, Moshe Weinberg's mother, and a cousin of Weinberg, Carmel Eliash. During the memorial service, Eliash collapsed and died of a heart attack. Many of the 80,000 people who filled the Olympic Stadium for West Germany's football match with Hungary carried noisemakers and waved flags, but when several spectators unfurled a banner reading "17 dead, already forgotten?" security officers removed the sign and expelled those responsible from the grounds. During the memorial service, the Olympic Flag was flown at half-staff, along with the flags of most of the other competing nations at the request of Willy Brandt. Ten Arab nations objected to their flags flying at half-staff and the mandate was rescinded. Willi Daume, president of the Munich organizing committee, initially sought to cancel the remainder of the Games, but in the afternoon Brundage and others who wished to continue the Games prevailed, stating that they could not let the incident halt the Games. Brundage stated "The Games must go on, and we must ... and we must continue our efforts to keep them clean, pure and honest." The decision was endorsed by the Israeli government and Israeli Olympic team chef de mission Shmuel Lalkin. On 6 September, after the memorial service, the remaining members of the Israeli team withdrew from the Games and left Munich. All Jewish sportsmen were placed under guard. Mark Spitz, the American swimming star who had already completed his competitions, left Munich during the hostage crisis (it was feared that as a prominent Jew, Spitz might be a kidnapping target). The Egyptian team left the Games on 7 September, stating they feared reprisals. The Philippine and Algerian teams also left the Games, as did some members of the Dutch and Norwegian teams. American marathon runner Kenny Moore, who wrote about the incident for Sports Illustrated, quoted Dutch distance runner Jos Hermens as saying "It's quite simple. We were invited to a party, and if someone comes to the party and shoots people, how can you stay?" Many athletes, dazed by the tragedy, similarly felt that their desire to compete had been destroyed, although they stayed at the Games. Four years later at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, the Israeli team commemorated the massacre: when they entered the stadium at the Opening Ceremony, their national flag was adorned with a black ribbon. The families of some victims have asked the IOC to establish a permanent memorial to the athletes. The IOC has declined, saying that to introduce a specific reference to the victims could "alienate other members of the Olympic community," according to the BBC. Alex Gilady, an Israeli IOC official, told the BBC: "We must consider what this could do to other members of the delegations that are hostile to Israel." The IOC rejected an international campaign in support of a minute of silence at the Opening Ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics in honour of the Israeli victims on the 40th anniversary of the massacre. Jacques Rogge, the IOC President, said it would be "inappropriate," although the opening ceremony included a memorium for the victims of the 7 July 2005 London bombings. Speaking of the decision, Olympian Shaul Ladany, who survived the attack, commented: "I do not understand. I do not understand, and I do not accept it." In 2014 the International Olympic Committee agreed to contribute $250,000 towards a memorial to the murdered Israeli athletes. After 44 years, the IOC commemorated the victims of the Munich massacre for the first time in the Rio 2016 Olympic Village on 4 August 2016. There is a memorial outside the Olympic stadium in Munich in the form of a stone tablet at the bridge linking the stadium to the former Olympic village. There is a memorial tablet to the slain Israelis outside the front door of their former lodging at 31 Connollystraße. On 15 October 1999 (almost a year before the Sydney 2000 Games), a memorial plaque was unveiled in one of the large light towers (Tower 14) outside the Sydney Olympic Stadium. In the 2020 Summer Olympics, a moment of silence was observed in the opening ceremony. This is the first time in history this happens in the opening ceremony. Israeli response Golda Meir and the Israeli Defense Committee secretly authorized the Mossad to track down and kill those allegedly responsible for the Munich massacre. The accusation that this was motivated by a desire for vengeance was disputed by Zvi Zamir, who described the mission as "putting an end to the type of terror that was perpetrated" in Europe. To this end Mossad set up a number of special teams to locate and kill these fedayeen, aided by the agency's stations in Europe. In a February 2006 interview, Zamir answered direct questions: The Israeli mission later became known as Operation Wrath of God or Mivtza Za'am Ha'El. Reeve quotes General Aharon Yariv—who, he writes, was the general overseer of the operation—as stating that after Munich the Israeli government felt it had no alternative but to exact justice. Benny Morris writes that a target list was created using information from "turned" PLO personnel and friendly European intelligence services. Once completed, a wave of assassinations of suspected Black September operatives began across Europe. On 9 April 1973, Israel launched Operation "Spring of Youth", a joint Mossad–IDF operation in Beirut. The targets were Mohammad Yusuf al-Najjar (Abu Yusuf), head of Fatah's intelligence arm, which ran Black September, according to Morris; Kamal Adwan, who headed the PLO's Western Sector, which controlled PLO action inside Israel; and Kamal Nassir, the PLO spokesman. A group of Sayeret commandos were taken in nine missile boats and a small fleet of patrol boats to a deserted Lebanese beach, before driving in two cars to downtown Beirut, where they killed Najjar, Adwan and Nassir. Two further detachments of commandos blew up the PFLP's headquarters in Beirut and a Fatah explosives plant. The leader of the commando team that conducted the operations was Ehud Barak. On 21 July 1973, in the Lillehammer affair, a team of Mossad agents mistakenly killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan man unrelated to the Munich attack, in Lillehammer, Norway, after an informant mistakenly said Bouchiki was Ali Hassan Salameh, the head of Force 17 and a Black September operative. Five Mossad agents, including two women, were captured by the Norwegian authorities, while others managed to slip away. The five were convicted of the killing and imprisoned, but were released and returned to Israel in 1975. The Mossad later found Ali Hassan Salameh in Beirut and killed him on 22 January 1979 with a remote-controlled car bomb. The attack killed four passersby and injured 18 others. According to CIA officer Duane "Dewey" Claridge, chief of operations of the CIA Near East Division from 1975 to 1978, in mid-1976, Salameh offered Americans assistance and protection with Arafat's blessings during the American embassy pull-out from Beirut during the down-spiraling chaos of the Lebanese Civil War. There was a general feeling that Americans could be trusted. However, the scene of cooperation came to an end abruptly after the assassination of Salameh. Americans were generally blamed as Israel's principal benefactors. Simon Reeve writes that the Israeli operations continued for more than twenty years. He details the assassination in Paris in 1992 of Atef Bseiso, the PLO's head of intelligence, and says that an Israeli general confirmed there was a link back to Munich. Reeve also writes that while Israeli officials have stated Operation Wrath of God was intended to exact vengeance for the families of the athletes killed in Munich, "few relatives wanted such a violent reckoning with the Palestinians." Reeve states the families were instead desperate to know the truth of the events surrounding the Munich massacre. Reeve outlines what he sees as a lengthy cover-up by German authorities to hide the truth. After a lengthy court fight, in 2004 the families of the Munich victims reached a settlement of €3 million with the German government. Alleged German cover-up An article in 2012 in a front-page story of the German news magazine Der Spiegel reported that much of the information pertaining to the mishandling of the massacre was covered up by the German authorities. For twenty years, Germany refused to release any information about the attack and did not accept responsibility for the results. The magazine reported that the government had been hiding 3,808 files, which contained tens of thousands of documents. Der Spiegel said it obtained secret reports by authorities, embassy cables, and minutes of cabinet meetings that demonstrate the lack of professionalism of the German officials in handling the massacre. The newspaper also wrote that the German authorities were told that Palestinians were planning an "incident" at the Olympics three weeks before the massacre, but failed to take the necessary security measures, and these facts are missing from the official documentation of the German government. In August 2012, Der Spiegel reported that following the massacre, Germany began secret meetings with Black September, at the behest of the West German government, due to the fear that Black September would carry out other terrorist attacks in Germany. The government proposed a clandestine meeting between German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel and a member of Black September to create a "new basis of trust." In return for an exchange of the political status of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO would stop terrorist attacks on German soil. When French police arrested Abu Daoud, one of the chief organizers of the Munich massacre, and inquired about extraditing him to Germany, Bavaria's justice secretary recommended that Germany should not take any action, causing the French to release Abu Daoud and the Assad regime to shelter him until he died at a Damascus hospital in 2010. Surviving Black September members Two of the three surviving gunmen, Mohammed Safady and Adnan Al-Gashey, were allegedly killed by Mossad as part of Operation Wrath of God. Al-Gashey was allegedly located after making contact with a cousin in a Gulf State, and Safady was found by remaining in touch with family in Lebanon. This account was challenged in a book by Aaron J. Klein, who claims that Al-Gashey died of heart failure in the 1970s, and that Safady was killed by Christian Phalangists in Lebanon in |
has an area of about . The central part corresponds approximately with the province of Grosseto, extending northward to the Colline Metallifere and the slopes of Monte Amiata, but the region extends northward from Piombino to the mouth of the , and southwards into Lazio as far as Civitavecchia. Animal breeds The Maremma has given rise to, or given its name to, several breeds of domestic animal. These include two breeds of working horse, the Maremmano and the Cavallo Romano della Maremma Laziale, formerly used by butteri and cavalcanti; the Maremmana breed of large grey cattle; the Maremmano breed of shepherd's guard-dog; and the Macchiaiola Maremmana breed of small pig, | northern Lazio. It was formerly mostly marshland, often malarial, but was drained by order of Fernando I de' Medici. In recent years the area of Maremma is becoming a playground for the Russian elite, who are increasingly acquiring properties in the region. It was traditionally populated by the butteri, mounted cattle herders who rode horses fitted with one of two distinctive styles of saddle, the scafarda and the bardella. Geography The Maremma has an area of about . The central part corresponds approximately with the province of Grosseto, extending northward to the Colline Metallifere and the slopes of Monte Amiata, but |
on 1967's Headquarters, despite Jones & Dolenz having very limited instrumental skills, studio time being pricey and retakes costly. During the band's first independent press conference, Nesmith called their 2nd LP, More of The Monkees "probably the worst record in the history of the world", partly due to rushed, shoddy studio engineering. The band took a hit to its artistic credibility when fans learned the four had not played all the instruments on the first 2 LPs. But still sales continued to be profitable. Headquarters sold 2 million copies, down 2 million units from its predecessor, but still reached the number 1 spot on Billboard, falling only to Sgt. Pepper a week later and remaining #2 all through the entire 1967 Summer of Love. For the remaining 5 Monkees LPs, ironically, the original Kirshner formula of hired studio musicians & songwriters again became the norm, although Nesmith, Tork, Dolenz and Jones contributed about 50% of the original compositions, Nesmith the majority of those. By the tail end of the Monkees run though, Nesmith was withholding many of his original song ideas from Monkees albums, planning to release them in his post-Monkees solo career. Nesmith's last contractual Monkees commitment was a commercial for Kool-Aid and Nerf balls in April 1970 (the spot ends with Nesmith frowning and saying, "Enerf's enerf!"). As the band's sales declined, Nesmith asked to be released from his contract, despite it costing him: "I had three years left ... at $150,000 [equivalent to $980,940 in 2018] a year." He remained in a financial bind until 1980, when he received his inheritance from his mother's estate. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he said of that time: "I had to start telling little tales to the tax man while they were putting tags on the furniture." Return to the Monkees Nesmith did not participate in the Monkees' 20th anniversary reunion, due to contractual obligations with his production company, but he did appear during an encore with the 3 other Monkees at the Greek Theatre on September 7, 1986. In a 1987 interview for Nick Rocks, Nesmith stated, "When Peter called up and said 'we're going to go out, do you want to go?' I was booked. But, if you get to L.A., I'll play." Nesmith next joined his fellow Monkees for the 1986 "Monkees Christmas Melody" video for MTV appearing throughout dressed/disguised as Santa Claus until the finale, when he revealed his identity - and participation - to all. Nesmith appeared again in 1989 with the other members of the Monkees, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones. Prior to the official kickoff of The Monkees '89 tour (on July 1 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) all 4 Monkees gathered in Los Angeles, California, making two live radio appearances (KLOS-FM: The Mark and Brian Show on June 28 and KIIS Radio on June 30) to promote their reunion concert at the Universal Amphitheatre where they appeared together as a foursome live on stage on July 9. The following day (July 10th) all four band members were in attendance as the Monkees received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star. In 1995, Nesmith was again reunited with the Monkees to record their studio album (and first to feature all four since Head), titled Justus, released in 1996. He also wrote and directed a Monkees television special, Hey, Hey, It's the Monkees. To support the reunion, Nesmith, Jones, Dolenz, and Tork briefly toured the UK in 1997. The UK tour was the last appearance of all four Monkees performing together. In 2012, 2013, and 2014, after Jones's death, Nesmith reunited with Dolenz and Tork to perform concerts throughout the United States. Backed with a seven-piece band that included Nesmith's son, Christian, the trio performed 27 songs from The Monkees discography ("Daydream Believer" was sung by the audience). When asked why he had decided to return to the Monkees, Nesmith stated, "I never really left. It is a part of my youth that is always active in my thoughts and part of my overall work as an artist. It stays in a special place." In 2016, Nesmith contributed vocally and instrumentally to the Monkees' 50th anniversary album Good Times!. He additionally contributed a song, "I Know What I Know", and was reportedly "thrilled" at the outcome of the album. Despite not touring with Dolenz and Tork for the majority of the Monkees' 50th-anniversary reunion in 2016, Nesmith did twice fill in for the ailing Peter Tork and appeared for the final show of the tour, which featured the three surviving band members (the last show to do so). At the end of the final show, Nesmith announced his retirement from the Monkees, never to tour again. In 2018, Nesmith and Dolenz toured together as a duo for the first time under the banner "The Monkees Present: The Mike and Micky Show". The tour was cut short four dates out due to Nesmith having health issues (he was flown back home and proceeded to have quadruple bypass surgery). He contributed two songs to the Monkees' 13th studio album, Christmas Party (the group's first Christmas album), released on October 12, 2018. In 2019, Nesmith and Dolenz reunited again to make up the cancelled dates of the tour and adding several more dates, including a planned tour of Australia and New Zealand. Nesmith and Dolenz announced a follow-up tour, "An Evening with the Monkees", to begin in early 2020. The tour was delayed, however, due the COVID-19 pandemic. It was announced by Nesmith and Dolenz on May 4, 2021, that the Monkees would disband following a farewell tour. Dubbed "The Monkees Farewell Tour", the tour consisted of over 40 dates in the United States from September to November. However, because of restrictions due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they were not able to play shows in Canada, the UK or Australia. The final date of the tour was held on November 14, 2021, at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Solo career As he prepared for his exit from The Monkees, Nesmith was approached by John Ware of The Corvettes, a band that featured Nesmith's Texas band mate and close friend John London. London played on some of the earliest pre-Monkees, Nesmith 45s, as well as numerous Monkees sessions, and had 45s produced by Nesmith for the Dot label in 1969. Ware wanted Nesmith to put together a band. Nesmith's interest hinged on noted pedal steel player Orville "Red" Rhodes; their musical partnership continued until Rhodes's death in 1995. The new band was christened Michael Nesmith and the First National Band and recorded three albums for RCA Records in 1970. Nesmith's First National Band is now considered a pioneer of country-rock music. Nesmith wrote most of the songs for the band and he, himself, is considered one of the trailblazers of country rock. He also had moderate commercial success with the First National Band. Their second single, "Joanne," hit number 21 on the Billboard chart, number 17 on Cashbox, and number four in Canada, with the follow-up "Silver Moon" making number 42 Billboard, number 28 Cashbox, and number 13 in Canada. Two more singles charted ("Nevada Fighter" made number 70 Billboard, number 73 Cashbox, and number 67 Canada, and "Propinquity" reached number 95 Cashbox), and the first two LPs charted in the lower regions of the Billboard album chart. No clear answer has ever been given for the band's breakup. Nesmith followed up with The Second National Band, which consisted of Nesmith (vocals and guitar), Michael Cohen (keyboards and Moog), | his motorcycle to the audition, and wore a wool hat to keep his hair out of his eyes; producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider remembered the "wool hat guy" and called Nesmith back. Once he was cast, Screen Gems bought his songs so they could be used in the show. Many of the songs Nesmith wrote for the Monkees, such as "The Girl I Knew Somewhere", "Mary, Mary", and "Listen to the Band" became minor hits. One song he wrote, "You Just May Be the One", is in mixed meter, interspersing 5/4 bars into an otherwise 4/4 structure. Even before Colgems and Don Kirshner's surreptitious release of the Monkees 2nd LP, without the 4 musician-actors knowledge or consent, they came to be frustrated by their studio-manufactured "bubblegum" image. Within weeks of the release of More of the Monkees, Nesmith lobbied successfully with the group's creators, Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, that he and Tork be allowed to play their instruments on future records. During a group meeting with Kirshner and Colgems lawyer Herb Moelis, in a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, each actor received a $250k royalties check, yet Nesmith still threatened to quit. Moelis rebuked him, "You'd better read your contract". Nesmith defiantly punched a hole in the wall, declaring to Moelis, "That could have been your face, motherfucker!" Weeks later, due to a breach of (verbal) agreement over the next single release, which was promised to Nesmith by Rafelson & Schneider, Nesmith led the charge in completely ousting musical supervisor Don Kirshner, effectively giving the 4 youths complete artistic and production control of their output, and the group finally worked as a true 4-man rock group on 1967's Headquarters, despite Jones & Dolenz having very limited instrumental skills, studio time being pricey and retakes costly. During the band's first independent press conference, Nesmith called their 2nd LP, More of The Monkees "probably the worst record in the history of the world", partly due to rushed, shoddy studio engineering. The band took a hit to its artistic credibility when fans learned the four had not played all the instruments on the first 2 LPs. But still sales continued to be profitable. Headquarters sold 2 million copies, down 2 million units from its predecessor, but still reached the number 1 spot on Billboard, falling only to Sgt. Pepper a week later and remaining #2 all through the entire 1967 Summer of Love. For the remaining 5 Monkees LPs, ironically, the original Kirshner formula of hired studio musicians & songwriters again became the norm, although Nesmith, Tork, Dolenz and Jones contributed about 50% of the original compositions, Nesmith the majority of those. By the tail end of the Monkees run though, Nesmith was withholding many of his original song ideas from Monkees albums, planning to release them in his post-Monkees solo career. Nesmith's last contractual Monkees commitment was a commercial for Kool-Aid and Nerf balls in April 1970 (the spot ends with Nesmith frowning and saying, "Enerf's enerf!"). As the band's sales declined, Nesmith asked to be released from his contract, despite it costing him: "I had three years left ... at $150,000 [equivalent to $980,940 in 2018] a year." He remained in a financial bind until 1980, when he received his inheritance from his mother's estate. In a 1980 interview with Playboy, he said of that time: "I had to start telling little tales to the tax man while they were putting tags on the furniture." Return to the Monkees Nesmith did not participate in the Monkees' 20th anniversary reunion, due to contractual obligations with his production company, but he did appear during an encore with the 3 other Monkees at the Greek Theatre on September 7, 1986. In a 1987 interview for Nick Rocks, Nesmith stated, "When Peter called up and said 'we're going to go out, do you want to go?' I was booked. But, if you get to L.A., I'll play." Nesmith next joined his fellow Monkees for the 1986 "Monkees Christmas Melody" video for MTV appearing throughout dressed/disguised as Santa Claus until the finale, when he revealed his identity - and participation - to all. Nesmith appeared again in 1989 with the other members of the Monkees, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork, and Davy Jones. Prior to the official kickoff of The Monkees '89 tour (on July 1 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) all 4 Monkees gathered in Los Angeles, California, making two live radio appearances (KLOS-FM: The Mark and Brian Show on June 28 and KIIS Radio on June 30) to promote their reunion concert at the Universal Amphitheatre where they appeared together as a foursome live on stage on July 9. The following day (July 10th) all four band members were in attendance as the Monkees received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star. In 1995, Nesmith was again reunited with the Monkees to record their studio album (and first to feature all four since Head), titled Justus, released in 1996. He also wrote and directed a Monkees television special, Hey, Hey, It's the Monkees. To support the reunion, Nesmith, Jones, Dolenz, and Tork briefly toured the UK in 1997. The UK tour was the last appearance of all four Monkees performing together. In 2012, 2013, and 2014, after Jones's death, Nesmith reunited with Dolenz and Tork to perform concerts throughout the United States. Backed with a seven-piece band that included Nesmith's son, Christian, the trio performed 27 songs from The Monkees discography ("Daydream Believer" was sung by the audience). When asked why he had decided to return to the Monkees, Nesmith stated, "I never really left. It is a part of my youth that is always active in my thoughts and part of my overall work as an artist. It stays in a special place." In 2016, Nesmith contributed vocally and instrumentally to the Monkees' 50th anniversary album Good Times!. He additionally contributed a song, "I Know What I Know", and was reportedly "thrilled" at the outcome of the album. Despite not touring with Dolenz and Tork for the majority of the Monkees' 50th-anniversary reunion in 2016, Nesmith did twice fill in for the ailing Peter Tork and appeared for the final show of the tour, which featured the three surviving band members (the last show to do so). At the end of the final show, Nesmith announced his retirement from the Monkees, never to tour again. In 2018, Nesmith and Dolenz toured together as a duo for the first time under the banner "The Monkees Present: The Mike and Micky Show". The tour was cut short four dates out due to Nesmith having health issues (he was flown back home and proceeded to have quadruple bypass surgery). He contributed two songs to the Monkees' 13th studio album, Christmas Party (the group's first Christmas album), released on October 12, 2018. In 2019, Nesmith and Dolenz reunited again to make up the cancelled dates of the tour and adding several more dates, including a planned tour of Australia and New Zealand. Nesmith and Dolenz announced a follow-up tour, "An Evening with the Monkees", to begin in early 2020. The tour was delayed, however, due the COVID-19 pandemic. It was announced by Nesmith and Dolenz on May 4, 2021, that the Monkees would disband following a farewell tour. Dubbed "The Monkees Farewell Tour", the tour consisted of over 40 dates in the United States from September to November. However, because of restrictions due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, they were not able to play shows in Canada, the UK or Australia. The final date of the tour was held on November 14, 2021, at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Solo career As he prepared for his exit from The Monkees, Nesmith was approached by John Ware of The Corvettes, a band that featured Nesmith's Texas band mate and close friend John London. London played on some of the earliest pre-Monkees, Nesmith 45s, as well as numerous Monkees sessions, and had 45s produced by Nesmith for the Dot label in 1969. Ware wanted Nesmith to put together a band. Nesmith's interest hinged on noted pedal steel player Orville "Red" Rhodes; their musical partnership continued until Rhodes's death in 1995. The new band was christened Michael Nesmith and the First National Band and recorded three albums for RCA Records in 1970. Nesmith's First National Band is now considered a pioneer of country-rock music. Nesmith wrote most of the songs for the band and he, himself, is considered one of the trailblazers of country rock. He also had moderate commercial success with the First National Band. |
just fifth and third in the respective championships. From there, results continued to worsen. Lotus and Mario Andretti took the titles with their 78 and 79 ground-effect cars and neither Hunt nor Mass's replacement Patrick Tambay were able to seriously challenge with the nonground-effect M26. Hunt was dropped at the end of 1978 in favour of Lotus's Ronnie Peterson, but when Peterson was killed by a crash at the Italian Grand Prix, John Watson was signed, instead. No improvement occurred in ; Coppuck's M28 design was described by Mayer as "ghastly, a disaster" and "quite diabolical" and the M29 did little to change the situation. Tambay scored no points and Watson only 15 to place the team eighth at the end of the year. The 1980s started much as the 1970s had ended: Alain Prost took over from Tambay but Watson and he rarely scored points. Under increasing pressure since the previous year from principal sponsor Philip Morris and their executive John Hogan, Mayer was coerced into merging McLaren with Ron Dennis's Project Four Formula Two team, also sponsored by Philip Morris. Dennis had designer John Barnard who, inspired by the carbon-fibre rear wings of the BMW M1 race cars that Project Four was preparing, had ideas for an innovative Formula One chassis constructed from carbon-fibre instead of conventional aluminium alloy. On their own, they lacked the money to build it, but with investment that came with the merger it became the McLaren MP4 (later called MP4/1) of , driven by Watson and Andrea de Cesaris. In the MP4, Watson won the British Grand Prix and had three other podium finishes. Soon after the merger, McLaren moved from Colnbrook to a new base in Woking and Dennis and Mayer initially shared the managing directorship of the company; by 1982, Mayer had departed and Tyler Alexander's and his shareholdings had been bought by the new owners. TAG-Porsche and Honda engines (1983–1992) In the early 1980s, teams like Renault, Ferrari and Brabham were using 1.5-litre turbocharged engines in favour of the 3.0-litre naturally aspirated engines that had been standard since 1966. Having seen in 1982 the need for a turbo engine of their own, Dennis had convinced Williams backer Techniques d'Avant Garde (TAG) to fund Porsche-built, TAG-branded turbo engines made to Barnard's specifications; TAG's founder Mansour Ojjeh would later become a McLaren shareholder. In the meantime, they continued with Cosworth engines as old rival Lauda came out of retirement in 1982 to drive alongside Watson in that year's 1B development of the MP4. They each won two races, Watson notably from 17th place on the grid in Detroit, and at one stage of the season McLaren were second in the constructors' championship. As part of a dispute with FISA, they boycotted the San Marino Grand Prix. Although was not so fruitful, Watson did win again in the United States, this time from 22nd on the grid at Long Beach. Having been fired by Renault, Prost was once again at McLaren for . Now using the TAG engines, the team dominated, scoring 12 wins and two-and-a-half times as many constructors' points as nearest rival Ferrari. In the Drivers' Championship, Lauda prevailed over Prost by half a point, the narrowest margin ever. The McLaren-TAGs were again strong in ; a third Constructors' Championship came their way while this time Prost won the Drivers' Championship. In , the Williams team were resurgent with their Honda engine and drivers Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet, while at McLaren, Lauda's replacement, 1982 champion Keke Rosberg could not gel with the car. Williams took the Constructors' Championship, but for Prost, wins in San Marino, Monaco, and Austria combined with the fact that the Williams drivers were taking points from each other meant that he retained a chance going into the last race, the Australian Grand Prix. There, a puncture for Mansell and a precautionary pit stop for Piquet gave Prost the race win and his second title, making him the first driver to win back-to-back championships since Jack Brabham in and 1960. In Barnard departed for Ferrari to be replaced by Steve Nichols (who himself joined Ferrari in 1989). In the hands of Prost and Stefan Johansson, though, Nichols's MP4/3 and the TAG engine could not match the Williams-Honda. For , Honda switched their supply to McLaren and, encouraged by Prost, Dennis signed Ayrton Senna to drive. Despite regulations reducing the boost pressure and fuel capacity (and therefore, power) of the turbo cars, Honda persisted with a turbocharged engine. In the MP4/4, Senna and Prost engaged in a season-long battle, winning 15 of the 16 races (at the other race at Monza, Senna had been leading comfortably, but collided with back-marker Jean-Louis Schlesser). At the Portuguese Grand Prix, their relationship soured when Senna squeezed Prost against the pit wall; Prost won, but afterwards said, "It was dangerous. If he wants the world championship that badly he can have it." Prost scored more points that year, but because only the best 11 results counted, Senna took the title at the penultimate race in Japan. The next year, with turbos banned, Honda supplied a new 3.5-L naturally aspirated V10 engine and McLaren again won both titles with the MP4/5. Their drivers' relationship continued to deteriorate, though, especially when, at the San Marino Grand Prix, Prost felt that Senna had reneged on an agreement not to pass each other at the first corner. Believing that Honda and Dennis were favouring Senna, Prost announced mid-season that he would leave to drive at Ferrari the following year. For the second year in succession, the Drivers' Championship was decided at the Japanese Grand Prix, this time in Prost's favour after Senna and he collided (Senna initially recovered and won the race, but was later disqualified). With former McLaren men Nichols and Prost (Barnard had moved to the Benetton team), Ferrari pushed the British team more closely in . McLaren, in turn, brought in Ferrari's Gerhard Berger, but like the two seasons before, the Drivers' Championship was led by Prost and Senna and settled at the penultimate race in Japan. Here, Senna collided with Prost at the first corner, forcing both to retire, but this time Senna escaped punishment and took the title; McLaren also won the Constructors' Championship. The year was another for McLaren and Senna, with the ascendant Renault-powered Williams team their closest challengers. By , Williams, with their advanced FW14B car, had overtaken McLaren, breaking their four-year run as champions, despite the latter winning five races that year. Ford, Lamborghini and Peugeot engines (1993–1994) As Honda withdrew from the sport at end of 1992 due to their entrance into CART PPG Indy Car World Series in 1993, McLaren sought a new engine supplier. A deal to secure Renault engines fell through, subsequently McLaren switched to customer Ford engines for the season. Senna—who initially agreed only to a race-by-race contract before later signing for the whole year—won five races, including a record-breaking sixth victory at Monaco and a win at the European Grand Prix, where he went from fifth to first on the opening lap. His teammate, 1991 IndyCar champion Michael Andretti, fared much worse: he scored only seven points, and was replaced by test driver Mika Häkkinen for the final three rounds of the season. Williams ultimately won both titles and Senna—who had flirted with moving there for 1993—signed with them for the season. During the 1993 season McLaren took part in a seven part BBC Television documentary called A Season With McLaren. McLaren tested a Lamborghini V12 engine ahead of the season, as part of a potential deal with the then-Lamborghini owner Chrysler, before eventually deciding to use Peugeot engines. With Peugeot power, the MP4/9 was driven by Häkkinen and Martin Brundle, despite achieving eight podiums over the season no wins were achieved. Peugeot was dropped after a single year due to multiple engine failures/unreliability which cost McLaren potential race victories and they switched to a Mercedes-Benz-branded, Ilmor-designed engine. Mercedes partnership (1995–2014) 1995–2009: Works Mercedes partnership 's MP4/10 car was not a front-runner and Brundle's replacement, former champion Nigel Mansell, was unable to fit into the car at first and departed after just two races, with Mark Blundell taking his place. While Williams dominated in , McLaren, now with David Coulthard alongside Häkkinen, went a third successive season without a win. In , however, Coulthard broke this run by winning the season-opening Australian Grand Prix; Häkkinen and he would each win another race before the end of the season, and highly rated designer Adrian Newey joined the team from Williams in August that year. Despite the car's improved pace, unreliability proved costly throughout the season, with retirements at the British and Luxembourg Grands Prix occurring whilst Häkkinen was in the lead. With Newey able to take advantage of new technical regulations for , and with Williams losing their works Renault engines, McLaren were once again able to challenge for the championship. Häkkinen and Coulthard won five of the first six races despite the banning of the team's "brake steer" system, which allowed the rear brakes to be operated individually to reduce understeer, after a protest by Ferrari at the second race in Brazil. Schumacher and Ferrari provided the greatest competition, the former levelled on points with Häkkinen with two races to go, but wins for Häkkinen at the Luxembourg and Japanese Grands Prix gave both him the Drivers' Championship and McLaren the Constructors' Championship. Häkkinen won his second Drivers' Championship the following season, but due to a combination of driver errors and mechanical failures, the team lost the constructors' title to Ferrari. In McLaren won seven races in a close fight with Ferrari, but ultimately Ferrari and Schumacher prevailed in both competitions. This marked the start of a decline in form as Ferrari cemented their dominance of Formula One. In , Häkkinen was outscored by Coulthard for the first time since 1997 and retired (ending Formula One's longest ever driver partnership), his place taken by Kimi Räikkönen, then in , Coulthard took their solitary win at Monaco while Ferrari repeated McLaren's 1988 feat of 15 wins in a season. The year started promisingly, with one win each for Coulthard and Räikkönen at the first two Grands Prix. However, they were hampered when the MP4-18 car designed for that year suffered crash test and reliability problems, forcing them to continue using a 'D' development of the year-old MP4-17 for longer than they had initially planned. Despite this, Räikkönen scored points consistently and challenged for the championship up to the final race, eventually losing by two points. The team began with the MP4-19, which technical director Adrian Newey described as "a debugged version of [the MP4-18]". It was not a success, though, and was replaced mid-season by the MP4-19B. With this, Räikkönen scored the team's and his only win of the year at the Belgian Grand Prix, as McLaren finished fifth in the Constructors' Championship, their worst ranking since 1983. Coulthard left for Red Bull Racing in to be replaced by former CART champion Juan Pablo Montoya for what was McLaren's most successful season in several years as he and Räikkönen won ten races. However, both the team not being able to work out why the car could not heat its tyres properly in the early stages of the season and the overall unreliability of the MP4-20 cost several race victories when Räikkönen had been leading or in contention to win and also costing him grid positions in some qualifying sessions, which allowed Renault and their driver Fernando Alonso to capitalise and win both titles. In , the superior reliability and speed of the Ferraris and Renaults prevented the team from gaining any victories for the first time in a decade. Montoya parted company acrimoniously with the team to race in NASCAR after the United States Grand Prix, where he crashed into Räikkönen at the start; test driver Pedro de la Rosa deputised for the remainder of the season. The team also lost Räikkönen to Ferrari at the end of the year. Steve Matchett argued that the poor reliability of McLaren in 2006 and recent previous years was due to a lack of team continuity and stability. His cited examples of instability are logistical challenges related to the move to the McLaren Technology Centre, Adrian Newey's aborted move to Jaguar and later move to Red Bull, the subsequent move of Newey's deputy to Red Bull, and personnel changes at Ilmor. The season saw Fernando Alonso race alongside Formula One debutant and long-time McLaren protege Lewis Hamilton. The pair scored four wins each and led the Drivers' Championship for much of the year, but tensions arose within the team, BBC Sport claimed that Alonso was unable to cope with Hamilton's competitiveness. At the Hungarian Grand Prix, Alonso was judged to have deliberately impeded his teammate during qualifying, so the team were not allowed to score Constructors' points at the event. An internal agreement within the McLaren team stated that drivers would alternatively have an extra lap for qualifying, however, Lewis Hamilton refused to accept for the Hungarian Grand Prix. Subsequently, the McLaren team was investigated by the FIA for having proprietary technical blueprints of Ferrari's car – the so-called "Spygate" controversy. At the first hearing, McLaren management consistently denied all knowledge, blaming a single "rogue engineer". However, in the final hearing, McLaren was found guilty and the team was excluded from the Constructors' Championship and fined $100 million. The drivers were allowed to continue without penalty, and whilst Hamilton led the Drivers' Championship heading into the final race in Brazil, Räikkönen in the Ferrari won the race and the Drivers' Championship, a single point ahead of both McLaren drivers. In November, Alonso and McLaren agreed to terminate their contract by mutual consent, Heikki Kovalainen filling the vacant seat alongside Hamilton. In , a close fight ensued between Hamilton and the Ferraris of Felipe Massa and Räikkönen; Hamilton won five times and despite also crossing the finish line first at the Belgian Grand Prix, he was deemed to have gained an illegal advantage by cutting a chicane during an overtake and was controversially demoted to third. Going into the final race in Brazil, Hamilton had a seven-point lead over Massa. Massa won there, but Hamilton dramatically clinched his first Drivers' Championship by moving into the necessary fifth position at the final corner of the final lap of the race. Despite winning his first Grand Prix in Hungary, Kovalainen finished the season only seventh in the overall standings, allowing Ferrari to take the constructors' title. Before the start of the season, Dennis retired as team principal, handing responsibility to Martin Whitmarsh, but the year started badly: the MP4-24 car was off the pace and the team was given a three-race suspended ban for misleading stewards at the Australian and Malaysian Grands Prix. Despite these early problems, a late revival had Hamilton win at the Hungarian and Singapore Grands Prix. 2010–2014: Customer Mercedes engines For the 2010 season, McLaren lost its status as the Mercedes works team; Mercedes decided to buy the Brackley-based Brawn team that had won the 2009 titles with its customer engines, Whitmarsh having chosen to abandon their exclusive rights to the Mercedes engines to help Brawn run. Mercedes still continued providing engines to McLaren, albeit under a supplier-customer relationship rather than the works partnership as before, while it sold its 40 percent shares of McLaren over two years. McLaren signed 2009 champion, Jenson Button, to replace Kovalainen alongside Hamilton in . Button won twice (in Australia and China) and Hamilton three times (in Turkey, Canada, and Belgium), but they and McLaren failed to win their respective championships, that year's MP4-25 largely outpaced by Red Bull's RB6. Hamilton and Button remained with the team into , with Hamilton winning three races – China, Germany, and Abu Dhabi and Button also winning three races – Canada, Hungary, and Japan. Button finished the Drivers' Championship in second place with 270 points behind 2011 Drivers' Champion Sebastian Vettel of Red Bull Racing, ahead of Hamilton's 227 points. McLaren was second in the Constructors' Championship to Red Bull Racing. Throughout the season, Hamilton was involved in several incidents with other drivers including – most notably – multiple collisions with 2008 title rival Massa. In , McLaren won the first race of the year in Australia with a dominant victory by Button and a 3rd place from pole for Hamilton, while Hamilton went on to win in Canada, but by the mid-way mark of the season at the team's home race at Silverstone, the McLaren cars managed only eighth place (Hamilton) and 10th place (Button), while the drivers' and Constructors' Championships were being dominated by Red Bull Racing and Ferrari, whose cars occupied the first four places of the , this was partially due to pit stop problems and Button's temporary dip in form after not adapting as well as Hamilton to the new Pirelli tyres. The car also suffered reliability problems which cost the team and its drivers numerous potential points, most notably in Singapore and Abu Dhabi, where Hamilton had been leading from the front in both races and in Italy where the team lost a 1-2 finish when Button's car failed with fuel problems on lap 33. Sergio Pérez replaced Hamilton for , after Hamilton decided to leave for Mercedes. The team's car for the season, the MP4-28, was launched on 31 January 2013. The car struggled to compete with the other top teams and the season had McLaren fail to produce a podium finish for the first time since . Kevin Magnussen replaced Pérez for , and Ron Dennis, who had remained at arm's length since stepping down from the team principal role, returned as CEO | constructor, and has won the Canadian-American Challenge Cup (Can-Am) sports car racing championship. The team is a subsidiary of the McLaren Group, which owns a majority of the team. Founded in 1963 by New Zealander Bruce McLaren, the team won its first Grand Prix at the 1968 Belgian Grand Prix, but their greatest initial success was in Can-Am, which they dominated from 1967 to 1971. Further American triumph followed, with Indianapolis 500 wins in McLaren cars for Mark Donohue in 1972 and Johnny Rutherford in 1974 and 1976. After Bruce McLaren died in a testing accident in 1970, Teddy Mayer took over and led the team to their first Formula One Constructors' Championship in , with Emerson Fittipaldi and James Hunt winning the Drivers' Championship in 1974 and respectively. 1974 also marked the start of a long-standing sponsorship by the Marlboro cigarette brand. In 1981, McLaren merged with Ron Dennis' Project Four Racing; Dennis took over as team principal, and shortly afterwards organised a buyout of the original McLaren shareholders to take full control of the team. This began the team's most successful era; with Porsche and Honda engines, Niki Lauda, Alain Prost, and Ayrton Senna won seven Drivers' Championships between them and the team took six Constructors' Championships. The combination of Prost and Senna was particularly dominant—together they won all but one race in —but later their rivalry soured and Prost left for Ferrari. Fellow English team Williams offered the most consistent challenge during this period, the two winning every constructors' title between and . By the mid-1990s, Honda had withdrawn from Formula One, Senna had moved to Williams, and the team went three seasons without a win. With Mercedes-Benz engines, West sponsorship, and former Williams designer Adrian Newey, further championships came in and with driver Mika Häkkinen, and during the 2000s the team were consistent front-runners, with driver Lewis Hamilton taking their latest title in . Ron Dennis retired as McLaren team principal in 2009, handing over to long-time McLaren employee Martin Whitmarsh. At the end of 2013, after the team's worst season since 2004, Whitmarsh was ousted. McLaren announced in 2013 that they would be using Honda engines from 2015 onwards, replacing Mercedes-Benz. The team raced as McLaren Honda for the first time since 1992 at the 2015 Australian Grand Prix. In September 2017, McLaren announced they had agreed on an engine supply with Renault from 2018 to 2020. McLaren is using Mercedes-Benz engines from the 2021 season until at least 2024. After initially returning to the Indianapolis 500 in 2017 as a backer of Andretti Autosport to run Fernando Alonso and then in 2019 as an independent entry, McLaren announced in August 2019 that they would run in conjunction with Arrow Schmidt Peterson Motorsports starting in 2020 to run the full IndyCar Series, the combined entry being named Arrow McLaren SP. Initially having no ownership interest in the team, McLaren would purchase 75% of the operation in 2021. McLaren will enter the electric off-road racing series Extreme E in 2022. Origins Bruce McLaren Motor Racing was founded in 1963 by New Zealander Bruce McLaren. Bruce was a works driver for the British Formula One team Cooper with whom he had won three Grands Prix and come second in the World Championship. Wanting to compete in the Australasian Tasman Series, Bruce approached his employers, but when team owner Charles Cooper insisted on using 1.5-litre Formula One-specification engines instead of the 2.5-litre motors permitted by the Tasman rules, Bruce decided to set up his own team to run him and his prospective Formula One teammate Timmy Mayer with custom-built Cooper cars. Bruce won the 1964 series, but Mayer was killed in practice for the final race at the Longford Circuit in Tasmania. When Bruce McLaren approached Teddy Mayer to help him with the purchase of the Zerex sports car from Roger Penske, Teddy Mayer and Bruce McLaren began discussing a business partnership resulting in Teddy Mayer buying in to Bruce McLaren Motor Racing Limited (BMMR) ultimately becoming its largest shareholder. The team was based in Feltham in 1963–1964, and from 1965 until 1981 in Colnbrook, England. The team also held a British licence. Despite this, Bruce never used the traditional British racing green on his cars. Instead, he used colour schemes that were not based on national principles (e.g. his first car, the McLaren M2B, was painted white with a green stripe, to represent a fictional Yamura team in John Frankenheimer's film Grand Prix). During this period, Bruce drove for his team in sports car races in the United Kingdom and North America and also entered the 1965 Tasman Series with Phil Hill, but did not win it. He continued to drive in Grands Prix for Cooper, but judging that team's form to be waning, decided to race his own cars in 1966. Racing history: Formula One Early days (1966–1967) Bruce McLaren made the team's Grand Prix debut at the 1966 Monaco race (of the current Formula One teams only Ferrari is older). His race ended after nine laps due to a terminal oil leak. The car was the M2B designed by Robin Herd, but the programme was hampered by a poor choice of engines: a 3.0-litre version of Ford's Indianapolis 500 engine and a Serenissima V8 were used, the latter scoring the team's first point in Britain, but both were underpowered and unreliable. For Bruce decided to use a British Racing Motors (BRM) V12 engine, but due to delays with the engine, was forced initially to use a modified Formula Two car called the M4B powered by a 2.1-litre BRM V8, later building a similar but slightly larger car called the M5A for the V12. Neither car brought great success, the best result being a fourth at Monaco. Ford-Cosworth DFV engines (1968–1982) For , after driving McLaren's sole entry for the previous two years, Bruce was joined by 1967 champion and fellow New Zealander Denny Hulme, who was already racing for McLaren in Can-Am. That year's new M7A car, Herd's final design for the team, was powered by Cosworth's new and soon to be ubiquitous DFV engine (the DFV would go on to be used by McLaren until 1983) and with it a major upturn in form proceeded. Bruce won the Race of Champions at the Brands Hatch circuit and Hulme won the International Trophy at Silverstone, both non-championship races, before Bruce took the team's first championship win at the Belgian Grand Prix. Hulme also won the Italian and Canadian Grands Prix later in the year, helping the team to second in the Constructors' Championship. Using an updated 'C' version on the M7, a further three podium finishes followed for Bruce in , but the team's fifth win had to wait until the last race of the 1969 championship when Hulme won the Mexican Grand Prix. That year, McLaren experimented with four-wheel drive in the M9A, but the car had only a single outing driven by Derek Bell at the British Grand Prix; Bruce described driving it as like "trying to write your signature with somebody jogging your elbow". The year started with a second-place each for Hulme and Bruce in the first two Grands Prix, but in June, Bruce was killed in a crash at Goodwood while testing the new M8D Can-Am car. After his death, Teddy Mayer took over effective control of the team; Hulme continued with Dan Gurney and Peter Gethin partnering him. Gurney won the first two Can-Am events at Mosport and St. Jovite and placed ninth in the third, but left the team mid-season, and Gethin took over from there. While began promisingly when Hulme led the opening round in South Africa before retiring with broken suspension, ultimately Hulme, Gethin (who left for BRM mid-season,) and Jackie Oliver again failed to score a win. The 1972 season saw improvements though: Hulme won the team's first Grand Prix for two-and-a-half years in South Africa and he and Peter Revson scored ten other podiums, the team finishing third in the Constructors' Championship. McLaren gave Jody Scheckter his Formula One debut at the final race at Watkins Glen. All McLaren drivers used the Ford-Cosworth engines, except for Andrea de Adamich and Nanni Galli who used engines from Alfa Romeo in 1970. The McLaren M23, designed by Gordon Coppuck, was the team's new car for the season. Sharing parts of the design of both McLaren's Formula One M19 and Indianapolis M16 cars (itself inspired by Lotus's 72), it was a mainstay for four years. Hulme won with it in Sweden and Revson took the only Grand Prix wins of his career in Britain and Canada. In , Emerson Fittipaldi, world champion with Lotus two years earlier, joined McLaren. Hulme, in his final Formula One campaign, won the Argentinian season-opener; Fittipaldi, with wins in Brazil, Belgium and Canada, took the Drivers' Championship. It was a close fight for Fittipaldi, who secured the title with a fourth at the season-ending United States Grand Prix, putting him three points ahead of Ferrari's Clay Regazzoni. With Hulme and multiple motorcycle world champion Mike Hailwood, he also sealed McLaren's first Constructors' Championship. The year was less successful for the team: Fittipaldi was second in the championship behind Niki Lauda. Hulme's replacement Jochen Mass took his sole GP win in Spain. At the end of 1975, Fittipaldi left to join his brother's Fittipaldi/Copersucar team. With the top drivers already signed to other teams, Mayer turned to James Hunt, a driver on whom biographer Gerald Donaldson reflected as having "a dubious reputation". In , Lauda was again strong in his Ferrari; at midseason, he led the championship with 56 points whilst Hunt had only 26 despite wins in Spain (a race from which he was initially disqualified) and France. At the German Grand Prix, though, Lauda crashed heavily, was nearly killed, and missed the next two races. Hunt capitalised by winning four more Grands Prix giving him a three-point deficit going into the finale in Japan. Here it rained torentially, Lauda retired because of safety concerns, and Hunt sealed the Drivers' Championship by finishing third. McLaren, though, lost the Constructors' Championship to Ferrari. In , the M23 was gradually replaced with the M26, the M23's final works outing being Gilles Villeneuve's Formula One debut with the team in a one-off appearance at the British Grand Prix. Hunt won on three occasions that year, but the Lauda and Ferrari combination proved too strong, Hunt and McLaren managing just fifth and third in the respective championships. From there, results continued to worsen. Lotus and Mario Andretti took the titles with their 78 and 79 ground-effect cars and neither Hunt nor Mass's replacement Patrick Tambay were able to seriously challenge with the nonground-effect M26. Hunt was dropped at the end of 1978 in favour of Lotus's Ronnie Peterson, but when Peterson was killed by a crash at the Italian Grand Prix, John Watson was signed, instead. No improvement occurred in ; Coppuck's M28 design was described by Mayer as "ghastly, a disaster" and "quite diabolical" and the M29 did little to change the situation. Tambay scored no points and Watson only 15 to place the team eighth at the end of the year. The 1980s started much as the 1970s had ended: Alain Prost took over from Tambay but Watson and he rarely scored points. Under increasing pressure since the previous year from principal sponsor Philip Morris and their executive John Hogan, Mayer was coerced into merging McLaren with Ron Dennis's Project Four Formula Two team, also sponsored by Philip Morris. Dennis had designer John Barnard who, inspired by the carbon-fibre rear wings of the BMW M1 race cars that Project Four was preparing, had ideas for an innovative Formula One chassis constructed from carbon-fibre instead of conventional aluminium alloy. On their own, they lacked the money to build it, but with investment that came with the merger it became the McLaren MP4 (later called MP4/1) of , driven by Watson and Andrea de Cesaris. In the MP4, Watson won the British Grand Prix and had three other podium finishes. Soon after the merger, McLaren moved from Colnbrook to a new base in Woking and Dennis and Mayer initially shared the managing directorship of the company; by 1982, Mayer had departed and Tyler Alexander's and his shareholdings had been bought by the new owners. TAG-Porsche and Honda engines (1983–1992) In the early 1980s, teams like Renault, Ferrari and Brabham were using 1.5-litre turbocharged engines in favour of the 3.0-litre naturally aspirated engines that had been standard since 1966. Having seen in 1982 the need for a turbo engine of their own, Dennis had convinced Williams backer Techniques d'Avant Garde (TAG) to fund Porsche-built, TAG-branded turbo engines made to Barnard's specifications; TAG's founder Mansour Ojjeh would later become a McLaren shareholder. In the meantime, they continued with Cosworth engines as old rival Lauda came out of retirement in 1982 to drive alongside Watson in that year's 1B development of the MP4. They each won two races, Watson notably from 17th place on the grid in Detroit, and at one stage of the season McLaren were second in the constructors' championship. As part of a dispute with FISA, they boycotted the San Marino Grand Prix. Although was not so fruitful, Watson did win again in the United States, this time from 22nd on the grid at Long Beach. Having been fired by Renault, Prost was once again at McLaren for . Now using the TAG engines, the team dominated, scoring 12 wins and two-and-a-half times as many constructors' points as nearest rival Ferrari. In the Drivers' Championship, Lauda prevailed over Prost by half a point, the narrowest margin ever. The McLaren-TAGs were again strong in ; a third Constructors' Championship came their way while this time Prost won the Drivers' Championship. In , the Williams team were resurgent with their Honda engine and drivers Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet, while at McLaren, Lauda's replacement, 1982 champion Keke Rosberg could not gel with the car. Williams took the Constructors' Championship, but for Prost, wins in San Marino, Monaco, and Austria combined with the fact that the Williams drivers were taking points from each other meant that he retained a chance going into the last race, the Australian Grand Prix. There, a puncture for Mansell and a precautionary pit stop for Piquet gave Prost the race win and his second title, making him the first driver to win back-to-back championships since Jack Brabham in and 1960. In Barnard departed for Ferrari to be replaced by Steve Nichols (who himself joined Ferrari in 1989). In the hands of Prost and Stefan Johansson, though, Nichols's MP4/3 and the TAG engine could not match the Williams-Honda. For , Honda switched their supply to McLaren and, encouraged by Prost, Dennis signed Ayrton Senna to drive. Despite regulations reducing the boost pressure and fuel capacity (and therefore, power) of the turbo cars, Honda persisted with a turbocharged engine. In the MP4/4, Senna and Prost engaged in a season-long battle, winning 15 of the 16 races (at the other race at Monza, Senna had been leading comfortably, but collided with back-marker Jean-Louis Schlesser). At the Portuguese Grand Prix, their relationship soured when Senna squeezed Prost against the pit wall; Prost won, but afterwards said, "It was dangerous. If he wants the world championship that badly he can have it." Prost scored more points that year, but because only the best 11 results counted, Senna took the title at the penultimate race in Japan. The next year, with turbos banned, Honda supplied a new 3.5-L naturally aspirated V10 engine and McLaren again won both titles with the MP4/5. Their drivers' relationship continued to deteriorate, though, especially when, at the San Marino Grand Prix, Prost felt that Senna had reneged on an agreement not to pass each other at the first corner. Believing that Honda and Dennis were favouring Senna, Prost announced mid-season that he would leave to drive at Ferrari the following year. For the second year in succession, the Drivers' Championship was decided at the Japanese Grand Prix, this time in Prost's favour after Senna and he collided (Senna initially recovered and won the race, but was later disqualified). With former McLaren men Nichols and Prost (Barnard had moved to the Benetton team), Ferrari pushed the British team more closely in . McLaren, in turn, brought in Ferrari's Gerhard Berger, but like the two seasons before, the Drivers' Championship was led by Prost and Senna and settled at the penultimate race in Japan. Here, Senna collided with Prost at the first corner, forcing both to retire, but this time Senna escaped punishment and took the title; McLaren also won the Constructors' Championship. The year was another for McLaren and Senna, with the ascendant Renault-powered Williams team their closest challengers. By , Williams, with their advanced FW14B car, had overtaken McLaren, breaking their four-year run as champions, despite the latter winning five races that year. Ford, Lamborghini and Peugeot engines (1993–1994) As Honda withdrew from the sport at end of 1992 due to their entrance into CART PPG Indy Car World Series in 1993, McLaren sought a new engine supplier. A deal to secure Renault engines fell through, subsequently McLaren switched to customer Ford engines for the season. Senna—who initially agreed only to a race-by-race contract before later signing for the whole year—won five races, including a record-breaking sixth victory at Monaco and a win at the European Grand Prix, where he went from fifth to first on the opening lap. His teammate, 1991 IndyCar champion Michael Andretti, fared much worse: he scored only seven points, and was replaced by test driver Mika Häkkinen for the final three rounds of the season. Williams ultimately won both titles and Senna—who had flirted with moving there for 1993—signed with them for the season. During the 1993 season McLaren took part in a seven part BBC Television documentary called A Season With McLaren. McLaren tested a Lamborghini V12 engine ahead of the season, as part of a potential deal with the then-Lamborghini owner Chrysler, before eventually deciding to use Peugeot engines. With Peugeot power, the MP4/9 was driven by Häkkinen and Martin Brundle, despite achieving eight podiums over the season no wins were achieved. Peugeot was dropped after a single year due to multiple engine failures/unreliability which cost McLaren potential race victories and they switched to a Mercedes-Benz-branded, Ilmor-designed engine. Mercedes partnership (1995–2014) 1995–2009: Works Mercedes partnership 's MP4/10 car was not a front-runner and Brundle's replacement, former champion Nigel Mansell, was unable to fit into the car at first and departed after just two races, with Mark Blundell taking his place. While Williams dominated in , McLaren, now with David Coulthard alongside Häkkinen, went a third successive season without a win. In , however, Coulthard broke this run by winning the season-opening Australian Grand Prix; Häkkinen and he would each win another race before the end of the season, and highly rated designer Adrian Newey joined the team from Williams in August that year. Despite the car's improved pace, unreliability proved costly throughout the season, with retirements at the British and Luxembourg Grands Prix occurring whilst Häkkinen was in the lead. With Newey able to take advantage of new technical regulations for , and with Williams losing their works Renault engines, McLaren were once again able to challenge for the championship. Häkkinen and Coulthard won five of the first six races despite the banning of the team's "brake steer" system, which allowed the rear brakes to be operated individually to reduce understeer, after a protest by Ferrari at the second race in Brazil. Schumacher and Ferrari provided the greatest competition, the former levelled on points with Häkkinen with two races to go, but wins for Häkkinen at the Luxembourg and Japanese Grands Prix gave both him the Drivers' Championship and McLaren the Constructors' Championship. Häkkinen won his second Drivers' Championship the following season, but due to a combination of driver errors and mechanical failures, the team lost the constructors' title to Ferrari. In McLaren won seven races in a close fight with Ferrari, but ultimately Ferrari and Schumacher prevailed in both competitions. This marked the start of a decline in form as Ferrari cemented their dominance of Formula One. In , Häkkinen was outscored by Coulthard for the first time since 1997 and retired (ending Formula One's longest ever driver partnership), his place taken by Kimi Räikkönen, then in , Coulthard took their solitary win at Monaco while Ferrari repeated McLaren's 1988 feat of 15 wins in a season. The year started promisingly, with one win each for Coulthard and Räikkönen at the first two Grands Prix. However, they were hampered when the MP4-18 car designed for that year suffered crash test and reliability problems, forcing them to continue using a 'D' development of the year-old MP4-17 for longer than they had initially planned. Despite this, Räikkönen scored points consistently and challenged for the championship up to the final race, eventually losing by two points. The team began with the MP4-19, which technical director Adrian Newey described as "a debugged version of [the MP4-18]". It was not a success, though, and was replaced mid-season by the MP4-19B. With this, Räikkönen scored the team's and his only win of the year at the Belgian Grand Prix, as McLaren finished fifth in the Constructors' Championship, their worst ranking since 1983. Coulthard left for Red Bull Racing in to be replaced by former CART champion Juan Pablo Montoya for what was McLaren's most successful season in several years as he and Räikkönen won ten races. However, both the team not being able to work out why the car could not heat its tyres properly in the early stages of the season and the overall unreliability of the MP4-20 cost several race victories when Räikkönen had been leading or in contention to win and also costing him grid positions in some qualifying sessions, which allowed Renault and their driver Fernando Alonso to capitalise and win both titles. In , the superior reliability and speed of the Ferraris and Renaults prevented the team from gaining any victories for the first time in a decade. |
municipalities of the Val di Nievole. The province of Massa and Carrara was left crippled, waiting for a reorganization. In 1938, the municipalities of Carrara, Massa, and Montignoso joined and became the municipality of Apuania. In the same year, the industrial zone Apuana was instituted, including in relative Consortium C.Z.I.The municipalities of neighboring Versilia and the province assumed the name of a province of Apuania. In 1946, with decree Lieutenant one (Umberto II of Savoia) the new municipality of Apuania was formed, and the province (for error and/or historical ignorance) resumptions the denomination does not date from 1859 when it was "Massa and Carrara" but Massa. This was the name that had been designated to the city of Massa or Massa of Carrara from 1700 until the formation of the Kingdom of Italy (1860), to distinguish it from other homonymous cities. In 2009, both decrees of 1938 and 1946 were abolished, restoring the old name. Geography and administration The province covers an area of and a total population of about 200,000. There are 17 comuni (singular: comune) in the province. Government List of presidents of the province of Massa and Carrara Economy The province's economical relevance, once mainly based on the production of the famous white Carrara marble, has now shifted to the importation and fabrication of blocks of marble and granite from all over the world. See also | of the "Circondario" Castelnuovo Garfagnana were removed from Emilia and assigned to the province of Lucca, in order to compensate for the passage to the new province of Pistoia of all the municipalities of the Val di Nievole. The province of Massa and Carrara was left crippled, waiting for a reorganization. In 1938, the municipalities of Carrara, Massa, and Montignoso joined and became the municipality of Apuania. In the same year, the industrial zone Apuana was instituted, including in relative Consortium C.Z.I.The municipalities of neighboring Versilia and the province assumed the name of a province of Apuania. In 1946, with decree Lieutenant one (Umberto II of Savoia) the new municipality of Apuania was formed, and the province (for error and/or historical ignorance) resumptions the denomination does not date from 1859 when it was "Massa and Carrara" but Massa. This was the name that had been designated to the city of Massa or Massa of Carrara from 1700 until the formation of the Kingdom of Italy (1860), to distinguish it from other homonymous cities. In 2009, both decrees of 1938 and 1946 were abolished, restoring the old name. Geography and administration The province covers an area of and a total population of |
Monti (given name) Monti (surname) Places Monti, Lazio, the first rione (historic district) of | refer to: People Monti (given name) Monti (surname) Places Monti, Lazio, the first rione (historic district) of Rome, |
wine annually. Brunello was the first wine to be awarded Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG) status. In addition to Brunello di Montalcino, which must be aged five years prior to release, 6 years for the Riserva, Rosso di Montalcino (DOC), made from sangiovese grosso grapes and aged one year, and a variety of Super Tuscan wines are also produced within the comune, as well as the Moscadello sweet white wines for which it was most famous until the development of the Brunello series. Main sights Medieval structures The first walls of the town were built in the 13th century. The fortress, built in 1361 atop the highest point of the town, was designed with a pentagonal layout by the Sienese architects Mino Foresi and Domenico di Feo. The fortress incorporates some of the pre-existing southern walls, the pre-existing structures including the keep of Santo Martini, the San Giovanni tower and an ancient basilica which now serves as the fortress chapel. Though the town itself was eventually conquered, the fortress itself never submitted, an admirable feat, considering the size of the Sienese and Florentine forces that besieged Montalcino at varying intervals. The narrow, short street leads down from the main gate of the fortress to the Chiesa di Sant'Agostino with its simple 13th-century, Romanesque façade. Adjacent to the church is the former convent, now the Musei Riuniti, both a civic and diocesan museum, housing among its collections: a wooden crucifix by an unknown artist of the Sienese school, two 15th century wooden sculptures, including a Madonna by an anonymous artist, and several terracotta sculptures attributed to the Della Robbia school. The collection also includes a St Peter and St Paul by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and a Virgin and Child by Simone Martini. There are also modern works from the early 20th century in the museum. The Duomo (cathedral), dedicated to San Salvatore, was built originally in the 14th Century, but now has a 19th-century Neoclassical façade designed by the Sienese architect Agostino Fantasici. The Piazza della Principessa Margherita is down the hill from the fortress and Duomo on the via Matteotti. The principal building on the piazza is the former Palazzo dei Priori or Palazzo | Montaperti in 1260, Montalcino was deeply involved and affected by the conflicts in which Siena became embroiled, particularly in those with the city of Florence in the 14th and 15th centuries, and like many other cities in central and northern Italy, the town was also caught up in the internecine wars between the Ghibellines (supporters of the Holy Roman Empire) and the Guelphs (supporters of the Papacy). Factions from each side controlled the town at various times in the late medieval period. Once Siena had been conquered by Florence under the rule of the Medici family in 1555, Montalcino held out for almost four years, but ultimately fell to the Florentines, under whose control it remained until the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was amalgamated into a united Italy in 1861. In the case of Montalcino, gradual economic decline has recently been reversed by economic growth due to the increasing popularity of the town's famous wine Brunello di Montalcino, made from the sangiovese grosso grapes grown within the comune. The number of producers of the wine has grown from only 11 in the 1960s to more than 200 today, producing some 330,000 cases of the Brunello wine annually. Brunello was the first wine to be awarded Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita (DOCG) status. In addition to Brunello di Montalcino, which must be aged five years prior to release, 6 years for the Riserva, Rosso di Montalcino (DOC), made from sangiovese grosso grapes and aged one year, and a variety of Super Tuscan wines are also produced within the comune, as well as the Moscadello sweet white wines for which it was most famous until the development of the Brunello series. Main sights Medieval structures The first walls of the town were built in the 13th century. The fortress, built in 1361 atop the highest |
Gobies and clingfishes Typically are hardy and do not harm invertebrates which makes them a good choice of fish for a reef tank. {|class="sortable collapsible" cellpadding="4" width="100%" border="1" style="border:1px solid #aaa; border-collapse:collapse" ! align="left" style="background:#F2F3F4" width="170px" | Common name ! style="background:#F2F3F4" width="130px" class="unsortable" | Image ! align="left" style="background:#F2F3F4" width="190px" | Taxonomy ! style="background:#F2F3F4" width="100px" | Reef safe ! align="left" style="background:#F2F3F4" width="610px" class="unsortable" | Description ! style="background:#F2F3F4" width="100px" | Max size |- | Black barred convict goby || || Priolepis nocturna || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Black clown goby || || Gobiodon acicularis || align="center" | Mostly; can destroy unhealthy Acropora by laying its eggs in the coral's tissue || Similar to Yellow clown goby, but black || |- | Bluespotted watchman goby || || Cryptocentrus pavoninoides || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Catalina goby || || Lythrypnus dalli || align="center" | Yes || A cold water species that doesn’t live long at reef temperatures. || align="center" | |- | Cave transparent goby || || Coryphopterus glaucofraenum || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Citron clown goby || || Gobiodon citrinus || align="center" | Mostly; can destroy unhealthy Acropora by laying its eggs in the coral's tissue || || align="center" | |- | Court jester goby || || Amblygobius rainfordi || || || align="center" | |- | Diagonal bar prawn goby || || Amblyeleotris diagonalis || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Diamond watchman goby || || Valenciennea puellaris || align="center" | Yes || Burrow and sift sand constantly; very good algae eaters || align="center" | |- | Dracula goby || || Stonogobiops dracula || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Gold neon eviota goby || || Eviota pellucida || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Green banded goby || || Elacatinus multifasciatus || align="center" | Yes || Small burrowing goby with green vertical stripes || align="center" | |- | Green clown goby || || Gobiodon atrangulatus || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Hector's goby || || Amblygobius hectori || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Hi fin red banded goby || || Stonogobiops nematodes || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Neon goby || || Elacatinus oceanops || align="center" | Yes || A Caribbean cleaner species that sometimes eats larger parasites from other fish. || |- | Orange marked goby || || Amblygobius decussatus || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Orange spotted goby || || Amblyeleotris guttata || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Orange stripe prawn goby || || Amblyeleotris randalli || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Pinkspotted shrimp goby || || Gobius melanopus || align="center" | May eat ornamental shrimp || White fish with pink bands around the body and pink spots on face and fins. One of the most handsome members of the group. || align="center" | |- | Pinkbar goby || || Cryptocentrus aurora || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Red head goby || || Elacatinus puncticulatus || align="center" | Yes || A small goby that can clean like the neon goby but is easily frightened. Often said to 'disappear' in a larger tank, as it never swims out into view. || align="center" | |- | Red striped goby || || Trimma cana || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper banded goby || || Amblygobius phalaena || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper blue dot goby || || Valenciennea sexguttata || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper gold head goby || || Valenciennea strigata || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper railway glider goby || || Valenciennea helsdingenii || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper striped goby || || Valenciennea longipinnis || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Steinitz goby || || Amblyeleotris steinitzi || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Tangaroa goby || || Ctenogobiops tangaroai || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Tiger watchman goby || || Valenciennea wardii || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Two spot goby || || Signigobius biocellatus || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Violet goby || || Gobioides broussonnetii || align="center" | No || Also a freshwater and brackish water fish and often sold as Dragon Fish or Dragon Goby || align="center" | 21" |- | Wheeler's watchman goby || || Amblyeleotris wheeleri || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Yellow watchman goby || || Cryptocentrus cinctus || align="center" | Yes || A species of "watchman" or "shrimp" goby that can form a symbiotic relationship with pistol shrimp || align="center" | |- | Yasha goby || || Stonogobiops yasha || align="center" | Yes || A species of "watchman" or "shrimp" goby that will form a symbiotic relationship with the red and white banded pistol shrimp, Alpheus randalli. || align="center" | |- | Yellow clown goby|| || Gobiodon okinawae || align="center" | Yes || Small yellow fish that likes branching corals || align="center" | |- | Yellow priolepis goby || || Priolepis aureoviridis || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Yellow stripe clingfish || || Diademichthys lineatus || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |} Grunts Hamlet Hawkfish Attractive and relatively small, Hawkfish make excellent additions to fish only or FOWLR aquariums. With extreme caution taken, they could be kept in reef aquariums, but because of their propensity to eat small ornamental shrimps and other mobile invertebrates (usually leaving sessile invertebrates alone) they are not considered reef safe. Lacking a swim bladder, Hawkfish can often be found resting in crevices of rocks or among the branches of corals or gorgonians. Hawkfish are easy to care for and not picky at all about water quality. A varied diet, including spirulina and small meaty foods like Mysis is recommended. Hogfish Idols Jacks Jawfish Jawfish are burrowers and require a sandy substrate of sufficient depth. Lionfish "Lionfish" specifically refer to the genus | aggressive and difficult to catch once you put them in an aquarium. Damselfish change gender as they grow larger and older. Small damselfish are ungendered. Eventually, they become males if no males prevent them from doing so. One or sometimes two males live with a female and guard over the eggs. Females are the largest fish and dominant over the males and juveniles. They will not allow other females into an area they have claimed as their territory without a fight. They may not allow new males or juveniles, either. Aggression increases with each change. Dartfish Most should be kept as pairs or small groups where all individuals are added at once. Dragonets Dragonets are often mis-categorized as gobies or blennies by fish sellers. They are bottom-dwelling fish that constantly hunt tiny invertebrates for food. Most starve to death in a marine aquarium unless you provide a refugium or place for the invertebrates to reproduce safely without any fish being able to reach them. Eels Most eels are easily kept in a large aquarium, although several species such as the blue ribbon eel should usually be avoided. With any moray eel care must be taken to secure the lid as one of the most common causes of death is escaping from the tank, and onto the floor. Filefish Less often kept than their relatives the triggerfish and puffers, there are many filefish that make good aquarium residents, and a few that require specialized diets, making it hard to sustain them in an aquarium. Flatfish Frogfish A type of Anglerfish, Frogfish are ambush predators with huge mouths. They are capable of eating fish up to twice their length so care should be taken in choosing tank mates. Goatfish While not as common a choice for aquariums as many other species, they are typically hardy and brightly colored Gobies and clingfishes Typically are hardy and do not harm invertebrates which makes them a good choice of fish for a reef tank. {|class="sortable collapsible" cellpadding="4" width="100%" border="1" style="border:1px solid #aaa; border-collapse:collapse" ! align="left" style="background:#F2F3F4" width="170px" | Common name ! style="background:#F2F3F4" width="130px" class="unsortable" | Image ! align="left" style="background:#F2F3F4" width="190px" | Taxonomy ! style="background:#F2F3F4" width="100px" | Reef safe ! align="left" style="background:#F2F3F4" width="610px" class="unsortable" | Description ! style="background:#F2F3F4" width="100px" | Max size |- | Black barred convict goby || || Priolepis nocturna || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Black clown goby || || Gobiodon acicularis || align="center" | Mostly; can destroy unhealthy Acropora by laying its eggs in the coral's tissue || Similar to Yellow clown goby, but black || |- | Bluespotted watchman goby || || Cryptocentrus pavoninoides || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Catalina goby || || Lythrypnus dalli || align="center" | Yes || A cold water species that doesn’t live long at reef temperatures. || align="center" | |- | Cave transparent goby || || Coryphopterus glaucofraenum || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Citron clown goby || || Gobiodon citrinus || align="center" | Mostly; can destroy unhealthy Acropora by laying its eggs in the coral's tissue || || align="center" | |- | Court jester goby || || Amblygobius rainfordi || || || align="center" | |- | Diagonal bar prawn goby || || Amblyeleotris diagonalis || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Diamond watchman goby || || Valenciennea puellaris || align="center" | Yes || Burrow and sift sand constantly; very good algae eaters || align="center" | |- | Dracula goby || || Stonogobiops dracula || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Gold neon eviota goby || || Eviota pellucida || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Green banded goby || || Elacatinus multifasciatus || align="center" | Yes || Small burrowing goby with green vertical stripes || align="center" | |- | Green clown goby || || Gobiodon atrangulatus || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Hector's goby || || Amblygobius hectori || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Hi fin red banded goby || || Stonogobiops nematodes || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Neon goby || || Elacatinus oceanops || align="center" | Yes || A Caribbean cleaner species that sometimes eats larger parasites from other fish. || |- | Orange marked goby || || Amblygobius decussatus || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Orange spotted goby || || Amblyeleotris guttata || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Orange stripe prawn goby || || Amblyeleotris randalli || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Pinkspotted shrimp goby || || Gobius melanopus || align="center" | May eat ornamental shrimp || White fish with pink bands around the body and pink spots on face and fins. One of the most handsome members of the group. || align="center" | |- | Pinkbar goby || || Cryptocentrus aurora || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Red head goby || || Elacatinus puncticulatus || align="center" | Yes || A small goby that can clean like the neon goby but is easily frightened. Often said to 'disappear' in a larger tank, as it never swims out into view. || align="center" | |- | Red striped goby || || Trimma cana || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper banded goby || || Amblygobius phalaena || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper blue dot goby || || Valenciennea sexguttata || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper gold head goby || || Valenciennea strigata || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper railway glider goby || || Valenciennea helsdingenii || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Sleeper striped goby || || Valenciennea longipinnis || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Steinitz goby || || Amblyeleotris steinitzi || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Tangaroa goby || || Ctenogobiops tangaroai || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Tiger watchman goby || || Valenciennea wardii || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Two spot goby || || Signigobius biocellatus || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Violet goby || || Gobioides broussonnetii || align="center" | No || Also a freshwater and brackish water fish and often sold as Dragon Fish or Dragon Goby || align="center" | 21" |- | Wheeler's watchman goby || || Amblyeleotris wheeleri || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Yellow watchman goby || || Cryptocentrus cinctus || align="center" | Yes || A species of "watchman" or "shrimp" goby that can form a symbiotic relationship with pistol shrimp || align="center" | |- | Yasha goby || || Stonogobiops yasha || align="center" | Yes || A species of "watchman" or "shrimp" goby that will form a symbiotic relationship with the red and white banded pistol shrimp, Alpheus randalli. || align="center" | |- | Yellow clown goby|| || Gobiodon okinawae || align="center" | Yes || Small yellow fish that likes branching corals || align="center" | |- | Yellow priolepis goby || || Priolepis aureoviridis || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |- | Yellow stripe clingfish || || Diademichthys lineatus || align="center" | Yes || || align="center" | |} Grunts Hamlet Hawkfish Attractive and relatively small, Hawkfish make excellent additions to fish only or FOWLR aquariums. With extreme caution taken, they could be kept in reef aquariums, but because of their propensity to eat small ornamental shrimps and other mobile invertebrates (usually leaving sessile invertebrates alone) they are not considered reef safe. Lacking a swim bladder, Hawkfish can often be found resting in crevices of rocks or among the branches of corals or gorgonians. Hawkfish are easy to care for and not picky at all about water quality. A varied diet, including spirulina and small meaty foods like Mysis is recommended. Hogfish Idols Jacks Jawfish Jawfish are burrowers and require a sandy substrate of sufficient depth. Lionfish "Lionfish" specifically refer to the genus Pterois within the family Scorpaenidae. They have venomous spines and should be treated with caution. Other species within Scorpaenidae but outside Pterois may also have "lionfish" in their common names. Feeder goldfish are not the proper nutrition for a lion fish. Parrotfish Pipefish Pipefish are relatives of seahorses and require a similar level of care. They should only be bought by experienced aquarium owners. Captive bred specimens are sometimes available, and are significantly more likely to survive. Pseudochromidae Usually only a single specimen can be kept in an aquarium. Sometimes multiple specimens can be kept in larger aquariums, but usually this requires them to be added at the same time or they will be too territorial. Rabbitfish and Foxfaces Less commonly kept than some other species, many still make hardy and colorful aquarium residents. Rays Most rays have a venomous spine near the base of the tail. Care must be taken to avoid this animal when performing tank maintenance and during capture. Scorpionfish Because they are relatively inactive fishes, most species can be kept in smaller aquariums than other equally large fish, and 30 gallon tanks are not unusual. Because they are capable of eating fish that are surprisingly large, but will often be picked at by fish that eat invertebrates a species tank is often set up for them. Some fish will never accept anything but live food, typically these specimens are fed on gut packed guppies, mollies, or ghost shrimp. Similarly to the lionfish, care should be taken when handling these fish as they are also venomous. Seahorses It takes a special aquarist to maintain these delicate beauties. A potential keeper must be dedicated and willing to throw artistic creativity to the winds- as what seahorses need is not always beautiful. They require taller tanks, live/frozen food, and many hitching posts, as well as very peaceful tankmates. In fact, beginners would be well-advised not to mix seahorses with any other species until they have more experience. Seahorses found in stores are generally Captive Bred, but occasionally one might find a wild caught (WC) specimen. WC Seahorses should only be purchased by seahorse experts who are going to breed them, as they tend to be finicky and most are endangered in the wild. One of the advantages of Seahorses is that many species stay small and can (in fact, some should'') be kept in smaller tanks, making them ideal for aquarists who are pressed for space or money. Seahorses are among the few popular marine aquarium species that can be temperate. Species vary in their temperature requirement, so here an extra category has been added. TR=Tropical ST=Sub-Tropical TM=Temperate Squirrelfish Typically are hardy fish that can be kept with a wide variety of tankmates. Sharks Many sharks will outgrow most home aquariums and/or adapt |
magazines stimulated an increase in literary criticism and political debate, moving towards more opinionated pieces from the objective newspapers. The increased time between prints and the greater amount of space to write provided a forum for public arguments by scholars and critical observers. The early periodical predecessors to magazines started to evolve to modern definition in the late 1800s. Works slowly became more specialized and the general discussion or cultural periodicals were forced to adapt to a consumer market which yearned for more localization of issues and events. Progressive Era: 1890s–1920s Mass circulation magazines became much more common after 1900, some with circulations in the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Some passed the million-mark in the 1920s. It was an age of mass media. Because of the rapid expansion of national advertising, the cover price fell sharply to about 10 cents. One cause was the heavy coverage of corruption in politics, local government and big business, especially by Muckrakers. They were journalists who wrote for popular magazines to expose social and political sins and shortcomings. They relied on their own investigative journalism reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption. Muckraking magazines–notably McClure's–took on corporate monopolies and crooked political machines while raising public awareness of chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and social issues like child labor. The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel, and Brand Whitlock. Others like Lincoln Steffens exposed political corruption in many large cities; Ida Tarbell went after John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1905 showed the fraud involved in many patent medicines, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle gave a horrid portrayal of how meat was packed, and, also in 1906, David Graham Phillips unleashed a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained that they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck. 1930s–1990s 21st century According to the Research Department of Statista, closures of magazines outnumbered launches in North America during 2009. Although both figures declined during 2010–2015, launches outnumbered closures in each of those years, sometimes by a 3:1 ratio. Focusing more narrowly, MediaFinder.com found that 93 new magazines launched during the first six months of 2014 while only 30 closed in that time frame. The category which produced the most new publications was "Regional interest", of which six new magazines were launched, including 12th & Broad and Craft Beer & Brewing. However, two magazines had to change their print schedules. Johnson Publishing's Jet stopped printing regular issues making the transition to digital format, however still print an annual print edition. Ladies' Home Journal stopped their monthly schedule and home delivery for subscribers to become a quarterly newsstand-only special interest publication. According to statistics from the end of 2013, subscription levels for 22 of the top 25 magazines declined from 2012 to 2013, with just Time, Glamour and ESPN The Magazine gaining numbers. Women's magazines The "seven sisters" of American women's magazines are Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Woman's Day, Redbook, Family Circle and Better Homes and Gardens. Some magazines like Godey's Lady's Book and Harper's Bazaar were intended exclusively for a female audience, emphasizing the traditional gender roles of the 19th century. Harper's Bazaar was the first to focus exclusively on couture fashion, fashion accessories and textiles. The inclusion of didactic content about housekeeping may have increased the appeal of the magazine for a broader audience of women and men concerned about the frivolity of a fashion magazine. Types Targeting women Fashion In the 1920s, new magazines appealed to young German women with a sensuous image and advertisements for the appropriate clothes and accessories they would want to purchase. The glossy pages of Die Dame and Das Blatt der Hausfrau displayed the "Neue Frauen", "New Girl" – what Americans called the flapper. This ideal young woman was chic, financially independent, and an eager consumer of the latest fashions. Magazines kept her up to date on fashion, arts, sports, and modern technology such as automobiles and telephones. Parenting The first women's magazine targeted toward wives and mothers was published in 1852. Through the use of advice columns, advertisements, and various publications related to parenting, women's magazines have influenced views of motherhood and child-rearing. Mass-marketed women's magazines have shaped and transformed cultural values related to parenting practices. As such, magazines targeting women and parenthood have exerted power and influence over ideas about motherhood and child-rearing. Religion Religious groups have used magazines for spreading and communicating religious doctrine for over 100 years. The Friend was founded in Philadelphia in 1827 at the time of a major Quaker schism; it has been continually published and was renamed Friends Journal when the rival Quaker groups formally reconciled in the mid-1950s. Several Catholic magazines launched at the turn of the 20th century that still remain in circulation including; St. Anthony Messenger founded in 1893 and published by the Franciscan Friars (OFM) of St. John the Baptist Province, Cincinnati, Ohio, Los Angeles–based Tidings, founded in 1895 (renamed Angelus in 2016), and published jointly by The Tidings Corporation and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and Maryknoll, founded in 1907 by the Foreign Mission Society of America which brings news about the organization's charitable and missionary work in over 100 countries. There are over 100 Catholic magazines published in the United States, and thousands globally which range in scope from inspirational messages to specific religious orders, faithful family life, to global issues facing the worldwide Church. Jehovah's Witnesses' primary magazine, The Watchtower, was started by Charles Taze Russell in July 1879 under the title Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence. The public edition of the magazine is one of the most widely distributed magazines in the world, with an average printing of approximately 36 million per issue. Celebrity, human interest, and gossip Magazines publishing stories and photos of high-profile individuals and celebrities have long been a popular format in the United States. In 2019, People Magazine ranked second behind ESPN Magazine in total reach with a reported reach of 98.51 million. Professional Professional magazines, also called trade magazines, or business-to-business magazines are targeted to readers employed in particular industries. These magazines typically cover industry trends and news of interest to professionals in the industry. Subscriptions often come with membership in a professional association. Professional magazines may derive revenue from advertisement placements or advertorials by companies selling products and services to a specific professional audience. Examples include Advertising Age and Automotive News. See also History of journalism Automobile magazines Boating magazines British boys' magazines Business magazines Computer magazines Customer magazines Fantasy fiction magazines Horror fiction magazines Humor magazines Inflight magazines Literary magazines Luxury magazines Music magazines News magazines Online magazines Pornographic magazines Pulp magazines Science fiction magazines Scientific journals Shelter magazines (home design and decorating) Sports magazines Sunday magazines Teen magazines Trade journals Video magazines Zines Lists List of 18th-century British periodicals List of 19th-century British periodicals List of architecture magazines List of art magazines List of fashion magazines List of health and fitness magazines List of magazines by circulation Lists of magazines by country List of men's magazines List of music magazines List of online magazine archives List of political magazines List of railroad-related periodicals List of satirical magazines List of science magazines List of travel magazines List of teen magazines List of women's magazines Categories References Further reading Angeletti, Norberto, and Alberto Oliva. Magazines That Make History: Their Origins, Development, and Influence (2004), covers Time, Der Spiegel, Life, Paris Match, National Geographic, Reader's Digest, ¡Hola!, and People Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker, eds. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume I: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (2009) Buxton, | launched, most failing within a few editions, but publishers kept trying. Benjamin Franklin is said to have envisioned one of the first magazines of the American colonies in 1741, the General Magazine and Historical Chronicle. The Pennsylvania Magazine, edited by Thomas Paine, ran only for a short time but was a very influential publication during the Revolutionary War. The final issue containing the text of the Declaration of Independence was published in 1776. Late 19th century In the mid-1800s, monthly magazines gained popularity. They were general interest to begin, containing some news, vignettes, poems, history, political events, and social discussion. Unlike newspapers, they were more of a monthly record of current events along with entertaining stories, poems, and pictures. The first periodicals to branch out from news were Harper's and The Atlantic, which focused on fostering the arts. Both Harper's and The Atlantic persist to this day, with Harper's being a cultural magazine and The Atlantic focusing mainly on world events. Early publications of Harper's even held famous works such as early publications of Moby Dick or famous events such as the laying of the world's first transatlantic telegraph cable; however, the majority of early content was trickle down from British events. The development of the magazines stimulated an increase in literary criticism and political debate, moving towards more opinionated pieces from the objective newspapers. The increased time between prints and the greater amount of space to write provided a forum for public arguments by scholars and critical observers. The early periodical predecessors to magazines started to evolve to modern definition in the late 1800s. Works slowly became more specialized and the general discussion or cultural periodicals were forced to adapt to a consumer market which yearned for more localization of issues and events. Progressive Era: 1890s–1920s Mass circulation magazines became much more common after 1900, some with circulations in the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Some passed the million-mark in the 1920s. It was an age of mass media. Because of the rapid expansion of national advertising, the cover price fell sharply to about 10 cents. One cause was the heavy coverage of corruption in politics, local government and big business, especially by Muckrakers. They were journalists who wrote for popular magazines to expose social and political sins and shortcomings. They relied on their own investigative journalism reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption. Muckraking magazines–notably McClure's–took on corporate monopolies and crooked political machines while raising public awareness of chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and social issues like child labor. The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel, and Brand Whitlock. Others like Lincoln Steffens exposed political corruption in many large cities; Ida Tarbell went after John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1905 showed the fraud involved in many patent medicines, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle gave a horrid portrayal of how meat was packed, and, also in 1906, David Graham Phillips unleashed a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained that they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck. 1930s–1990s 21st century According to the Research Department of Statista, closures of magazines outnumbered launches in North America during 2009. Although both figures declined during 2010–2015, launches outnumbered closures in each of those years, sometimes by a 3:1 ratio. Focusing more narrowly, MediaFinder.com found that 93 new magazines launched during the first six months of 2014 while only 30 closed in that time frame. The category which produced the most new publications was "Regional interest", of which six new magazines were launched, including 12th & Broad and Craft Beer & Brewing. However, two magazines had to change their print schedules. Johnson Publishing's Jet stopped printing regular issues making the transition to digital format, however still print an annual print edition. Ladies' Home Journal stopped their monthly schedule and home delivery for subscribers to become a quarterly newsstand-only special interest publication. According to statistics from the end of 2013, subscription levels for 22 of the top 25 magazines declined from 2012 to 2013, with just Time, Glamour and ESPN The Magazine gaining numbers. Women's magazines The "seven sisters" of American women's magazines are Ladies' Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, McCall's, Woman's Day, Redbook, Family Circle and Better Homes and Gardens. Some magazines like Godey's Lady's Book and Harper's Bazaar were intended exclusively for a female audience, emphasizing the traditional gender roles of the 19th century. Harper's Bazaar was the first to focus exclusively on couture fashion, fashion accessories and textiles. The inclusion of didactic content about housekeeping may have increased the appeal of the magazine for a broader audience of women and men concerned about the frivolity of a fashion magazine. Types Targeting women Fashion In the 1920s, new magazines appealed to young German women with a sensuous image and advertisements for the appropriate clothes and accessories they would want to purchase. The glossy pages of Die Dame and Das Blatt der Hausfrau displayed the "Neue Frauen", "New Girl" – what Americans called the flapper. This ideal young woman was chic, financially independent, and an eager consumer of the latest fashions. Magazines kept her up to date on fashion, arts, sports, and modern technology such as automobiles and telephones. Parenting The first women's magazine targeted toward wives and mothers was published in 1852. Through the use of advice columns, advertisements, and various publications related to parenting, women's magazines have influenced views of motherhood and child-rearing. Mass-marketed women's magazines have shaped and transformed cultural values related to parenting practices. As such, magazines targeting women and parenthood have exerted power and influence over ideas about motherhood and child-rearing. Religion Religious groups have used magazines for spreading and communicating religious doctrine for over 100 years. The Friend was founded in Philadelphia in 1827 at the time of a major Quaker schism; it has been continually published and was renamed Friends Journal when the rival Quaker groups formally reconciled in the mid-1950s. Several Catholic magazines launched at the turn of the 20th century that still remain in circulation including; St. Anthony Messenger founded in 1893 and published by the Franciscan Friars (OFM) of St. John the Baptist Province, Cincinnati, Ohio, Los Angeles–based Tidings, founded in 1895 (renamed Angelus in 2016), and published jointly by The Tidings Corporation and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, and Maryknoll, founded in 1907 by the Foreign Mission Society of America which brings news about the organization's charitable and missionary work in over 100 countries. There are over 100 Catholic magazines |
(-V) toward +V. As Q2 base-emitter junction is reverse-biased, it does not conduct, so all the current from R2 goes into C1. Simultaneously, C2 that is fully discharged and even slightly charged to 0.6 V (in the previous State 2) quickly charges via the low-value collector resistor R4 and Q1 forward-biased base-emitter junction (because R4 is less than R2, C2 charges faster than C1). Thus C2 restores its charge and prepares for the next State C2 when it will act as a time-setting capacitor. Q1 is firmly saturated in the beginning by the "forcing" C2 charging current added to R3 current. In the end, only R3 provides the needed input base current. The resistance R3 is chosen small enough to keep Q1 (not deeply) saturated after C2 is fully charged. When the voltage of C1 right-hand plate (Q2 base voltage) becomes positive and reaches 0.6 V, Q2 base-emitter junction begins diverting a part of R2 charging current. Q2 begins conducting and this starts the avalanche-like positive feedback process as follows. Q2 collector voltage begins falling; this change transfers through the fully charged C2 to Q1 base and Q1 begins cutting off. Its collector voltage begins rising; this change transfers back through the almost empty C1 to Q2 base and makes Q2 conduct more thus sustaining the initial input impact on Q2 base. Thus the initial input change circulates along the feedback loop and grows in an avalanche-like manner until finally Q1 switches off and Q2 switches on. The forward-biased Q2 base-emitter junction fixes the voltage of C1 right-hand plate at 0.6 V and does not allow it to continue rising toward +V. State 2 (Q1 is switched off, Q2 is switched on) Now, the capacitor C2 is fully charged (in the previous State 1) to the power supply voltage V with the polarity shown in Figure 1. Q2 is on and connects the right-hand positive plate of C2 to ground. As its left-hand negative plate is connected to Q1 base, a maximum negative voltage (-V) is applied to Q1 base that keeps Q1 firmly off. C2 begins discharging (reverse charging) via the high-value base resistor R3, so that the voltage of its left-hand plate (and at the base of Q1) is rising from below ground (-V) toward +V. Simultaneously, C1 that is fully discharged and even slightly charged to 0.6 V (in the previous State 1) quickly charges via the low-value collector resistor R1 and Q2 forward-biased base-emitter junction (because R1 is less than R3, C1 charges faster than C2). Thus C1 restores its charge and prepares for the next State 1 when it will act again as a time-setting capacitor...and so on... (the next explanations are a mirror copy of the second part of State 1). Multivibrator frequency Derivation The duration of state 1 (low output) will be related to the time constant R2C1 as it depends on the charging of C1, and the duration of state 2 (high output) will be related to the time constant R3C2 as it depends on the charging of C2. Because they do not need to be the same, an asymmetric duty cycle is easily achieved. The voltage on a capacitor with non-zero initial charge is: Looking at C2, just before Q2 turns on, the left terminal of C2 is at the base-emitter voltage of Q1 (VBE_Q1) and the right terminal is at VCC ("VCC" is used here instead of "+V" to ease notation). The voltage across C2 is VCC minus VBE_Q1 . The moment after Q2 turns on, the right terminal of C2 is now at 0 V which drives the left terminal of C2 to 0 V minus (VCC - VBE_Q1) or VBE_Q1 - VCC. From this instant in time, the left terminal of C2 must be charged back up to VBE_Q1. How long this takes is half our multivibrator switching time (the other half comes from C1). In the charging capacitor equation above, substituting: VBE_Q1 for (VBE_Q1 - VCC) for VCC for results in: Solving for t results in: For this circuit to work, VCC>>VBE_Q1 (for example: VCC=5 V, VBE_Q1=0.6 V), therefore the equation can be simplified to: or or The period of each half of the multivibrator is therefore given by t = ln(2)RC. The total period of oscillation is given by: T = t1 + t2 = ln(2)R2 C1 + ln(2)R3 C2 where... f is frequency in hertz. R2 and R3 are resistor values in ohms. C1 and C2 are capacitor values in farads. T is the period (In this case, the sum of two period durations). For the special case where t1 = t2 (50% duty cycle) R2 = R3 C1 = C2 Output pulse shape The output voltage has a shape that approximates a square waveform. It is considered below for the transistor Q1. During State 1, Q2 base-emitter junction is reverse-biased and capacitor C1 is "unhooked" from ground. The output voltage of the switched-on transistor Q1 changes rapidly from high to low since this low-resistive output is loaded by a high impedance load (the series connected capacitor C1 and the high-resistive base resistor R2). During State 2, Q2 base-emitter junction is forward-biased and capacitor C1 is "hooked" to ground. The output voltage of the switched-off transistor Q1 changes exponentially from low to high since this relatively high resistive output is loaded by a low impedance load (capacitor C1). This is the output voltage of R1C1 integrating circuit. To approach the needed square waveform, the collector resistors have to be low in resistance. The base resistors have to be low enough to make the transistors saturate in the end of the restoration (RB < β.RC). Initial power-up When the circuit is first powered up, neither transistor will be switched on. However, this means | transistor can provide a path for the capacitor restoration. State 1 (Q1 is switched on, Q2 is switched off) In the beginning, the capacitor C1 is fully charged (in the previous State 2) to the power supply voltage V with the polarity shown in Figure 1. Q1 is on and connects the left-hand positive plate of C1 to ground. As its right-hand negative plate is connected to Q2 base, a maximum negative voltage (-V) is applied to Q2 base that keeps Q2 firmly off. C1 begins discharging (reverse charging) via the high-value base resistor R2, so that the voltage of its right-hand plate (and at the base of Q2) is rising from below ground (-V) toward +V. As Q2 base-emitter junction is reverse-biased, it does not conduct, so all the current from R2 goes into C1. Simultaneously, C2 that is fully discharged and even slightly charged to 0.6 V (in the previous State 2) quickly charges via the low-value collector resistor R4 and Q1 forward-biased base-emitter junction (because R4 is less than R2, C2 charges faster than C1). Thus C2 restores its charge and prepares for the next State C2 when it will act as a time-setting capacitor. Q1 is firmly saturated in the beginning by the "forcing" C2 charging current added to R3 current. In the end, only R3 provides the needed input base current. The resistance R3 is chosen small enough to keep Q1 (not deeply) saturated after C2 is fully charged. When the voltage of C1 right-hand plate (Q2 base voltage) becomes positive and reaches 0.6 V, Q2 base-emitter junction begins diverting a part of R2 charging current. Q2 begins conducting and this starts the avalanche-like positive feedback process as follows. Q2 collector voltage begins falling; this change transfers through the fully charged C2 to Q1 base and Q1 begins cutting off. Its collector voltage begins rising; this change transfers back through the almost empty C1 to Q2 base and makes Q2 conduct more thus sustaining the initial input impact on Q2 base. Thus the initial input change circulates along the feedback loop and grows in an avalanche-like manner until finally Q1 switches off and Q2 switches on. The forward-biased Q2 base-emitter junction fixes the voltage of C1 right-hand plate at 0.6 V and does not allow it to continue rising toward +V. State 2 (Q1 is switched off, Q2 is switched on) Now, the capacitor C2 is fully charged (in the previous State 1) to the power supply voltage V with the polarity shown in Figure 1. Q2 is on and connects the right-hand positive plate of C2 to ground. As its left-hand negative plate is connected to Q1 base, a maximum negative voltage (-V) is applied to Q1 base that keeps Q1 firmly off. C2 begins discharging (reverse charging) via the high-value base resistor R3, so that the voltage of its left-hand plate (and at the base of Q1) is rising from below ground (-V) toward +V. Simultaneously, C1 that is fully discharged and even slightly charged to 0.6 V (in the previous State 1) quickly charges via the low-value collector resistor R1 and Q2 forward-biased base-emitter junction (because R1 is less than R3, C1 charges faster than C2). Thus C1 restores its charge and prepares for the next State 1 when it will act again as a time-setting capacitor...and so on... (the next explanations are a mirror copy of the second part of State 1). Multivibrator frequency Derivation The duration of state 1 (low output) will be related to the time constant R2C1 as it depends on the charging of C1, and the duration of state 2 (high output) will be related to the time constant R3C2 as it depends on the charging of C2. Because they do not need to be the same, an asymmetric duty cycle is easily achieved. The voltage on a capacitor with non-zero initial charge is: Looking at C2, just before Q2 turns on, the left terminal of C2 is at the base-emitter voltage of Q1 (VBE_Q1) and the right terminal is at VCC ("VCC" is used here instead of "+V" to ease notation). The voltage across C2 is VCC minus VBE_Q1 . The moment after Q2 turns on, the right terminal of C2 is now at 0 V which drives the left terminal of C2 to 0 V minus (VCC - VBE_Q1) or VBE_Q1 - VCC. From this instant in time, the left terminal of C2 must be charged back up to VBE_Q1. How long this takes is half our multivibrator switching time (the other half comes from C1). In the charging capacitor equation above, substituting: VBE_Q1 for (VBE_Q1 - VCC) for VCC for results in: Solving for t results in: For this circuit to work, VCC>>VBE_Q1 (for example: VCC=5 V, VBE_Q1=0.6 V), therefore the equation can be simplified to: or or The period of each half of the multivibrator is therefore given by t = ln(2)RC. The total period of oscillation is given by: T = t1 + t2 = ln(2)R2 C1 + ln(2)R3 C2 where... f is frequency in hertz. R2 and R3 are resistor values in ohms. C1 and C2 are capacitor values in farads. T is the period (In this case, the sum of two period durations). For the special case where t1 = t2 (50% duty cycle) R2 = R3 C1 = C2 Output pulse shape The output voltage has a shape that approximates a square waveform. It is considered below for the transistor Q1. During State 1, Q2 base-emitter junction is reverse-biased and capacitor C1 is "unhooked" from ground. The output voltage of the switched-on transistor Q1 changes rapidly from high to low since this low-resistive output is loaded by a high impedance load (the series connected capacitor C1 and the high-resistive base resistor R2). During State 2, Q2 base-emitter junction is forward-biased and capacitor C1 is "hooked" to ground. The output voltage of the switched-off transistor Q1 changes exponentially from low to high since this relatively high resistive output is loaded by a low impedance load (capacitor C1). This is the output voltage of R1C1 integrating circuit. To approach the needed square waveform, the collector resistors have to be low in resistance. The base resistors have to be low enough to make the transistors saturate in the end of the restoration (RB < β.RC). Initial power-up When the circuit is first powered up, neither transistor will be switched on. However, this means that at this stage they will both have high base voltages and therefore a tendency to switch on, and inevitable slight asymmetries will mean that one of the transistors is first to switch on. This will quickly put the circuit into one of the above states, and oscillation will ensue. In practice, oscillation always occurs for practical values of R and C. However, if the circuit is temporarily held with both bases high, for longer than it takes for both capacitors to charge fully, then the circuit will remain in this stable state, with both bases at 0.60 V, both collectors at |
is a type of one-way transport of gases from nutrient rich sediments, to the water column, and then to the atmosphere. It is a major mechanism for gas exchange in freshwater and coastal marine ecosystems and is known to peak during the daytime and at warm temperatures. It has been reported that ebullition is responsible for 45% of the annual methane flux for fresh water marshes and that it is more important in the summer months during the daytime and can also be triggered by increased wind. One of the most common species of grass in marsh environments is Spartina. These spartina and other common marsh grasses use a gas transport system found in the stems and roots of the plants. The gas transport system works by gaseous diffusion that occurs through the leaf blades and then moves down into the furthest tips of the plant roots. This transport system is sufficient to supply all of the aerobic respiratory needs of the grass roots and also helps to aerate the surrounding mud. Environmental Impact Over the past century, more than 50% of the original tidal salt marsh habitats in the U.S. have been lost. The majority of this loss can be directly accounted for by human activity. Direct human impacts that negatively impact salt marshes include: dredging, spoil dumping, grid ditching, canal cutting, leveeing, and salt hay farming. Indirect impacts, such as land reclamation projects and dam construction, which usually occur over a longer period of time than the direct impacts, can lead to even more damages that affect tidal flooding at the marsh surface, cause changes to wetland drainage, shoreline retreat, and reduce vertical marsh accretion rates. Changes in eustatic sea level due to the increase of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere | of the annual methane flux for fresh water marshes and that it is more important in the summer months during the daytime and can also be triggered by increased wind. One of the most common species of grass in marsh environments is Spartina. These spartina and other common marsh grasses use a gas transport system found in the stems and roots of the plants. The gas transport system works by gaseous diffusion that occurs through the leaf blades and then moves down into the furthest tips of the plant roots. This transport system is sufficient to supply all of the aerobic respiratory needs of the grass roots and also helps to aerate the surrounding mud. Environmental Impact Over the past century, more than 50% of the original tidal salt marsh habitats in the U.S. have been lost. The majority of this loss can be directly accounted for by human activity. Direct human impacts that negatively impact salt marshes include: dredging, spoil dumping, grid ditching, canal cutting, leveeing, and salt hay farming. Indirect impacts, such as land reclamation projects and dam construction, which usually occur over a longer period of time than the direct impacts, can lead to even more damages that affect tidal flooding at the marsh surface, cause changes to wetland drainage, shoreline retreat, and reduce vertical marsh accretion rates. Changes in eustatic sea |
Carl Bosch and Friedrich Bergius, who laid down the scientific fundamentals of the catalytic high-pressure ammonia synthesis from 1909 to 1913. Enterprises, too, blazed a trail in the course of the transformational process. Ultimately, the nearby Leuna works emerged at the nearby town of Leuna, which continues to operate in the 21st century as a chemical production park that serves multiple international chemical companies. Merseburg was badly damaged in World War II. In 23 air raids 6,200 dwellings were completely or partly destroyed. The historic town centre was almost completely destroyed. Briefly part of Saxony-Anhalt after the war, it was then administered within the Bezirk Halle in East Germany. It became part of Saxony-Anhalt again after reunification of Germany. Demographics Like many towns in the former East Germany, Merseburg has had a general decline in population since German Reunification despite annexing and merging with a number of smaller nearby villages. Population of Merseburg (from 1960, population on 31 December, unless otherwise indicated): Data source from 1990: Statistical Office of Saxony Anhalt 1 29 October 2 31 August 3 3 October 4 14 July 2008 Attractions Among the notable buildings of Merseburg are the Merseburg Cathedral of St John the Baptist (founded 1015, rebuilt in the 13th and 16th centuries) and the episcopal palace (15th century). The cathedral-and-palace ensemble also features a palace garden. Other attractions include the Merseburg House of Trades with a cultural stage and the German Museum of Chemistry, Merseburg. Arts and culture The Merseburg Palace Festival with the Historical Pageant, the International Palace-Moat Concerts, Merseburg Organ Days and the Puppet Show Festival Week are events celebrated every year. Transport Merseburg station is located on the Halle–Bebra railway. Leipzig/Halle Airport is just 25 kilometers away. Merseburg is connected with the Halle (Saale) tramway network. A tram ride from Halle's city centre to Merseburg takes about 50 minutes. Twin towns – sister cities Merseburg is twinned with: Châtillon, France Genzano di Roma, Italy Bottrop, Germany Notable people Thietmar of | of Merseburg since 1 January 2010. History Pre-history and Middle Ages Merseburg was first mentioned in 850. King Henry the Fowler built a royal palace at Merseburg; in the 933 Battle of Riade, he gained his great victory over the Hungarians in the vicinity. Thietmar, appointed in 973, became the first bishop of the newly created bishopric of Prague in Bohemia. Prague had been part of the archbishopric of Mainz for a hundred years before that. From 968 until the Protestant Reformation, Merseburg was the seat of the Bishop of Merseburg, and in addition to being for a time the residence of the margraves of Meissen, it was a favorite residence of the German kings during the 10th, 11th and 12th centuries. Fifteen diets were held here during the Middle Ages, during which time its fairs enjoyed the importance which was afterwards transferred to those of Leipzig. After Ekkehard's treacherous death on April 3, 1002, Bolesław I Chrobry took Merseburg and Meissen, and then Milsko with Bautzen and Strehla, with the help of the local Slavic population. The German princes accepted the sovereignty of the Polish prince in these areas. Some historians believe that since the convention in Gniezno, the Brave might have had certain rights to the German throne after Otto III, guaranteed by some succession document. Merseburg was later the site of a failed assassination attempt on Polish ruler Bolesław I Chrobry in 1002. The town suffered severely during the German Peasants' War and also during the Thirty Years' War. 17th century to 20th century From 1657 to 1738 Merseburg was the residence of the Dukes of Saxe-Merseburg, after which it fell to the Electorate of Saxony. In 1815 following the Napoleonic Wars, the town became part of the Prussian Province of Saxony. Merseburg is where the Merseburg Incantations were rediscovered in 1841. Written down in Old High German, they are hitherto the only preserved German documents with a heathen theme. One of them is a charm to release warriors caught during battle, and the other is a charm to heal a horse's sprained foot. At the beginning of the 20th century, Merseburg was transformed into an industrial town, largely due to the pioneering work done by Carl Bosch and Friedrich Bergius, who laid down the scientific fundamentals of the catalytic high-pressure ammonia |
one of the most successful products in the company's history, and he expanded the microcontroller division's budget by over 25%. Most microcontrollers at this time had concurrent variants. One had EPROM program memory, with a transparent quartz window in the lid of the package to allow it to be erased by exposure to ultraviolet light. These erasable chips were often used for prototyping. The other variant was either a mask programmed ROM or a PROM variant which was only programmable once. For the latter, sometimes the designation OTP was used, standing for "one-time programmable". In an OTP microcontroller, the PROM was usually of identical type as the EPROM, but the chip package had no quartz window; because there was no way to expose the EPROM to ultraviolet light, it could not be erased. Because the erasable versions required ceramic packages with quartz windows, they were significantly more expensive than the OTP versions, which could be made in lower-cost opaque plastic packages. For the erasable variants, quartz was required, instead of less expensive glass, for its transparency to ultraviolet light—to which glass is largely opaque—but the main cost differentiator was the ceramic package itself. In 1993, the introduction of EEPROM memory allowed microcontrollers (beginning with the Microchip PIC16C84) to be electrically erased quickly without an expensive package as required for EPROM, allowing both rapid prototyping, and in-system programming. (EEPROM technology had been available prior to this time, but the earlier EEPROM was more expensive and less durable, making it unsuitable for low-cost mass-produced microcontrollers.) The same year, Atmel introduced the first microcontroller using Flash memory, a special type of EEPROM. Other companies rapidly followed suit, with both memory types. Nowadays microcontrollers are cheap and readily available for hobbyists, with large online communities around certain processors. Volume and cost In 2002, about 55% of all CPUs sold in the world were 8-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors. Over two billion 8-bit microcontrollers were sold in 1997, and according to Semico, over four billion 8-bit microcontrollers were sold in 2006. More recently, Semico has claimed the MCU market grew 36.5% in 2010 and 12% in 2011. A typical home in a developed country is likely to have only four general-purpose microprocessors but around three dozen microcontrollers. A typical mid-range automobile has about 30 microcontrollers. They can also be found in many electrical devices such as washing machines, microwave ovens, and telephones. Cost to manufacture can be under $0.10 per unit. Cost has plummeted over time, with the cheapest 8-bit microcontrollers being available for under in 2018, and some 32-bit microcontrollers around US$1 for similar quantities. In 2012, following a global crisis—a worst ever annual sales decline and recovery and average sales price year-over-year plunging 17%—the biggest reduction since the 1980s—the average price for a microcontroller was US$0.88 ($0.69 for 4-/8-bit, $0.59 for 16-bit, $1.76 for 32-bit). In 2012, worldwide sales of 8-bit microcontrollers were around $4 billion, while 4-bit microcontrollers also saw significant sales. In 2015, 8-bit microcontrollers could be bought for $0.311 (1,000 units), 16-bit for $0.385 (1,000 units), and 32-bit for $0.378 (1,000 units, but at $0.35 for 5,000). In 2018, 8-bit microcontrollers can be bought for $0.03, 16-bit for $0.393 (1,000 units, but at $0.563 for 100 or $0.349 for full reel of 2,000), and 32-bit for $0.503 (1,000 units, but at $0.466 for 5,000). A lower-priced 32-bit microcontroller, in units of one, can be had for $0.891. In 2018, the low-priced microcontrollers above from 2015 are all more expensive (with inflation calculated between 2018 and 2015 prices for those specific units) at: the 8-bit microcontroller can be bought for $0.319 (1,000 units) or 2.6% higher, the 16-bit one for $0.464 (1,000 units) or 21% higher, and the 32-bit one for $0.503 (1,000 units, but at $0.466 for 5,000) or 33% higher. Smallest computer On 21 June 2018, the "world's smallest computer" was announced by the University of Michigan. The device is a "0.04mm3 16nW wireless and batteryless sensor system with integrated Cortex-M0+ processor and optical communication for cellular temperature measurement." It "measures just 0.3 mm to a side—dwarfed by a grain of rice. [...] In addition to the RAM and photovoltaics, the new computing devices have processors and wireless transmitters and receivers. Because they are too small to have conventional radio antennae, they receive and transmit data with visible light. A base station provides light for power and programming, and it receives the data." The device is 1/10th the size of IBM's previously claimed world-record-sized computer from months back in March 2018, which is "smaller than a grain of salt", has a million transistors, costs less than $0.10 to manufacture, and, combined with blockchain technology, is intended for logistics and "crypto-anchors"—digital fingerprint applications. Embedded design A microcontroller can be considered a self-contained system with a processor, memory and peripherals and can be used as an embedded system. The majority of microcontrollers in use today are embedded in other machinery, such as automobiles, telephones, appliances, and peripherals for computer systems. While some embedded systems are very sophisticated, many have minimal requirements for memory and program length, with no operating system, and low software complexity. Typical input and output devices include switches, relays, solenoids, LED's, small or custom liquid-crystal displays, radio frequency devices, and sensors for data such as temperature, humidity, light level etc. Embedded systems usually have no keyboard, screen, disks, printers, or other recognizable I/O devices of a personal computer, and may lack human interaction devices of any kind. Interrupts Microcontrollers must provide real-time (predictable, though not necessarily fast) response to events in the embedded system they are controlling. When certain events occur, an interrupt system can signal the processor to suspend processing the current instruction sequence and to begin an interrupt service routine (ISR, or "interrupt handler") which will perform any processing required based on the source of the interrupt, before returning to the original instruction sequence. Possible interrupt sources are device dependent, and often include events such as an internal timer overflow, completing an analog to digital conversion, a logic level change on an input such as from a button being pressed, and data received on a communication link. Where power consumption is important as in battery devices, interrupts may also wake a microcontroller from a low-power sleep state where the processor is halted until required to do something by a peripheral event. Programs Typically micro-controller programs must fit in the available on-chip memory, since it would be costly to provide a system with external, expandable memory. Compilers and assemblers are used to convert both high-level and assembly language codes into a compact machine code for storage in the micro-controller's memory. Depending on the device, the program memory may be permanent, read-only memory that can only be programmed at the factory, or it may be field-alterable flash or erasable read-only memory. Manufacturers have often produced special versions of their micro-controllers in order to help the hardware and software development of the target system. Originally these included EPROM versions that have | both memory types. Nowadays microcontrollers are cheap and readily available for hobbyists, with large online communities around certain processors. Volume and cost In 2002, about 55% of all CPUs sold in the world were 8-bit microcontrollers and microprocessors. Over two billion 8-bit microcontrollers were sold in 1997, and according to Semico, over four billion 8-bit microcontrollers were sold in 2006. More recently, Semico has claimed the MCU market grew 36.5% in 2010 and 12% in 2011. A typical home in a developed country is likely to have only four general-purpose microprocessors but around three dozen microcontrollers. A typical mid-range automobile has about 30 microcontrollers. They can also be found in many electrical devices such as washing machines, microwave ovens, and telephones. Cost to manufacture can be under $0.10 per unit. Cost has plummeted over time, with the cheapest 8-bit microcontrollers being available for under in 2018, and some 32-bit microcontrollers around US$1 for similar quantities. In 2012, following a global crisis—a worst ever annual sales decline and recovery and average sales price year-over-year plunging 17%—the biggest reduction since the 1980s—the average price for a microcontroller was US$0.88 ($0.69 for 4-/8-bit, $0.59 for 16-bit, $1.76 for 32-bit). In 2012, worldwide sales of 8-bit microcontrollers were around $4 billion, while 4-bit microcontrollers also saw significant sales. In 2015, 8-bit microcontrollers could be bought for $0.311 (1,000 units), 16-bit for $0.385 (1,000 units), and 32-bit for $0.378 (1,000 units, but at $0.35 for 5,000). In 2018, 8-bit microcontrollers can be bought for $0.03, 16-bit for $0.393 (1,000 units, but at $0.563 for 100 or $0.349 for full reel of 2,000), and 32-bit for $0.503 (1,000 units, but at $0.466 for 5,000). A lower-priced 32-bit microcontroller, in units of one, can be had for $0.891. In 2018, the low-priced microcontrollers above from 2015 are all more expensive (with inflation calculated between 2018 and 2015 prices for those specific units) at: the 8-bit microcontroller can be bought for $0.319 (1,000 units) or 2.6% higher, the 16-bit one for $0.464 (1,000 units) or 21% higher, and the 32-bit one for $0.503 (1,000 units, but at $0.466 for 5,000) or 33% higher. Smallest computer On 21 June 2018, the "world's smallest computer" was announced by the University of Michigan. The device is a "0.04mm3 16nW wireless and batteryless sensor system with integrated Cortex-M0+ processor and optical communication for cellular temperature measurement." It "measures just 0.3 mm to a side—dwarfed by a grain of rice. [...] In addition to the RAM and photovoltaics, the new computing devices have processors and wireless transmitters and receivers. Because they are too small to have conventional radio antennae, they receive and transmit data with visible light. A base station provides light for power and programming, and it receives the data." The device is 1/10th the size of IBM's previously claimed world-record-sized computer from months back in March 2018, which is "smaller than a grain of salt", has a million transistors, costs less than $0.10 to manufacture, and, combined with blockchain technology, is intended for logistics and "crypto-anchors"—digital fingerprint applications. Embedded design A microcontroller can be considered a self-contained system with a processor, memory and peripherals and can be used as an embedded system. The majority of microcontrollers in use today are embedded in other machinery, such as automobiles, telephones, appliances, and peripherals for computer systems. While some embedded systems are very sophisticated, many have minimal requirements for memory and program length, with no operating system, and low software complexity. Typical input and output devices include switches, relays, solenoids, LED's, small or custom liquid-crystal displays, radio frequency devices, and sensors for data such as temperature, humidity, light level etc. Embedded systems usually have no keyboard, screen, disks, printers, or other recognizable I/O devices of a personal computer, and may lack human interaction devices of any kind. Interrupts Microcontrollers must provide real-time (predictable, though not necessarily fast) response to events in the embedded system they are controlling. When certain events occur, an interrupt system can signal the processor to suspend processing the current instruction sequence and to begin an interrupt service routine (ISR, or "interrupt handler") which will perform any processing required based on the source of the interrupt, before returning to the original instruction sequence. Possible interrupt sources are device dependent, and often include events such as an internal timer overflow, completing an analog to digital conversion, a logic level change on an input such as from a button being pressed, and data received on a communication link. Where power consumption is important as in battery devices, interrupts may also wake a microcontroller from a low-power sleep state where the processor is halted until required to do something by a peripheral event. Programs Typically micro-controller programs must fit in the available on-chip memory, since it would be costly to provide a system with external, expandable memory. Compilers and assemblers are used to convert both high-level and assembly language codes into a compact machine code for storage in the micro-controller's memory. Depending on the device, the program memory may be permanent, read-only memory that can only be programmed at the factory, or it may be field-alterable flash or erasable read-only memory. Manufacturers have often produced special versions of their micro-controllers in order to help the hardware and software development of the target system. Originally these included EPROM versions that have a "window" on the top of the device through which program memory can be erased by ultraviolet light, ready for reprogramming after a programming ("burn") and test cycle. Since 1998, EPROM versions are rare and have been replaced by EEPROM and flash, which are easier to use (can be erased electronically) and cheaper to manufacture. Other versions may be available where the ROM is accessed as an external device rather than as internal memory, however these are becoming rare due to the widespread availability of cheap microcontroller programmers. The use of field-programmable devices on a micro controller may allow field update of the firmware or permit late factory revisions to products that have been assembled but not yet shipped. Programmable memory also reduces the lead time required for deployment of a new product. Where hundreds of thousands of identical devices are required, using parts programmed at the time of manufacture can be economical. These "mask programmed" parts have the program laid down in the same way as the logic of the chip, at the same time. A customized micro-controller incorporates a block of digital logic that can be personalized for additional processing capability, peripherals and interfaces that are adapted to the requirements of the application. One example is the AT91CAP from Atmel. Other microcontroller features Microcontrollers usually contain from several to dozens of general purpose input/output pins (GPIO). GPIO pins are software configurable to either an input or an output state. When GPIO pins are configured to an input state, they are often used to read sensors or external signals. Configured to the output state, GPIO pins can drive external devices such as LEDs or motors, often indirectly, through external power electronics. Many embedded systems need to read sensors that produce analog signals. This is the purpose of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Since processors are built to interpret and process digital data, i.e. 1s and 0s, they are not able to do anything with the analog signals that may be sent to it by a device. So the analog to digital converter is used to convert the incoming data into a form that the processor can recognize. A less common feature on some microcontrollers is a digital-to-analog converter (DAC) that allows the processor to output analog signals or voltage levels. In addition to the converters, many embedded microprocessors include a variety of timers as well. One of the most common types of timers is the programmable interval timer (PIT). A PIT may either count down from some value to zero, or up to the capacity of the count register, overflowing to zero. Once it reaches zero, it sends an interrupt to the processor indicating that it has finished counting. This is useful for devices such as thermostats, which periodically test the temperature around them to see if they need to turn the air conditioner on, the heater on, etc. A dedicated pulse-width modulation (PWM) block makes it possible for the CPU to control power converters, resistive loads, motors, etc., without using many CPU resources in tight timer loops. A universal asynchronous receiver/transmitter (UART) block makes it possible to receive and transmit data over a serial line with very little load on the CPU. Dedicated on-chip hardware also often includes capabilities to communicate with other devices (chips) in digital formats such as Inter-Integrated Circuit (I²C), Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), Universal Serial Bus (USB), and Ethernet. Higher integration Micro-controllers may not implement an external address or data bus as they integrate RAM and non-volatile memory on the same chip as the CPU. Using fewer pins, the chip can be placed in a much smaller, cheaper package. Integrating the memory and other peripherals on a single chip and testing them as a unit increases the cost of that chip, but often results in decreased net cost of the embedded system as a whole. Even if the cost of a CPU that has integrated peripherals is slightly more than the cost of a CPU and external peripherals, having fewer chips typically allows a smaller and cheaper circuit board, and reduces the labor required to assemble and test the circuit board, in addition to tending to decrease the defect rate for the finished assembly. A micro-controller is a single integrated circuit, commonly with the following features: central processing unit ranging from small and simple 4-bit processors to complex 32-bit or 64-bit processors volatile memory (RAM) for data storage ROM, EPROM, EEPROM or Flash memory for program and operating parameter storage discrete input and output bits, allowing control or detection of the logic state of an individual package pin serial input/output such as serial ports (UARTs) other serial communications interfaces like I²C, Serial Peripheral Interface and Controller Area Network for system interconnect peripherals such as timers, event counters, PWM generators, and watchdog clock generator often an oscillator for a quartz timing crystal, resonator or RC circuit many include analog-to-digital converters, some include digital-to-analog converters in-circuit programming and in-circuit debugging support This integration drastically reduces the number of chips and the amount of wiring and circuit board space that would be needed to produce equivalent systems using separate chips. Furthermore, on low pin count devices in particular, each pin may interface to several internal peripherals, with the pin function selected by software. This allows a part to be used in a wider variety of applications than if pins had dedicated functions. Micro-controllers have proved to be highly popular in embedded systems since their introduction in the 1970s. Some microcontrollers use a Harvard architecture: separate memory buses for instructions and data, allowing accesses to take place concurrently. Where a Harvard architecture is used, instruction words for the processor may be a different bit size than the length of internal memory and registers; for example: 12-bit instructions used with 8-bit data registers. |
Proust gradually abandoned Jean Santeuil in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by 1899. Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Ruskin. Through this reading, he refined his theories of art and the role of the artist in society. Also, in Time Regained Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. The artist's responsibility is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Bible of Amiens, and Praeterita. Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of English. To compensate for this he made his translations a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime lover Reynaldo Hahn, then finally polished by Proust. Questioned about his method by an editor, Proust responded, "I don't claim to know English; I claim to know Ruskin". The Bible of Amiens, with Proust's extended introduction, was published in French in 1904. Both the translation and the introduction were well-reviewed; Henri Bergson called Proust's introduction "an important contribution to the psychology of Ruskin", and had similar praise for the translation. At the time of this publication, Proust was already translating Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, which he completed in June 1905, just before his mother's death, and published in 1906. Literary historians and critics have ascertained that, apart from Ruskin, Proust's chief literary influences included Saint-Simon, Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy. 1908 was an important year for Proust's development as a writer. During the first part of the year he published in various journals pastiches of other writers. These exercises in imitation may have allowed Proust to solidify his own style. In addition, in the spring and summer of the year Proust began work on several different fragments of writing that would later coalesce under the working title of Contre Sainte-Beuve. Proust described his efforts in a letter to a friend: "I have in progress: a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel". From these disparate fragments Proust began to shape a novel on which he worked continually during this period. The rough outline of the work centred on a first-person narrator, unable to sleep, who during the night remembers waiting as a child for his mother to come to him in the morning. The novel was to have ended with a critical examination of Sainte-Beuve and a refutation of his theory that biography was the most important tool for understanding an artist's work. Present in the unfinished manuscript notebooks are many elements that correspond to parts of the Recherche, in particular, to the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections of Volume 1, and to the final section of Volume 7. Trouble with finding a publisher, as well as a gradually changing conception of his novel, led Proust to shift work to a substantially different project that still contained many of the same themes and elements. By 1910 he was at work on À la recherche du temps perdu. In Search of Lost Time Begun in 1909, when Proust was 38 years old, À la recherche du temps perdu consists of seven volumes totaling around 3,200 pages (about 4,300 in The Modern Library's translation) and featuring more than 2,000 characters. Graham Greene called Proust the "greatest novelist of the 20th century", and W. Somerset Maugham called the novel the "greatest fiction to date". André Gide was initially not so taken with his work. The first volume was refused by the publisher Gallimard on Gide's advice. He later wrote to Proust apologizing for his part in the refusal and calling it one of the most serious mistakes of his life. Finally, the book was published at the author's expense by Grasset and Proust paid critics to speak favorably about it. Proust died before he was able to complete his revision of the drafts and proofs of the final volumes, the last three of which were published posthumously and edited by his brother Robert. The book was translated into English by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, appearing under the title Remembrance of Things Past between 1922 and 1931. Scott Moncrieff translated volumes one through six of the seven volumes, dying before completing the last. This last volume was rendered by other translators at different times. When Scott Moncrieff's translation was later revised (first by Terence Kilmartin, then by D. J. Enright) the title of the novel was changed to the more literal In Search of Lost Time. In 1995 Penguin undertook a fresh translation of the book by editor Christopher Prendergast and seven translators in three countries, based on the latest, most complete and authoritative French text. Its six volumes, comprising Proust's seven, were published in Britain under the Allen Lane imprint in 2002. Personal life Proust is known to have been homosexual, and his sexuality and relationships with men are often discussed by his biographers. Although his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, denies this aspect of Proust's sexuality in her memoirs, her denial runs contrary to the statements of many of Proust's friends and contemporaries, including his fellow writer André Gide as well as his valet Ernest A. Forssgren. Proust never openly admitted to his homosexuality, though his family and close friends either knew or suspected it. In 1897, he even fought a duel with writer Jean Lorrain, who publicly questioned the nature of Proust's relationship with Lucien Daudet (both duellists survived). Despite Proust's own public denial, his romantic relationship with composer Reynaldo Hahn, and his infatuation with his chauffeur and secretary, Alfred Agostinelli, are well documented. On the night of 11 January 1918, Proust was one of the men identified by police in a raid on a male brothel run by Albert Le Cuziat. Proust's friend, the poet Paul Morand, openly teased Proust about his visits to male prostitutes. In his journal, Morand refers to Proust, as well as Gide, as "constantly hunting, never satiated by their adventures ... eternal prowlers, tireless sexual adventurers." The exact influence of Proust's sexuality on his writing is a topic of debate. However, In Search of Lost Time discusses homosexuality at length and features several principal characters, both men and women, who are either homosexual or bisexual: the Baron de Charlus, Robert de Saint-Loup, Odette de Crécy, and Albertine Simonet. Homosexuality also appears as a theme in Les plaisirs et les jours and his unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil. Proust inherited much of his mother's political outlook, which was supportive of the French Third Republic and near the liberal centre of French politics. In an 1892 article published in Le Banquet entitled "L'Irréligion d'État", Proust condemned extreme anti-clerical measures such as the expulsion of monks, observing that "one might just be surprised that the negation of religion should bring in its wake the same fanaticism, intolerance, and persecution as religion itself." He argued that socialism posed a greater threat to society than the Church. He was equally critical of the right, lambasting "the insanity of the conservatives," whom he deemed "as dumb and ungrateful as under Charles X," and referring to Pope Pius X's obstinacy as foolish. Proust always rejected the bigoted and illiberal views harbored by many priests at the time, but believed that the most enlightened clerics could be just as progressive as the most enlightened secularists, and that both could serve the cause of "the advanced liberal Republic". He approved of the more moderate stance taken in 1906 by Aristide Briand, whom he described as "admirable". Proust was among the earliest Dreyfusards, even attending Émile Zola's trial and proudly claiming to have been the one who asked Anatole France to sign the petition in support of Dreyfus's innocence. In 1919, when representatives of the right-wing Action Française published a manifesto upholding French colonialism and the Catholic Church as the embodiment of civilised values, Proust rejected their nationalism and chauvinism in favor of a liberal pluralist vision which acknowledged Christianity's cultural legacy in France. Julien Benda commended Proust in La Trahison des clercs as a writer who distinguished himself from his generation by avoiding the twin traps of nationalism and class sectarianism. Gallery Bibliography Novels In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu published in seven volumes, previously translated as Remembrance of Things Past) (1913–1927) Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann, sometimes translated as The Way by Swann's) (1913) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, also translated as Within a Budding Grove) (1919) The Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes originally published in two volumes) (1920–1921) Sodom and Gomorrah (Sodome et Gomorrhe originally published in two volumes, sometimes translated as Cities of the Plain) (1921–1922) The Prisoner (La Prisonnière, also translated as The Captive) (1923) The Fugitive (Albertine disparue, also titled La Fugitive, sometimes translated as The Sweet Cheat Gone or Albertine Gone) (1925) Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé, also translated as Finding Time Again and The Past Recaptured) (1927) Jean Santeuil (unfinished novel in three volumes published posthumously – 1952) Short story collections Early Stories (short stories published posthumously) Pleasures and Days (Les plaisirs et les jours; illustrations by Madeleine Lemaire, preface by Anatole France, and four piano works by Reynaldo Hahn) (1896) Non-fiction Pastiches, or The Lemoine Affair (Pastiches et mélanges – a collection) (1919) Against Sainte-Beuve (Contre Sainte-Beuve: suivi de Nouveaux mélanges) (published posthumously 1954) Translations of John Ruskin La Bible d'Amiens (translation of The Bible of Amiens) (1896) Sésame et les lys: des trésors des rois, des jardins des reines (translation of Sesame and Lilies) (1906) See also 102 Boulevard Haussmann, a BBC production set in 1916 about Proust Albertine, a novel based on a character in À la recherche du temps perdu by | critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Background Proust was born on 10 July 1871, shortly after the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War and at the very beginning of the Third Republic. He was born in the Paris Borough of Auteuil (the south-western sector of the then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle on 10 July 1871, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War. His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes, that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle. Proust's father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent French pathologist and epidemiologist, studying cholera in Europe and Asia. He wrote numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust's mother, Jeanne Clémence (Weil), was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace. Literate and well-read, she demonstrated a well-developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of the English language was sufficient to help with her son's translations of John Ruskin. Proust was raised in his father's Catholic faith. He was baptized (on 5 August 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practised that faith. He later became an atheist and was something of a mystic. By the age of nine, Proust had had his first serious asthma attack, and thereafter he was considered a sickly child. Proust spent long holidays in the village of Illiers. This village, combined with recollections of his great-uncle's house in Auteuil, became the model for the fictional town of Combray, where some of the most important scenes of In Search of Lost Time take place. (Illiers was renamed Illiers-Combray in 1971 on the occasion of the Proust centenary celebrations.) In 1882, at the age of eleven, Proust became a pupil at the Lycée Condorcet; however, his education was disrupted by his illness. Despite this, he excelled in literature, receiving an award in his final year. Thanks to his classmates, he was able to gain access to some of the salons of the upper bourgeoisie, providing him with copious material for In Search of Lost Time. In spite of his poor health, Proust served a year (1889–90) in the French army, stationed at Coligny Barracks in Orléans, an experience that provided a lengthy episode in The Guermantes' Way, part three of his novel. As a young man, Proust was a dilettante and a social climber whose aspirations as a writer were hampered by his lack of self-discipline. His reputation from this period, as a snob and an amateur, contributed to his later troubles with getting Swann's Way, the first part of his large-scale novel, published in 1913. At this time, he attended the salons of Mme Straus, widow of Georges Bizet and mother of Proust's childhood friend Jacques Bizet, of Madeleine Lemaire and of Mme Arman de Caillavet, one of the models for Madame Verdurin, and mother of his friend Gaston Arman de Caillavet, with whose fiancée (Jeanne Pouquet) he was in love. It is through Mme Arman de Caillavet, he made the acquaintance of Anatole France, her lover. Proust had a close relationship with his mother. To appease his father, who insisted that he pursue a career, Proust obtained a volunteer position at Bibliothèque Mazarine in the summer of 1896. After exerting considerable effort, he obtained a sick leave that extended for several years until he was considered to have resigned. He never worked at his job, and he did not move from his parents' apartment until after both were dead. His life and family circle changed markedly between 1900 and 1905. In February 1903, Proust's brother, Robert Proust, married and left the family home. His father died in November of the same year. Finally, and most crushingly, Proust's beloved mother died in September 1905. She left him a considerable inheritance. His health throughout this period continued to deteriorate. Proust spent the last three years of his life mostly confined to his bedroom, sleeping during the day and working at night to complete his novel. He died of pneumonia and a pulmonary abscess in 1922. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Early writing Proust was involved in writing and publishing from an early age. In addition to the literary magazines with which he was associated, and in which he published while at school (La Revue verte and La Revue lilas), from 1890 to 1891 he published a regular society column in the journal Le Mensuel. In 1892, he was involved in founding a literary review called Le Banquet (also the French title of Plato's Symposium), and throughout the next several years Proust published small pieces regularly in this journal and in the prestigious La Revue Blanche. In 1896 Les plaisirs et les jours, a compendium of many of these early pieces, was published. The book included a foreword by Anatole France, drawings by Mme Lemaire in whose salon Proust was a frequent guest, and who inspired Proust's Mme Verdurin. She invited him and Reynaldo Hahn to her château de Réveillon (the model for Mme Verdurin's La Raspelière) in summer 1894, and for three weeks in 1895. This book was so sumptuously produced that it cost twice the normal price of a book its size. That year Proust also began working on a novel, which was eventually published in 1952 and titled Jean Santeuil by his posthumous editors. Many of the themes later developed in In Search of Lost Time find their first articulation in this unfinished work, including the enigma of memory and the necessity of reflection; several sections of In Search of Lost Time can be read in the first draft in Jean Santeuil. The portrait of the parents in Jean Santeuil is quite harsh, in marked contrast to the adoration with which the parents are painted in Proust's masterpiece. Following the poor reception of Les Plaisirs et les Jours, and internal troubles with resolving the plot, Proust gradually abandoned Jean Santeuil in 1897 and stopped work on it entirely by 1899. Beginning in 1895 Proust spent several years reading Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Ruskin. Through this reading, he refined his theories of art and the role of the artist in society. Also, in Time Regained Proust's universal protagonist recalls having translated Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies. The artist's responsibility is to confront the appearance of nature, deduce its essence and retell or explain that essence in the work of art. Ruskin's view of artistic production was central to this conception, and Ruskin's work was so important to Proust that he claimed to know "by heart" several of Ruskin's books, including The Seven Lamps of Architecture, The Bible of Amiens, and Praeterita. Proust set out to translate two of Ruskin's works into French, but was hampered by an imperfect command of English. To compensate for this he made his translations a group affair: sketched out by his mother, the drafts were first revised by Proust, then by Marie Nordlinger, the English cousin of his friend and sometime lover Reynaldo Hahn, |
year, he began work on a commission for Cardinal Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god Bacchus. Upon completion, the work was rejected by the cardinal, and subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his garden. In November 1497, the French ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas, commissioned him to carve a Pietà, a sculpture showing the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Jesus. The subject, which is not part of the Biblical narrative of the Crucifixion, was common in religious sculpture of Medieval Northern Europe and would have been very familiar to the Cardinal. The contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. Michelangelo was 24 at the time of its completion. It was soon to be regarded as one of the world's great masterpieces of sculpture, "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture". Contemporary opinion was summarised by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh." It is now located in St Peter's Basilica. Florence, 1499–1505 Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499. The Republic was changing after the fall of its leader, anti-Renaissance priest Girolamo Savonarola, who was executed in 1498, and the rise of the gonfaloniere Piero Soderini. Michelangelo was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue of Carrara marble portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom to be placed on the gable of Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo responded by completing his most famous work, the statue of David, in 1504. The masterwork definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination. A team of consultants, including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Antonio and Giuliano da Sangallo, Andrea della Robbia, Cosimo Rosselli, Davide Ghirlandaio, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea Sansovino and Michelangelo's dear friend Francesco Granacci, was called together to decide upon its placement, ultimately the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. It now stands in the Academia while a replica occupies its place in the square. In the same period of placing the David, Michelangelo may have been involved in creating the sculptural profile on Palazzo Vecchio's façade known as the Importuno di Michelangelo. The hypothesis on Michelangelo's possible involvement in the creation of the profile is based on the strong resemblance of the latter to a profile drawn by the artist, datable to the beginning of the 16th century, now preserved in the Louvre. With the completion of the David came another commission. In early 1504 Leonardo da Vinci had been commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the council chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio, depicting the battle between Florence and Milan in 1440. Michelangelo was then commissioned to paint the Battle of Cascina. The two paintings are very different: Leonardo depicts soldiers fighting on horseback, while Michelangelo has soldiers being ambushed as they bathe in the river. Neither work was completed and both were lost forever when the chamber was refurbished. Both works were much admired, and copies remain of them, Leonardo's work having been copied by Rubens and Michelangelo's by Bastiano da Sangallo. Also during this period, Michelangelo was commissioned by Angelo Doni to paint a "Holy Family" as a present for his wife, Maddalena Strozzi. It is known as the Doni Tondo and hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in its original magnificent frame, which Michelangelo may have designed. He also may have painted the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the Manchester Madonna and now in the National Gallery, London. Tomb of Julius II, 1505-1545 In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II and commissioned to build the Pope's tomb, which was to include forty statues and be finished in five years. Under the patronage of the pope, Michelangelo experienced constant interruptions to his work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. The commission for the tomb forced the artist to leave Florence with his planned Battle of Cascina painting unfinished. By this time, Michelangelo was established as an artist; both he and Julius II had hot tempers and soon argued. On 17 April 1506, Michelangelo left Rome in secret for Florence, remaining there until the Florentine government pressed him to return to the pope. Although Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years, it was never finished to his satisfaction. It is located in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and is most famous for the central figure of Moses, completed in 1516. Of the other statues intended for the tomb, two, known as the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave, are now in the Louvre. Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1505-1512 During the same period, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512). According to Condivi's account, Bramante, who was working on the building of St. Peter's Basilica, resented Michelangelo's commission for the pope's tomb and convinced the pope to commission him in a medium with which he was unfamiliar, in order that he might fail at the task. Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the Twelve Apostles on the triangular pendentives that supported the ceiling, and to cover the central part of the ceiling with ornament. Michelangelo persuaded Pope Julius II to give him a free hand and proposed a different and more complex scheme, representing the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Promise of Salvation through the prophets, and the genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel that represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church. The composition stretches over 500 square metres of ceiling and contains over 300 figures. At its centre are nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's creation of the earth; God's creation of humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of Jesus, seven prophets of Israel, and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world. Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are The Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, the Prophet Jeremiah, and the Cumaean Sibyl. Florence under Medici popes, 1513 – early 1534 In 1513, Pope Julius II died and was succeeded by Pope Leo X, the second son of Lorenzo de' Medici. From 1513 to 1516 Pope Leo was on good terms with Pope Julius's surviving relatives, so encouraged Michelangelo to continue work on Julius's tomb, but the families became enemies again in 1516 when Pope Leo tried to seize the Duchy of Urbino from Julius's nephew Francesco Maria I della Rovere. Pope Leo then had Michelangelo stop working on the tomb, and commissioned him to reconstruct the façade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. He spent three years creating drawings and models for the façade, as well as attempting to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the project. In 1520, the work was abruptly cancelled by his financially strapped patrons before any real progress had been made. The basilica lacks a façade to this day. In 1520, the Medici came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this time for a family funerary chapel in the Basilica of San Lorenzo. For posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realised. Michelangelo used his own discretion to create the composition of the Medici Chapel, which houses the large tombs of two of the younger members of the Medici family, Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and Lorenzo, his nephew. It also serves to commemorate their more famous predecessors, Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, who are buried nearby. The tombs display statues of the two Medici and allegorical figures representing Night and Day, and Dusk and Dawn. The chapel also contains Michelangelo's Medici Madonna. In 1976 a concealed corridor was discovered with drawings on the walls that related to the chapel itself. Pope Leo X died in 1521 and was succeeded briefly by the austere Adrian VI, and then by his cousin Giulio Medici as Pope Clement VII. In 1524 Michelangelo received an architectural commission from the Medici pope for the Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo's Church. He designed both the interior of the library itself and its vestibule, a building utilising architectural forms with such dynamic effect that it is seen as the forerunner of Baroque architecture. It was left to assistants to interpret his plans and carry out construction. The library was not opened until 1571, and the vestibule remained incomplete until 1904. In 1527, Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530, and the Medici were restored to power. Michelangelo fell out of favour with the young Alessandro Medici, who had been installed as the first Duke of Florence. Fearing for his life, he fled to Rome, leaving assistants to complete the Medici chapel and the Laurentian Library. Despite Michelangelo's support of the republic and resistance to the Medici rule, he was welcomed by Pope Clement, who reinstated an allowance that he had previously granted the artist and made a new contract with him over the tomb of Pope Julius. Rome, 1534–1546 In Rome, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto. It was at this time that he met the poet Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, who was to become one of his closest friends until her death in 1547. Shortly before his death in 1534, Pope Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint a fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. His successor, Pope Paul III, was instrumental in seeing that Michelangelo began and completed the project, which he laboured on from 1534 to October 1541. The fresco depicts the Second Coming of Christ and his Judgement of the souls. Michelangelo ignored the usual artistic conventions in portraying Jesus, showing him as a massive, muscular figure, youthful, beardless and naked. He is surrounded by saints, among whom Saint Bartholomew holds a drooping flayed skin, bearing the likeness of Michelangelo. The dead rise from their graves, to be consigned either to Heaven or to Hell. Once completed, the depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary naked was considered sacrilegious, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope resisted. At the Council of Trent, shortly before Michelangelo's death in 1564, it was decided to obscure the genitals and Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, was commissioned to make the alterations. An uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, is in the Capodimonte Museum of Naples. Michelangelo worked on a number of architectural projects at this time. They included a design for the Capitoline Hill with its trapezoid piazza displaying the ancient bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius. He designed the upper floor of the Palazzo Farnese and the interior of the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in which he transformed the vaulted interior of an Ancient Roman bathhouse. Other architectural works include San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the Sforza Chapel (Capella Sforza) in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore and the Porta Pia. St Peter's Basilica, 1546–1564 While still working on the Last Judgment, Michelangelo received yet another commission for the Vatican. This was for the painting of two large frescos in the Cappella Paolina depicting significant events in the lives of the two most important saints of Rome, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Like the Last Judgment, these two works are complex compositions containing a great number of figures. They were completed in 1550. In the same year, Giorgio Vasari published his Vita, including a biography of Michelangelo. In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica, Rome. The process of replacing the Constantinian basilica of the 4th century had been underway for fifty years and in 1506 foundations had been laid to the plans of Bramante. Successive architects had worked on it, but little progress had been made. Michelangelo was persuaded to take over the project. He returned to the concepts of Bramante, and developed his ideas for a centrally planned church, strengthening the structure both physically and visually. The dome, not completed until after his death, has been called by Banister Fletcher, "the greatest creation of the Renaissance". As construction was progressing on St Peter's, there was concern that Michelangelo would pass away before the dome was finished. However, once building commenced on the lower part of the dome, the supporting ring, the completion of the design was inevitable. On 7 December 2007, a red chalk sketch for the dome of St Peter's Basilica, possibly the last made by Michelangelo before his death, was discovered in the Vatican archives. It is extremely rare, since he destroyed his designs later in life. The sketch is a partial plan for one of the radial columns of the cupola drum of Saint Peter's. Personal life Faith Michelangelo was a devout Catholic whose faith deepened at the end of his life. His poetry includes the following closing lines from what is known as poem 285 (written in 1554); "Neither painting nor sculpture will be able any longer to calm my soul, now turned toward that divine love that opened his arms on the cross to take us in." Personal habits Michelangelo was abstemious in his personal life, and once told his apprentice, Ascanio Condivi: "However rich I may have been, I have always lived like a poor man." Michelangelo’s bank accounts and numerous deeds of purchase show that his net worth was about 50,000 gold ducats, more than many princes and dukes of his time. Condivi said he was indifferent to food and drink, eating "more out of necessity than of pleasure" and that he "often slept in his clothes and ... boots." His biographer Paolo Giovio says, "His nature was so rough and uncouth that his domestic habits were incredibly squalid, and deprived posterity of any pupils who might have followed him." This, however, may not have affected him, as he was by nature a solitary and melancholy | the city, previously under threat from the French, was no longer in danger as Charles VIII had suffered defeats. Michelangelo returned to Florence but received no commissions from the new city government under Savonarola. He returned to the employment of the Medici. During the half-year he spent in Florence, he worked on two small statues, a child St. John the Baptist and a sleeping Cupid. According to Condivi, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, for whom Michelangelo had sculpted St. John the Baptist, asked that Michelangelo "fix it so that it looked as if it had been buried" so he could "send it to Rome ... pass [it off as] an ancient work and ... sell it much better." Both Lorenzo and Michelangelo were unwittingly cheated out of the real value of the piece by a middleman. Cardinal Raffaele Riario, to whom Lorenzo had sold it, discovered that it was a fraud, but was so impressed by the quality of the sculpture that he invited the artist to Rome. This apparent success in selling his sculpture abroad as well as the conservative Florentine situation may have encouraged Michelangelo to accept the prelate's invitation. Michelangelo arrived in Rome on 25 June 1496 at the age of 21. On 4 July of the same year, he began work on a commission for Cardinal Riario, an over-life-size statue of the Roman wine god Bacchus. Upon completion, the work was rejected by the cardinal, and subsequently entered the collection of the banker Jacopo Galli, for his garden. In November 1497, the French ambassador to the Holy See, Cardinal Jean de Bilhères-Lagraulas, commissioned him to carve a Pietà, a sculpture showing the Virgin Mary grieving over the body of Jesus. The subject, which is not part of the Biblical narrative of the Crucifixion, was common in religious sculpture of Medieval Northern Europe and would have been very familiar to the Cardinal. The contract was agreed upon in August of the following year. Michelangelo was 24 at the time of its completion. It was soon to be regarded as one of the world's great masterpieces of sculpture, "a revelation of all the potentialities and force of the art of sculpture". Contemporary opinion was summarised by Vasari: "It is certainly a miracle that a formless block of stone could ever have been reduced to a perfection that nature is scarcely able to create in the flesh." It is now located in St Peter's Basilica. Florence, 1499–1505 Michelangelo returned to Florence in 1499. The Republic was changing after the fall of its leader, anti-Renaissance priest Girolamo Savonarola, who was executed in 1498, and the rise of the gonfaloniere Piero Soderini. Michelangelo was asked by the consuls of the Guild of Wool to complete an unfinished project begun 40 years earlier by Agostino di Duccio: a colossal statue of Carrara marble portraying David as a symbol of Florentine freedom to be placed on the gable of Florence Cathedral. Michelangelo responded by completing his most famous work, the statue of David, in 1504. The masterwork definitively established his prominence as a sculptor of extraordinary technical skill and strength of symbolic imagination. A team of consultants, including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo di Credi, Antonio and Giuliano da Sangallo, Andrea della Robbia, Cosimo Rosselli, Davide Ghirlandaio, Piero di Cosimo, Andrea Sansovino and Michelangelo's dear friend Francesco Granacci, was called together to decide upon its placement, ultimately the Piazza della Signoria, in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. It now stands in the Academia while a replica occupies its place in the square. In the same period of placing the David, Michelangelo may have been involved in creating the sculptural profile on Palazzo Vecchio's façade known as the Importuno di Michelangelo. The hypothesis on Michelangelo's possible involvement in the creation of the profile is based on the strong resemblance of the latter to a profile drawn by the artist, datable to the beginning of the 16th century, now preserved in the Louvre. With the completion of the David came another commission. In early 1504 Leonardo da Vinci had been commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the council chamber of the Palazzo Vecchio, depicting the battle between Florence and Milan in 1440. Michelangelo was then commissioned to paint the Battle of Cascina. The two paintings are very different: Leonardo depicts soldiers fighting on horseback, while Michelangelo has soldiers being ambushed as they bathe in the river. Neither work was completed and both were lost forever when the chamber was refurbished. Both works were much admired, and copies remain of them, Leonardo's work having been copied by Rubens and Michelangelo's by Bastiano da Sangallo. Also during this period, Michelangelo was commissioned by Angelo Doni to paint a "Holy Family" as a present for his wife, Maddalena Strozzi. It is known as the Doni Tondo and hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in its original magnificent frame, which Michelangelo may have designed. He also may have painted the Madonna and Child with John the Baptist, known as the Manchester Madonna and now in the National Gallery, London. Tomb of Julius II, 1505-1545 In 1505 Michelangelo was invited back to Rome by the newly elected Pope Julius II and commissioned to build the Pope's tomb, which was to include forty statues and be finished in five years. Under the patronage of the pope, Michelangelo experienced constant interruptions to his work on the tomb in order to accomplish numerous other tasks. The commission for the tomb forced the artist to leave Florence with his planned Battle of Cascina painting unfinished. By this time, Michelangelo was established as an artist; both he and Julius II had hot tempers and soon argued. On 17 April 1506, Michelangelo left Rome in secret for Florence, remaining there until the Florentine government pressed him to return to the pope. Although Michelangelo worked on the tomb for 40 years, it was never finished to his satisfaction. It is located in the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli in Rome and is most famous for the central figure of Moses, completed in 1516. Of the other statues intended for the tomb, two, known as the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave, are now in the Louvre. Sistine Chapel ceiling, 1505-1512 During the same period, Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which took approximately four years to complete (1508–1512). According to Condivi's account, Bramante, who was working on the building of St. Peter's Basilica, resented Michelangelo's commission for the pope's tomb and convinced the pope to commission him in a medium with which he was unfamiliar, in order that he might fail at the task. Michelangelo was originally commissioned to paint the Twelve Apostles on the triangular pendentives that supported the ceiling, and to cover the central part of the ceiling with ornament. Michelangelo persuaded Pope Julius II to give him a free hand and proposed a different and more complex scheme, representing the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Promise of Salvation through the prophets, and the genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel that represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church. The composition stretches over 500 square metres of ceiling and contains over 300 figures. At its centre are nine episodes from the Book of Genesis, divided into three groups: God's creation of the earth; God's creation of humankind and their fall from God's grace; and lastly, the state of humanity as represented by Noah and his family. On the pendentives supporting the ceiling are painted twelve men and women who prophesied the coming of Jesus, seven prophets of Israel, and five Sibyls, prophetic women of the Classical world. Among the most famous paintings on the ceiling are The Creation of Adam, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Deluge, the Prophet Jeremiah, and the Cumaean Sibyl. Florence under Medici popes, 1513 – early 1534 In 1513, Pope Julius II died and was succeeded by Pope Leo X, the second son of Lorenzo de' Medici. From 1513 to 1516 Pope Leo was on good terms with Pope Julius's surviving relatives, so encouraged Michelangelo to continue work on Julius's tomb, but the families became enemies again in 1516 when Pope Leo tried to seize the Duchy of Urbino from Julius's nephew Francesco Maria I della Rovere. Pope Leo then had Michelangelo stop working on the tomb, and commissioned him to reconstruct the façade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence and to adorn it with sculptures. He spent three years creating drawings and models for the façade, as well as attempting to open a new marble quarry at Pietrasanta specifically for the project. In 1520, the work was abruptly cancelled by his financially strapped patrons before any real progress had been made. The basilica lacks a façade to this day. In 1520, the Medici came back to Michelangelo with another grand proposal, this time for a family funerary chapel in the Basilica of San Lorenzo. For posterity, this project, occupying the artist for much of the 1520s and 1530s, was more fully realised. Michelangelo used his own discretion to create the composition of the Medici Chapel, which houses the large tombs of two of the younger members of the Medici family, Giuliano, Duke of Nemours, and Lorenzo, his nephew. It also serves to commemorate their more famous predecessors, Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano, who are buried nearby. The tombs display statues of the two Medici and allegorical figures representing Night and Day, and Dusk and Dawn. The chapel also contains Michelangelo's Medici Madonna. In 1976 a concealed corridor was discovered with drawings on the walls that related to the chapel itself. Pope Leo X died in 1521 and was succeeded briefly by the austere Adrian VI, and then by his cousin Giulio Medici as Pope Clement VII. In 1524 Michelangelo received an architectural commission from the Medici pope for the Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo's Church. He designed both the interior of the library itself and its vestibule, a building utilising architectural forms with such dynamic effect that it is seen as the forerunner of Baroque architecture. It was left to assistants to interpret his plans and carry out construction. The library was not opened until 1571, and the vestibule remained incomplete until 1904. In 1527, Florentine citizens, encouraged by the sack of Rome, threw out the Medici and restored the republic. A siege of the city ensued, and Michelangelo went to the aid of his beloved Florence by working on the city's fortifications from 1528 to 1529. The city fell in 1530, and the Medici were restored to power. Michelangelo fell out of favour with the young Alessandro Medici, who had been installed as the first Duke of Florence. Fearing for his life, he fled to Rome, leaving assistants to complete the Medici chapel and the Laurentian Library. Despite Michelangelo's support of the republic and resistance to the Medici rule, he was welcomed by Pope Clement, who reinstated an allowance that he had previously granted the artist and made a new contract with him over the tomb of Pope Julius. Rome, 1534–1546 In Rome, Michelangelo lived near the church of Santa Maria di Loreto. It was at this time that he met the poet Vittoria Colonna, marchioness of Pescara, who was to become one of his closest friends until her death in 1547. Shortly before his death in 1534, Pope Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint a fresco of The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel. His successor, Pope Paul III, was instrumental in seeing that Michelangelo began and completed the project, which he laboured on from 1534 to October 1541. The fresco depicts the Second Coming of Christ and his Judgement of the souls. Michelangelo ignored the usual artistic conventions in portraying Jesus, showing him as a massive, muscular figure, youthful, beardless and naked. He is surrounded by saints, among whom Saint Bartholomew holds a drooping flayed skin, bearing the likeness of Michelangelo. The dead rise from their graves, to be consigned either to Heaven or to Hell. Once completed, the depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary naked was considered sacrilegious, and Cardinal Carafa and Monsignor Sernini (Mantua's ambassador) campaigned to have the fresco removed or censored, but the Pope resisted. At the Council of Trent, shortly before Michelangelo's death in 1564, it was decided to obscure the genitals and Daniele da Volterra, an apprentice of Michelangelo, was commissioned to make the alterations. An uncensored copy of the original, by Marcello Venusti, is in the Capodimonte Museum of Naples. Michelangelo worked on a number of architectural projects at this time. They included a design for the Capitoline Hill with its trapezoid piazza displaying the ancient bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius. He designed the upper floor of the Palazzo Farnese and the interior of the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in which he transformed the vaulted interior of an Ancient Roman bathhouse. Other architectural works include San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, the Sforza Chapel (Capella Sforza) in the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore and the Porta Pia. St Peter's Basilica, 1546–1564 While still working on the Last Judgment, Michelangelo received yet another commission for the Vatican. This was for the painting of two large frescos in the Cappella Paolina depicting significant events in the lives of the two most important saints of Rome, the Conversion of Saint Paul and the Crucifixion of Saint Peter. Like the Last Judgment, these two works are complex compositions containing a great number of figures. They were completed in 1550. In the same year, Giorgio Vasari published his Vita, including a biography of Michelangelo. In 1546, Michelangelo was appointed architect of St. Peter's Basilica, Rome. The process of replacing the Constantinian basilica of the 4th century had been underway for fifty years and in 1506 foundations had been laid to the plans of |
the deities of Arabia's pagan tribes. Mecca's most important pagan deity was Hubal, which had been placed there by the ruling Quraish tribe. and remained until the Conquest of Mecca by Muhammad. In the 5th century, the Quraish took control of Mecca, and became skilled merchants and traders. In the 6th century, they joined the lucrative spice trade, since battles elsewhere were diverting trade routes from dangerous sea routes to more secure overland routes. The Byzantine Empire had previously controlled the Red Sea, but piracy had been increasing. Another previous route that ran through the Persian Gulf via the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was also being threatened by exploitations from the Sassanid Empire, and was being disrupted by the Lakhmids, the Ghassanids, and the Roman–Persian Wars. Mecca's prominence as a trading center also surpassed the cities of Petra and Palmyra. The Sassanids however did not always pose a threat to Mecca, as in 575 CE they protected it from a Yemeni invasion, led by its Christian leader Abraha. The tribes of southern Arabia asked the Persian king Khosrau I for aid, in response to which he came south to Arabia with foot-soldiers and a fleet of ships near Mecca. By the middle of the 6th century, there were three major settlements in northern Arabia, all along the south-western coast that borders the Red Sea, in a habitable region between the sea and the Hejaz mountains to the east. Although the area around Mecca was completely barren, it was the wealthiest of the three settlements with abundant water from the renowned Zamzam Well and a position at the crossroads of major caravan routes. The harsh conditions and terrain of the Arabian peninsula meant a near-constant state of conflict between the local tribes, but once a year they would declare a truce and converge upon Mecca in an annual pilgrimage. Up to the 7th century, this journey was intended for religious reasons by the pagan Arabs to pay homage to their shrine, and to drink Zamzam. However, it was also the time each year that disputes would be arbitrated, debts would be resolved, and trading would occur at Meccan fairs. These annual events gave the tribes a sense of common identity and made Mecca an important focus for the peninsula. The Year of the Elephant (570 CE) The "Year of the Elephant" is the name in Islamic history for the year approximately equating to 550–552 CE, when, according to Islamic sources such as Ibn Ishaq, Abraha descended upon Mecca, riding an elephant, with a large army after building a cathedral at San'aa, named al-Qullays in honor of the Negus of Axum. It gained widespread fame, even gaining attention from the Byzantine Empire. Abraha attempted to divert the pilgrimage of the Arabs from the Ka'bah to al-Qullays, effectively converting them to Christianity. According to Islamic tradition, this was the year of Muhammad's birth. Abraha allegedly sent a messenger named Muhammad ibn Khuza'i to Mecca and Tihamah with a message that al-Qullays was both much better than other houses of worship and purer, having not been defiled by the housing of idols. When Muhammad ibn Khuza'i got as far as the land of Kinana, the people of the lowland, knowing what he had come for, sent a man of Hudhayl called ʿUrwa bin Hayyad al-Milasi, who shot him with an arrow, killing him. His brother Qays who was with him, fled to Abraha and told him the news, which increased his rage and fury and he swore to raid the Kinana tribe and destroy the Ka'bah. Ibn Ishaq further states that one of the men of the Quraysh tribe was angered by this, and going to Sana'a, entering the church at night and defiling it; widely assumed to have done so by defecating in it. Abraha marched upon the Ka'bah with a large army, which included one or more war elephants, intending to demolish it. When news of the advance of his army came, the Arab tribes of Quraysh, Kinanah, Khuza'a and Hudhayl united in the defense of the Ka'bah and the city. A man from the Himyarite Kingdom was sent by Abraha to advise them that Abraha only wished to demolish the Ka'bah and if they resisted, they would be crushed. Abdul Muttalib told the Meccans to seek refuge in the hills while he and some members of the Quraysh remained within the precincts of the Kaaba. Abraha sent a dispatch inviting Abdul-Muttalib to meet with Abraha and discuss matters. When Abdul-Muttalib left the meeting he was heard saying, "The Owner of this House is its Defender, and I am sure he will save it from the attack of the adversaries and will not dishonor the servants of His House." Abraha eventually attacked Mecca. However, the lead elephant, known as Mahmud, is said to have stopped at the boundary around Mecca and refused to enter. It has been theorized that an epidemic such as by smallpox could have caused such a failed invasion of Mecca. The reference to the story in Quran is rather short. According to the 105th Surah of the Quran, Al-Fil, the next day, a dark cloud of small birds sent by Allah appeared. The birds carried small rocks in their beaks, and bombarded the Ethiopian forces, and smashed them to a state like that of eaten straw. Economy Camel caravans, said to have first been used by Muhammad's great-grandfather, were a major part of Mecca's bustling economy. Alliances were struck between the merchants in Mecca and the local nomadic tribes, who would bring goods – leather, livestock, and metals mined in the local mountains – to Mecca to be loaded on the caravans and carried to cities in Shaam and Iraq. Historical accounts also provide some indication that goods from other continents may also have flowed through Mecca. Goods from Africa and the Far East passed through en route to Syria including spices, leather, medicine, cloth, and slaves; in return Mecca received money, weapons, cereals and wine, which in turn were distributed throughout Arabia. The Meccans signed treaties with both the Byzantines and the Bedouins, and negotiated safe passages for caravans, giving them water and pasture rights. Mecca became the center of a loose confederation of client tribes, which included those of the Banu Tamim. Other regional powers such as the Abyssinians, Ghassanids, and Lakhmids were in decline leaving Meccan trade to be the primary binding force in Arabia in the late 6th century. Muhammad and the conquest of Mecca Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570, and thus Islam has been inextricably linked with it ever since. He was born in a faction, the Banu Hashim, of the ruling Quraysh tribe. It was in Mecca, in the nearby mountain cave of Hira on Jabal al-Nour, that, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad began receiving divine revelations from God through the archangel Jibreel in 610 CE. Advocating his form of Abrahamic monotheism against Meccan paganism, and after enduring persecution from the pagan tribes for 13 years, Muhammad emigrated to Medina (hijrah) in 622 with his companions, the Muhajirun, to Yathrib (later renamed Medina). The conflict between the Quraysh and the Muslims is accepted to have begun at this point. Overall, Meccan efforts to annihilate Islam failed and proved to be costly and unsuccessful. During the Battle of the Trench in 627, the combined armies of Arabia were unable to defeat Muhammad's forces. In 628, Muhammad and his followers wanted to enter Mecca for pilgrimage, but were blocked by the Quraysh. Subsequently, Muslims and Meccans entered into the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, whereby the Quraysh and their allies promised to cease fighting Muslims and their allies and promised that Muslims would be allowed into the city to perform the pilgrimage the following year. It was meant to be a ceasefire for 10 years; however, just two years later, the Banu Bakr, allies of the Quraish, violated the truce by slaughtering a group of the Banu Khuza'ah, allies of the Muslims. Muhammad and his companions, now 10,000 strong, marched into Mecca and conquered the city. The pagan imagery was destroyed by Muhammad's followers and the location Islamized and rededicated to the worship of Allah alone. Mecca was declared the holiest site in Islam ordaining it as the center of Muslim pilgrimage (Hajj), one of the faith's Five Pillars. Muhammad then returned to Medina, after assigning 'Akib ibn Usaid as governor of the city. His other activities in Arabia led to the unification of the peninsula under the banner of Islam. Muhammad died in 632. Within the next few hundred years, the area under the banner of Islam stretched from North Africa into Asia and parts of Europe. As the Islamic realm grew, Mecca continued to attract pilgrims from all across the Muslim world and beyond, as Muslims came to perform the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Mecca also attracted a year-round population of scholars, pious Muslims who wished to live close to the Kaaba, and local inhabitants who served the pilgrims. Due to the difficulty and expense of the Hajj, pilgrims arrived by boat at Jeddah, and came overland, or joined the annual caravans from Syria or Iraq. Medieval and pre-modern times Mecca was never the capital of any of the Islamic states. Muslim rulers did contribute to its upkeep, such as during the reigns of 'Umar (r. 634–644 CE) and 'Uthman ibn Affan (r. 644–656 CE) when concerns of flooding caused the caliphs to bring in Christian engineers to build barrages in the low-lying quarters and construct dykes and embankments to protect the area around the Kaaba. Muhammad's return to Medina shifted the focus away from Mecca and later even further away when 'Ali, the fourth caliph, took power chose Kufa as his capital. The Umayyad Caliphate moved the capital to Damascus in Syria and the Abbasid Caliphate to Baghdad, in modern-day Iraq, which remained the center of the Islamic Empire for nearly 500 years. Mecca re-entered Islamic political history during the Second Fitna, when it was held by Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr and the Zubayrids. The city was twice besieged by the Umayyads, in 683 and 692 and for some time thereafter, the city figured little in politics, remaining a city of devotion and scholarship governed by various other factions. In 930, Mecca was attacked and sacked by Qarmatians, a millenarian Shi'a Isma'ili Muslim sect led by Abū-Tāhir Al-Jannābī and centered in eastern Arabia. The Black Death pandemic hit Mecca in 1349. Ibn Battuta's description of Mecca One of the most famous travelers to Mecca in the 14th century was a Moroccan scholar and traveler, Ibn Battuta. In his rihla (account), he provides a vast description of the city. Around the year 1327 CE or 729 AH, Ibn Battuta arrived at the holy city. Immediately, he says, it felt like a holy sanctuary, and thus. he started the rites of the pilgrimage. He remained in Mecca for three years and left in 1330 CE. During his second year in the holy city, he says his caravan arrived "with a great quantity of alms for the support of those who were staying in Mecca and Medina". While in Mecca, prayers were made for (not to) the King of Iraq and also for Salaheddin al-Ayyubi, Sultan of Egypt and Syria at the Ka'bah. Battuta says the Ka'bah was large, but was destroyed and rebuilt smaller than the original and that it contained images of angels and prophets including Jesus, his mother Mary, and many others. Battuta describes the Ka'bah as an important part of Mecca due to the fact that many people make the pilgrimage to it. Battuta describes the people of the city as being humble and kind, and also willing to give a part of everything they had to someone who had nothing. The inhabitants of Mecca and the village itself, he says, were very clean. There was also a sense of elegance to the village. Under the Ottomans In 1517, the then Sharif of Mecca, Barakat bin Muhammad, acknowledged the supremacy of the Ottoman Caliph but retained a great degree of local autonomy. In 1803 the city was captured by the First Saudi State, which held Mecca until 1813. destroying some of the historic tombs and domes in and around the city. The Ottomans assigned the task of bringing Mecca back under Ottoman control to their powerful Khedive (viceroy) and Wali of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha. Muhammad Ali Pasha successfully returned Mecca to Ottoman control in 1813. In 1818, the Saud were defeated again but survived and founded the Second Saudi State that lasted until 1891 and led on to the present country of Saudi Arabia. In 1853, Sir Richard Francis Burton undertook the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina disguised as a Muslim. Although Burton was certainly not the first non-Muslim European to make the Hajj (Ludovico di Varthema did this in 1503), his pilgrimage remains one of the most famous and documented of modern times. Mecca was regularly hit by cholera outbreaks. Between 1830 and 1930, cholera broke out among pilgrims at Mecca 27 times. Modern history Hashemite Revolt and subsequent control by the Sharifate of Mecca In World War I, the Ottoman Empire was at war with the Allies. It had successfully repulsed an attack on Istanbul in the Gallipoli campaign and on Baghdad in the Siege of Kut. The British intelligence agent T.E. Lawrence conspired with the Ottoman governor, Hussain bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca to revolt against the Ottoman Empire and it was the first city captured by his forces in the 1916 Battle of Mecca. Sharif's revolt proved a turning point of the war on the eastern front. Hussein declared a new state, the Kingdom of Hejaz, declaring himself the Sharif of the state and Mecca his capital. News reports in November 1916 via contact in Cairo with returning Hajj pilgrims, stated that with the Ottoman Turkish authorities gone, the Hajj of 1916 was free of the previous massive extortion and monetary demands made by the Turks who were agents of the Ottoman government. Saudi Arabian conquest and modern history Following the 1924 Battle of Mecca, the Sharif of Mecca was overthrown by the Saud family, and Mecca was incorporated into Saudi Arabia. Under Saudi rule, much of the historic city has been demolished as a result of the Saudi government fearing these sites might become sites of association in worship besides Allah (shirk). The city has been expanded to include several towns previously considered to be separate from the holy city and now is just a few kilometers outside the main sites of the Hajj, Mina, Muzdalifah and Arafat. Mecca is not served by any airport, due to concerns about the city's safety. It is instead served by the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah (approx. 70 km away) internationally and the Ta'if Regional Airport (approx. 120 km away) for domestic flights. The city today is at the junction of the two most important highways in all of the Saudi Arabian highway system, Highway 40, which connects the city to Jeddah in the west and the capital, Riyadh and Dammam in the east and Highway 15, which connects it to Medina, Tabuk and onward to Jordan in the north and Abha and Jizan in the south. The Ottomans had planned to extend their railway network to the holy city, but were forced to abandon this plan due to their partaking in the First World War. This plan was later carried out by the Saudi government, which connected the two holy cities of Medina and Mecca with the modern Haramain high-speed railway system which runs at 300 km/h (190 mph) and connects the two cities via Jeddah, King Abdulaziz International Airport and King Abdullah Economic City near Rabigh within two hours. The haram area of Mecca, in which the entry of non-Muslims is forbidden, is much larger than that of Medina. 1979 Grand Mosque seizure On 20 November 1979, two hundred armed dissidents led by Juhayman al-Otaibi, seized the Grand Mosque, claiming the Saudi royal family no longer represented pure Islam and that the Masjid al-Haram and the Ka'bah, must be held by those of true faith. The rebels seized tens of thousands of pilgrims as hostages and barricaded themselves in the mosque. The siege lasted two weeks, and resulted in several hundred deaths and significant damage to the shrine, especially the Safa-Marwah gallery. A multinational force was finally able to retake the mosque from the dissidents. Since then, the Grand Mosque has been expanded several times, with many other expansions being undertaken in the present day. Destruction of Islamic heritage sites Under Saudi rule, it has been estimated that since 1985, about 95% of Mecca's historic buildings, most over a thousand years old, have been demolished. It has been reported that there are now fewer than 20 structures remaining in Mecca that date back to the time of Muhammad. Some important buildings that have been destroyed include the house of Khadijah, the wife of Muhammad, the house of Abu Bakr, Muhammad's birthplace and the Ottoman-era Ajyad Fortress. The reason for much of the destruction of historic buildings has been for the construction of hotels, apartments, parking lots, and other infrastructure facilities for Hajj pilgrims. Incidents during pilgrimage Mecca has been the site of several incidents and failures of crowd control because of the large numbers of people who come to make the Hajj. For example, on 2 July 1990, a pilgrimage to Mecca ended in tragedy when the ventilation system failed in a crowded pedestrian tunnel and 1,426 people were either suffocated or trampled to death in a stampede. On 24 September 2015, 700 pilgrims were killed in a stampede at Mina during the stoning-the-Devil ritual at Jamarat. Significance in Islam Mecca holds an important place in Islam and is the holiest city in all branches of the religion. The city derives its importance from the role it plays in the Hajj and 'Umrah. Masjid al-Haram The Masjid al-Haram is the largest mosque in the world and the most expensive single building in the entire world, valued at 100 billion US dollars, as of 2020. It is the site of two of the most important rites of both the Hajj and of the Umrah, the circumambulation around the Ka'bah (tawaf) and the walking between the two mounts of Safa and Marwa (sa'ee). The masjid is also the site of the Zamzam Well. According to Islamic tradition, a prayer in the masjid is equal to 100,000 prayers in any other masjid around the world. Kaaba There is a difference of opinion between Islamic scholars upon who first built the Ka'bah, some believe it was built by the angels while others believe it was built by Adam. Regardless, it was built several times before reaching its current state. The Ka'bah is also the common direction of prayer (qibla) for all Muslims. The surface surrounding the Ka'bah on which Muslims circumambulate it is known as the Mataf. Hijr al-Aswad (The Black Stone) The Black Stone is a stone, considered by scientists to be a meteorite or of similar origin and believed by Muslims to be of divine origin. It is set in the eastern corner of the Ka’bah and it is Sunnah to touch and kiss the stone. The area around the stone is generally always crowded | a municipal council of 14 locally elected members headed by the mayor (called Amin in Arabic) appointed by the Saudi government. , the mayor of the city is Osama bin Fadhel Al-Barr. The City of Mecca amanah, which constitutes Mecca and the surrounding region, is the capital of the Mecca Province, which includes the neighboring cities of Jeddah and Ta'if, even though Jeddah is considerably larger in population compared to Mecca. The Provincial Governor of the province from 16 May 2007 is Prince Khalid bin Faisal Al Saud. Etymology Mecca has been referred to by many names. As with many Arabic words, its etymology is obscure. Widely believed to be a synonym for Makkah, it is said to be more specifically the early name for the valley located therein, while Muslim scholars generally use it to refer to the sacred area of the city that immediately surrounds and includes the Ka'bah. Bakkah The Quran refers to the city as Bakkah in Surah Al Imran (3), verse 96, "Indeed the first House [of worship], established for mankind was that at Bakkah..." – Quran 3:96 This is presumed to have been the name of the city at the time of Abraham (Ibrahim in Islamic tradition) and it is also transliterated as Baca, Baka, Bakah, Bakka, Becca, Bekka, among others. Makkah, Makkah al-Mukarramah and Mecca "Makkah" is the official transliteration used by the Saudi government and is closer to the Arabic pronunciation. The government adopted Makkah as the official spelling in the 1980s, but is not universally known or used worldwide. The full official name is Makkah al-Mukarramah (). "Makkah" is used to refer to the city in the Quran in Surah Al-Fath (48), verse 24. The word "Mecca" in English has come to be used to refer to any place that draws large numbers of people, and because of this some English-speaking Muslims have come to regard the use of this spelling for the city as offensive. Nonetheless, Mecca is the familiar form of the English transliteration for the Arabic name of the city. The historic consensus in academic scholarship has long been that "Macoraba", the place mentioned in Arabia Felix by Claudius Ptolemy, is Mecca. More recent study has questioned this association. Many etymologies have been proposed: the traditional one is that it is derived from the Old South Arabian root M-K-R-B which means "temple". Other names Another name used for Mecca in the Quran is at 6:92 where it is called Umm al-Qurā (, meaning "Mother of all Settlements"). The city has been called several other names in both the Quran and ahadith. Another name used historically for Mecca is Tihāmah. According to Arab and Islamic tradition, another name for Mecca, Fārān, is synonymous with the Desert of Paran mentioned in the Old Testament at Genesis 21:21. Arab and Islamic tradition holds that the wilderness of Paran, broadly speaking, is the Tihamah coastal plain and the site where Ishmael settled was Mecca. Yaqut al-Hamawi, the 12th-century Syrian geographer, wrote that Fārān was "an arabized Hebrew word, one of the names of Mecca mentioned in the Torah." History Prehistory In 2010, Mecca and the surrounding area became an important site for paleontology with respect to primate evolution, with the discovery of a Saadanius fossil. Saadanius is considered to be a primate closely related to the common ancestor of the Old World monkeys and apes. The fossil habitat, near what is now the Red Sea in western Saudi Arabia, was a damp forest area between 28 million and 29 million years ago. Paleontologists involved in the research hope to find further fossils in the area. Early history (up to 6th century CE) The early history of Mecca is still largely disputed, as there are no unambiguous references to it in ancient literature prior to the rise of Islam. The first unambiguous reference to Mecca in external literature occurs in 741 CE, in the Byzantine-Arab Chronicle, though here the author places the region in Mesopotamia rather than the Hejaz. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus writes about Arabia in the 1st century BCE in his work Bibliotheca historica, describing a holy shrine: "And a temple has been set up there, which is very holy and exceedingly revered by all Arabians". Claims have been made this could be a reference to the Ka'bah in Mecca. However, the geographic location Diodorus describes is located in northwest Arabia, around the area of Leuke Kome, within the former Nabataean Kingdom and the Roman province of Arabia Petraea. Ptolemy lists the names of 50 cities in Arabia, one going by the name of Macoraba. There has been speculation since 1646 that this could be a reference to Mecca. Historically, there has been a general consensus in scholarship that Macoraba mentioned by Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE is indeed Mecca, but more recently, this has been questioned. Bowersock favors the identity of the former, with his theory being that "Macoraba" is the word "Makkah" followed by the aggrandizing Aramaic adjective rabb (great). The Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus also enumerated many cities of Western Arabia, most of which can be identified. According to Bowersock, he did mention Mecca as "Geapolis" or "Hierapolis", the latter one meaning "holy city" potentially referring to the sanctuary of the Kaaba. Patricia Crone, from the Revisionist school of Islamic studies on the other hand, writes that "the plain truth is that the name Macoraba has nothing to do with that of Mecca [...] if Ptolemy mentions Mecca at all, he calls it Moka, a town in Arabia Petraea" Procopius' 6th century statement that the Ma'ad tribe possessed the coast of western Arabia between the Ghassanids and the Himyarites of the south supports the Arabic sources tradition that associates Quraysh as a branch of the Ma'add and Muhammad as a direct descendant of Ma'ad ibn Adnan. Historians including Patricia Crone and Tom Holland have cast doubt on the claim that Mecca was a major historical trading outpost. However, other scholars such as Glen W. Bowersock disagree and assert that Mecca was a major trading outpost. Crone later on disregarded some of her theories. She argues that Meccan trade relied on skins, hides, manufactured leather goods, clarified butter, Hijazi woollens, and camels. She suggests that most of these goods were destined for the Roman army, which is known to have required colossal quantities of leather and hides for its equipment. Mecca is mentioned in the following early Quranic manuscripts: Codex Is. 1615 I, folio 47v, radiocarbon dated to 591–643 CE. Codex Ṣanʿāʾ DAM 01–29.1, folio 29a, radiocarbon dated between 633 and 665 CE. Codex Arabe 331, folio 40 v, radiocarbon dated between 652 and 765 CE. The earliest Muslim inscriptions are from the Mecca-Ta'if area. Islamic narrative In the Islamic view, the beginnings of Mecca are attributed to the Biblical figures, Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael. The civilization of Mecca is believed to have started after Ibrāhīm (Abraham) left his son Ismāʿīl (Ishmael) and wife Hājar (Hagar) in the valley at Allah's command. Some people from the Yemeni tribe of Jurhum settled with them, and Isma'il reportedly married two women, one after divorcing the first, on Ibrahim's advice. At least one man of the Jurhum helped Ismāʿīl and his father to construct or according to Islamic narratives, reconstruct, the Ka'bah ('Cube'), which would have social, religious, political and historical implications for the site and region. Muslims see the mention of a pilgrimage at the Valley of Baca in the Old Testament chapter Psalm 84:3–6 as a reference to Mecca, similar to the Quran at Surah 3:96. In the Sharḥ al-Asāṭīr, a commentary on the Samaritan midrashic chronology of the Patriarchs, of unknown date but probably composed in the 10th century CE, it is claimed that Mecca was built by the sons of Nebaioth, the eldest son of Ismāʿīl or Ishmael. Thamudic inscriptions Some Thamudic inscriptions which were discovered in the south Jordan contained names of some individuals such as ʿAbd Mekkat (, "Servant of Mecca"). There were also some other inscriptions which contained personal names such as Makki (, "Makkahn"), but Jawwad Ali from the University of Baghdad suggested that there's also a probability of a tribe named "Makkah". Under the Quraish Sometime in the 5th century, the Ka'bah was a place of worship for the deities of Arabia's pagan tribes. Mecca's most important pagan deity was Hubal, which had been placed there by the ruling Quraish tribe. and remained until the Conquest of Mecca by Muhammad. In the 5th century, the Quraish took control of Mecca, and became skilled merchants and traders. In the 6th century, they joined the lucrative spice trade, since battles elsewhere were diverting trade routes from dangerous sea routes to more secure overland routes. The Byzantine Empire had previously controlled the Red Sea, but piracy had been increasing. Another previous route that ran through the Persian Gulf via the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was also being threatened by exploitations from the Sassanid Empire, and was being disrupted by the Lakhmids, the Ghassanids, and the Roman–Persian Wars. Mecca's prominence as a trading center also surpassed the cities of Petra and Palmyra. The Sassanids however did not always pose a threat to Mecca, as in 575 CE they protected it from a Yemeni invasion, led by its Christian leader Abraha. The tribes of southern Arabia asked the Persian king Khosrau I for aid, in response to which he came south to Arabia with foot-soldiers and a fleet of ships near Mecca. By the middle of the 6th century, there were three major settlements in northern Arabia, all along the south-western coast that borders the Red Sea, in a habitable region between the sea and the Hejaz mountains to the east. Although the area around Mecca was completely barren, it was the wealthiest of the three settlements with abundant water from the renowned Zamzam Well and a position at the crossroads of major caravan routes. The harsh conditions and terrain of the Arabian peninsula meant a near-constant state of conflict between the local tribes, but once a year they would declare a truce and converge upon Mecca in an annual pilgrimage. Up to the 7th century, this journey was intended for religious reasons by the pagan Arabs to pay homage to their shrine, and to drink Zamzam. However, it was also the time each year that disputes would be arbitrated, debts would be resolved, and trading would occur at Meccan fairs. These annual events gave the tribes a sense of common identity and made Mecca an important focus for the peninsula. The Year of the Elephant (570 CE) The "Year of the Elephant" is the name in Islamic history for the year approximately equating to 550–552 CE, when, according to Islamic sources such as Ibn Ishaq, Abraha descended upon Mecca, riding an elephant, with a large army after building a cathedral at San'aa, named al-Qullays in honor of the Negus of Axum. It gained widespread fame, even gaining attention from the Byzantine Empire. Abraha attempted to divert the pilgrimage of the Arabs from the Ka'bah to al-Qullays, effectively converting them to Christianity. According to Islamic tradition, this was the year of Muhammad's birth. Abraha allegedly sent a messenger named Muhammad ibn Khuza'i to Mecca and Tihamah with a message that al-Qullays was both much better than other houses of worship and purer, having not been defiled by the housing of idols. When Muhammad ibn Khuza'i got as far as the land of Kinana, the people of the lowland, knowing what he had come for, sent a man of Hudhayl called ʿUrwa bin Hayyad al-Milasi, who shot him with an arrow, killing him. His brother Qays who was with him, fled to Abraha and told him the news, which increased his rage and fury and he swore to raid the Kinana tribe and destroy the Ka'bah. Ibn Ishaq further states that one of the men of the Quraysh tribe was angered by this, and going to Sana'a, entering the church at night and defiling it; widely assumed to have done so by defecating in it. Abraha marched upon the Ka'bah with a large army, which included one or more war elephants, intending to demolish it. When news of the advance of his army came, the Arab tribes of Quraysh, Kinanah, Khuza'a and Hudhayl united in the defense of the Ka'bah and the city. A man from the Himyarite Kingdom was sent by Abraha to advise them that Abraha only wished to demolish the Ka'bah and if they resisted, they would be crushed. Abdul Muttalib told the Meccans to seek refuge in the hills while he and some members of the Quraysh remained within the precincts of the Kaaba. Abraha sent a dispatch inviting Abdul-Muttalib to meet with Abraha and discuss matters. When Abdul-Muttalib left the meeting he was heard saying, "The Owner of this House is its Defender, and I am sure he will save it from the attack of the adversaries and will not dishonor the servants of His House." Abraha eventually attacked Mecca. However, the lead elephant, known as Mahmud, is said to have stopped at the boundary around Mecca and refused to enter. It has been theorized that an epidemic such as by smallpox could have caused such a failed invasion of Mecca. The reference to the story in Quran is rather short. According to the 105th Surah of the Quran, Al-Fil, the next day, a dark cloud of small birds sent by Allah appeared. The birds carried small rocks in their beaks, and bombarded the Ethiopian forces, and smashed them to a state like that of eaten straw. Economy Camel caravans, said to have first been used by Muhammad's great-grandfather, were a major part of Mecca's bustling economy. Alliances were struck between the merchants in Mecca and the local nomadic tribes, who would bring goods – leather, livestock, and metals mined in the local mountains – to Mecca to be loaded on the caravans and carried to cities in Shaam and Iraq. Historical accounts also provide some indication that goods from other continents may also have flowed through Mecca. Goods from Africa and the Far East passed through en route to Syria including spices, leather, medicine, cloth, and slaves; in return Mecca received money, weapons, cereals and wine, which in turn were distributed throughout Arabia. The Meccans signed treaties with both the Byzantines and the Bedouins, and negotiated safe passages for caravans, giving them water and pasture rights. Mecca became the center of a loose confederation of client tribes, which included those of the Banu Tamim. Other regional powers such as the Abyssinians, Ghassanids, and Lakhmids were in decline leaving Meccan trade to be the primary binding force in Arabia in the late 6th century. Muhammad and the conquest of Mecca Muhammad was born in Mecca in 570, and thus Islam has been inextricably linked with it ever since. He was born in a faction, the Banu Hashim, of the ruling Quraysh tribe. It was in Mecca, in the nearby mountain cave of Hira on Jabal al-Nour, that, according to Islamic tradition, Muhammad began receiving divine revelations from God through the archangel Jibreel in 610 CE. Advocating his form of Abrahamic monotheism against Meccan paganism, and after enduring persecution from the pagan tribes for 13 years, Muhammad emigrated to Medina (hijrah) in 622 with his companions, the Muhajirun, to Yathrib (later renamed Medina). The conflict between the Quraysh and the Muslims is accepted to have begun at this point. Overall, Meccan efforts to annihilate Islam failed and proved to be costly and unsuccessful. During the Battle of the Trench in 627, the combined armies of Arabia were unable to defeat Muhammad's forces. In 628, Muhammad and his followers wanted to enter Mecca for pilgrimage, but were blocked by the Quraysh. Subsequently, Muslims and Meccans entered into the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, whereby the Quraysh and their allies promised to cease fighting Muslims and their allies and promised that Muslims would be allowed into the city to perform the pilgrimage the following year. It was meant to be a ceasefire for 10 years; however, just two years later, the Banu Bakr, allies of the Quraish, violated the truce by slaughtering a group of the Banu Khuza'ah, allies of the Muslims. Muhammad and his companions, now 10,000 strong, marched into Mecca and conquered the city. The pagan imagery was destroyed by Muhammad's followers and the location Islamized and rededicated to the worship of Allah alone. Mecca was declared the holiest site in Islam ordaining it as the center of Muslim pilgrimage (Hajj), one of the faith's Five Pillars. Muhammad then returned to Medina, after assigning 'Akib ibn Usaid as governor of the city. His other activities in Arabia led to the unification of the peninsula under the banner of Islam. Muhammad died in 632. Within the next few hundred years, the area under the banner of Islam stretched from North Africa into Asia and parts of Europe. As the Islamic realm grew, Mecca continued to attract pilgrims from all across the Muslim world and beyond, as Muslims came to perform the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Mecca also attracted a year-round population of scholars, pious Muslims who wished to live close to the Kaaba, and local inhabitants who served the pilgrims. Due to the difficulty and expense of the Hajj, pilgrims arrived by boat at Jeddah, and came overland, or joined the annual caravans from Syria or Iraq. Medieval and pre-modern times Mecca was never the capital of any of the Islamic states. Muslim rulers did contribute to its upkeep, such as during the reigns of 'Umar (r. 634–644 CE) and 'Uthman ibn Affan (r. 644–656 CE) when concerns of flooding caused the caliphs to bring in Christian engineers to build barrages in the low-lying quarters and construct dykes and embankments to protect the area around the Kaaba. Muhammad's return to Medina shifted the focus away from Mecca and later even further away when 'Ali, the fourth caliph, took power chose Kufa as his capital. The Umayyad Caliphate moved the capital to Damascus in Syria and the Abbasid Caliphate to Baghdad, in modern-day Iraq, which remained the center of the Islamic Empire for nearly 500 years. Mecca re-entered Islamic political history during the Second Fitna, when it was held by Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr and the Zubayrids. The city was twice besieged by the Umayyads, in 683 and 692 and for some time thereafter, the city figured little in politics, remaining a city of devotion and scholarship governed by various other factions. In 930, Mecca was attacked and sacked by Qarmatians, a millenarian Shi'a Isma'ili Muslim sect led by Abū-Tāhir Al-Jannābī and centered in eastern Arabia. The Black Death pandemic hit Mecca in 1349. Ibn Battuta's description of Mecca One of the most famous travelers to Mecca in the 14th century was a Moroccan scholar and traveler, Ibn Battuta. In his rihla (account), he provides a vast description of the city. Around the year 1327 CE or 729 AH, Ibn Battuta arrived at the holy city. Immediately, he says, it felt like a holy sanctuary, and thus. he started the rites of the pilgrimage. He remained in Mecca for three years and left in 1330 CE. During his second year in the holy city, he says his caravan arrived "with a great quantity of alms for the support of those who were staying in Mecca and Medina". While in Mecca, prayers were made for (not to) the King of Iraq and also for Salaheddin al-Ayyubi, Sultan of Egypt and Syria at the Ka'bah. Battuta says the Ka'bah was large, but was destroyed and rebuilt smaller than the original and that it contained images of angels and prophets including Jesus, his mother Mary, and many others. Battuta describes the Ka'bah as an important part of Mecca due to the fact that many people make the pilgrimage to it. Battuta describes the people of the city as being humble and kind, and also willing to give a part of everything they had to someone who had nothing. The inhabitants of Mecca and the village itself, he says, were very clean. There was also a sense of elegance to the village. Under the Ottomans In 1517, the then Sharif of Mecca, Barakat bin Muhammad, acknowledged the supremacy of the Ottoman Caliph but retained a great degree of local autonomy. In 1803 the city was captured by the First Saudi State, which held Mecca until 1813. destroying some of the historic tombs and domes in and around the city. The Ottomans assigned the task of bringing Mecca back under Ottoman control to their powerful Khedive (viceroy) and Wali of Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha. Muhammad Ali Pasha successfully returned Mecca to Ottoman control in 1813. In 1818, the Saud were defeated again but survived and founded the Second Saudi State that lasted until 1891 and led on to the present country of Saudi Arabia. In 1853, Sir Richard Francis Burton undertook the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina disguised as a Muslim. Although Burton was certainly not the first non-Muslim European to make the Hajj (Ludovico di Varthema did this in 1503), his pilgrimage remains one of the most famous and documented of modern times. Mecca was regularly hit by cholera outbreaks. Between 1830 and 1930, cholera broke out among pilgrims at Mecca 27 times. Modern history Hashemite Revolt and subsequent control by the Sharifate of Mecca In World War I, the Ottoman Empire was at war with the Allies. It had successfully repulsed an attack on Istanbul in the Gallipoli campaign and on Baghdad in the Siege of Kut. The British intelligence agent T.E. Lawrence conspired with the Ottoman governor, Hussain bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca to revolt against the Ottoman Empire and it was the first city captured by his forces in the 1916 Battle of Mecca. Sharif's revolt proved a turning point of the war on the eastern front. Hussein declared a new state, the Kingdom of Hejaz, declaring himself the Sharif of the state and Mecca his capital. News reports in November 1916 via contact in Cairo with returning Hajj pilgrims, stated that with the Ottoman Turkish authorities gone, the Hajj of 1916 was free of the previous massive extortion and monetary demands made by the Turks who were agents of the Ottoman government. Saudi Arabian conquest and modern history Following the 1924 Battle of Mecca, the Sharif of Mecca was overthrown by the Saud family, and Mecca was incorporated into Saudi Arabia. Under Saudi rule, much of the historic city has been demolished as a result of the Saudi government fearing these sites might become sites of association in worship besides Allah (shirk). The city has been expanded to include several towns previously considered to be separate from the holy city and now is just a few kilometers outside the main sites of the Hajj, Mina, Muzdalifah and Arafat. Mecca is not served by any airport, due to concerns about the city's safety. It is instead served by the King Abdulaziz International Airport in Jeddah (approx. 70 km away) internationally and the Ta'if Regional Airport |
this places America as the originator of religious liberty and freedom, while noting a need to expand these American values worldwide. Although officially shunned by the LDS Church, fundamentalist Mormons believe in the White Horse Prophecy, which argues that Mormons will be called upon to preserve the Constitution as it hangs "by a thread". Ordinances In Mormonism, an ordinance is a religious ritual of special significance, often involving the formation of a covenant with God. Ordinances are performed by the authority of the priesthood and in the name of Jesus Christ. The term has a meaning roughly similar to that of the term "sacrament" in other Christian denominations. Saving ordinances (or ordinances viewed as necessary for salvation) include: baptism by immersion after the age of accountability (normally age 8); confirmation and reception of the gift of the Holy Ghost, performed by laying hands on the head of a newly baptized member; ordination to the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods for males; an endowment (including washing and anointing) received in temples; and marriage (or sealing) to a spouse. Mormons also perform other ordinances, which include the Lord's supper (commonly called the sacrament), naming and blessing children, giving priesthood blessings and patriarchal blessings, anointing and blessing the sick, participating in prayer circles, and setting apart individuals who are called to church positions. In Mormonism, the saving ordinances are seen as necessary for salvation, but they are not sufficient in and of themselves. For example, baptism is required for exaltation, but simply having been baptized does not guarantee any eternal reward. The baptized person is expected to be obedient to God's commandments, to repent of any sinful conduct subsequent to baptism, and to receive the other saving ordinances. Because Mormons believe that everyone must receive certain ordinances to be saved, Mormons perform ordinances on behalf of deceased persons. These ordinances are performed vicariously or by "proxy" on behalf of the dead. In accordance with their belief in each individual's "free agency", living or dead, Mormons believe that the deceased may accept or reject the offered ordinance in the spirit world, just as all spirits decided to accept or reject God's plan originally. In addition, these "conditional" ordinances on behalf of the dead are performed only when a deceased person's genealogical information has been submitted to a temple and correctly processed there before the ordinance ritual is performed. Only ordinances for salvation are performed on behalf of deceased persons. Scripture Mormons believe in the Old and New Testaments, and the LDS Church uses the King James Bible as its official scriptural text of the Bible. While Mormons believe in the general accuracy of the modern day text of the Bible, they also believe that it is incomplete and that errors have been introduced. In Mormon theology, many lost truths are restored in the Book of Mormon, which Mormons hold to be divine scripture and equal in authority to the Bible. The Mormon scriptural canon also includes a collection of revelations and writings contained in the Doctrine and Covenants which contains doctrine and prophecy and the Pearl of Great Price which addresses briefly Genesis to Exodus. These books, as well as the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, have varying degrees of acceptance as divine scripture among different denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement. Revelation In Mormonism, continuous revelation is the principle that God or his divine agents still continue to communicate to mankind. This communication can be manifest in many ways: influences of the Holy Ghost (the principal form in which this principle is manifest), visions, visitations of divine beings, and others. Joseph Smith used the example of the Lord's revelations to Moses in Deuteronomy to explain the importance of continuous revelation: Mormons believe that Smith and subsequent church leaders could speak scripture "when moved upon by the Holy Ghost." In addition, many Mormons believe that ancient prophets in other regions of the world received revelations that resulted in additional scriptures that have been lost and may, one day, be forthcoming. In Mormonism, revelation is not limited to church members. For instance, Latter Day Saints believe that the United States Constitution is a divinely inspired document. Mormons are encouraged to develop a personal relationship with the Holy Ghost and receive personal revelation for their own direction and that of their family. The Latter Day Saint concept of revelation includes the belief that revelation from God is available to all those who earnestly seek it with the intent of doing good. It also teaches that everyone is entitled to personal revelation with respect to his or her stewardship (leadership responsibility). Thus, parents may receive inspiration from God in raising their families, individuals can receive divine inspiration to help them meet personal challenges, church officers may receive revelation for those whom they serve. The important consequence of this is that each person may receive confirmation that particular doctrines taught by a prophet are true, as well as gain divine insight in using those truths for their own benefit and eternal progress. In the church, personal revelation is expected and encouraged, and many converts believe that personal revelation from God was instrumental in their conversion. Relations to other faiths Relation to mainstream Christianity Mormonism categorizes itself within Christianity, and nearly all Mormons self-identify as Christian. For some who define Christianity within the doctrines of Catholicism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, the Churches of the East, and Protestantism, Mormonism's differences place it outside the umbrella of Christianity. Since its beginnings, the faith has proclaimed itself to be Christ's Church restored with its original authority, structure and power; maintaining that existing denominations believed in incorrect doctrines and were not acknowledged by God as his church and kingdom. Though the religion quickly gained a large following of Christian seekers, in the 1830s, many American Christians came to view the church's early doctrines and practices as politically and culturally subversive, as well as doctrinally heretical, abominable, and condemnable. This discord led to a series of sometimes-deadly conflicts between Mormons and others who saw themselves as orthodox Christians. Although such violence declined during the twentieth century, the religion's unique doctrinal views and practices still generate criticism, sometimes vehemently so. This gives rise to efforts by Mormons and opposing types of Christians to proselytize each other. Mormons believe in Jesus Christ as the literal Son of God and Messiah, his crucifixion as a conclusion of a sin offering, and subsequent resurrection. However, Latter-day Saints (LDS) reject the ecumenical creeds and the definition of the Trinity. (In contrast, the second-largest Latter Day Saint denomination, the Community of Christ, is Trinitarian and monotheistic.) Mormons hold the view that the New Testament prophesied both the apostasy from the teachings of Christ and his apostles as well as the restoration of all things prior to the second coming of Christ. Some notable differences with mainstream Christianity include: A belief that Jesus began his atonement in the garden of Gethsemane and continued it to his crucifixion, rather than the orthodox belief that the crucifixion alone was the physical atonement; and an afterlife with three degrees of glory, with hell (often called spirit prison) being a temporary repository for the wicked between death and the resurrection. Additionally, Mormons do not believe in creation ex nihilo, believing that matter is eternal, and creation involved God organizing existing matter. Much of the Mormon belief system is geographically oriented around the North and South American continents. Mormons believe that the people of the Book of Mormon lived in the western hemisphere, that Christ appeared in the western hemisphere after his death and resurrection, that the true faith was restored in Upstate New York by Joseph Smith, that the Garden of Eden was located in North America, and that the New Jerusalem would be built in Missouri. For this and other reasons, including a belief by many Mormons in American exceptionalism, Molly Worthen speculates that this may be why Leo Tolstoy described Mormonism as the "quintessential 'American religion'". Relation to Judaism Although Mormons do not claim to be part of Judaism, Mormon theology claims to situate Mormonism within the context of Judaism to an extent that goes beyond what most other Christian denominations claim. The faith incorporates many Old Testament ideas into its theology, and the beliefs of Mormons sometimes parallel those of Judaism and certain elements of Jewish culture. In the earliest days of Mormonism, Joseph Smith taught that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were members of some of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Later, he taught that Mormons were Israelites, and that they may learn of their tribal affiliation within the twelve Israelite tribes. Members of the LDS Church receive Patriarchal blessings which declare the recipient's lineage within one of the tribes of Israel. The lineage is either through true blood-line or adoption. The LDS Church teaches that if one is not a direct descendant of one of the twelve tribes, upon baptism he or she is adopted into one of the tribes. Patriarchal blessings also include personal information which is revealed through a patriarch by the power of the priesthood. The Mormon affinity for Judaism is expressed by the many references to Judaism in the Mormon liturgy. For example, Smith named the largest Mormon settlement he founded Nauvoo, which means "to be beautiful" in Hebrew. Brigham Young named a tributary of the Great Salt Lake the "Jordan River". The LDS Church created a writing scheme called the Deseret Alphabet, which was based, in part, on Hebrew. The LDS Church has a Jerusalem Center in Israel, where students focus their study on Near Eastern history, culture, language, and the Bible. There has been some controversy involving Jewish groups who see the actions of some elements of Mormonism as offensive. In the 1990s, Jewish groups vocally opposed the LDS practice of baptism for the dead on behalf of Jewish victims of the Holocaust and Jews in general. According to LDS Church general authority Monte J. Brough, "Mormons who baptized 380,000 Holocaust victims posthumously were motivated by love and compassion and did not understand their gesture might offend Jews ... they did not realize that what they intended as a 'Christian act of service' was 'misguided and insensitive'". Mormons believe that when the dead are baptized through proxy, they have the option of accepting or rejecting the ordinance. Relation to Islam Since its origins in the 19th century, Mormonism has been compared to Islam, often by detractors of one religion or the other. For instance, Joseph Smith was referred to as "the modern mahomet" by the New York Herald, shortly after his murder in June 1844. This epithet repeated a comparison that had been made from Smith's earliest career, one that was not intended at the time to be complimentary. Comparison of the Mormon and Muslim prophets still occurs today, sometimes for derogatory or polemical reasons but also for more scholarly (and neutral) purposes. While Mormonism and Islam have many similarities, there are also significant, fundamental differences between the two religions. Mormon–Muslim relations have been historically cordial; recent years have seen increasing dialogue between adherents of the two faiths, and cooperation in charitable endeavors, especially in the Middle and Far East. Islam and Mormonism both originate in the Abrahamic traditions. Each religion sees its founder (Muhammad for Islam, and Joseph Smith for Mormonism) as being a true prophet of God, called to re-establish the truths of these ancient theological belief systems that have been altered, corrupted, or lost. In addition, both prophets received visits from an angel, leading to additional books of scripture. Both religions share a high emphasis on family life, charitable giving, chastity, abstention from alcohol, and a special reverence for, though not worship of, their founding prophet. Before the 1890 Manifesto against plural marriage, Mormonism and Islam also shared in the belief in and practice of plural marriage, a practice now held in common by Islam and various branches of Mormon fundamentalism. The religions differ significantly in their views on God. Islam insists upon the complete oneness and uniqueness of God (Allah), while Mormonism asserts that the Godhead is made up of three distinct "personages." Mormonism sees Jesus Christ as the promised Messiah and the literal Son of God, while Islam insists that the title "Messiah" means that Jesus (or "Isa") was a prophet sent to establish the true faith, not that he was the Son of God or a divine being. Despite opposition from other Christian denominations, Mormonism identifies itself as a Christian religion, the "restoration" of primitive Christianity. Islam does not refer to itself as "Christian", asserting that Jesus and all true followers of Christ's teachings were (and are) Muslims—a term that means submitters to God. Islam proclaims that its prophet Muhammad was the "seal of the prophets", and that no further prophets would come | loss of Priesthood authority to administer the Church and its ordinances. Mormons believe that God re-established the early Christian Church as found in the New Testament through Joseph Smith. In particular, Mormons believe that angels such as Peter, James, John, and John the Baptist appeared to Joseph Smith and others and bestowed various Priesthood authorities on them. Mormons thus believe that their Church is the "only true and living church" because divine authority was restored to it through Smith. In addition, Mormons believe that Smith and his legitimate successors are modern prophets who receive revelation from God to guide the church. They maintain that other religions have a portion of the truth and are guided by the light of Christ. Cosmology Smith's cosmology is laid out mostly in Smith's later revelations and sermons, but particularly the Book of Abraham, the Book of Moses, and the King Follett discourse. Mormon cosmology presents a unique view of God and the universe, and places a high importance on human agency. In Mormonism, life on earth is just a short part of an eternal existence. Mormons believe that in the beginning, all people existed as spirits or "intelligences," in the presence of God. In this state, God proposed a plan of salvation whereby they could progress and "have a privilege to advance like himself." The spirits were free to accept or reject this plan, and a "third" of them, led by Satan rejected it. The rest accepted the plan, coming to earth and receiving bodies with an understanding that they would experience sin and suffering. In Mormonism, the central part of God's plan is the atonement of Jesus Christ. Mormons believe that one purpose of earthly life is to learn to choose good over evil. In this process, people inevitably make mistakes, becoming unworthy to return to the presence of God. Mormons believe that Jesus paid for the sins of the world and that all people can be saved through his atonement. Mormons accept Christ's atonement through faith, repentance, formal covenants or ordinances such as baptism, and consistently trying to live a Christ-like life. According to Mormon scripture, the Earth's creation was not ex nihilo, but organized from existing matter. The Earth is just one of many inhabited worlds, and there are many governing heavenly bodies, including the planet or star Kolob, which is said to be nearest the throne of God. America Mormon theology teaches that the United States is a unique place and that Mormons are God's chosen people, selected for a singular destiny. The Book of Mormon alludes to the United States as being the Biblical promised land, with the Constitution of the United States being divinely inspired, and argues that America is an exceptional nation. In Upstate New York in 1823, Joseph Smith claimed to have had a vision in which the Angel Moroni told him about engraved golden plates buried in a nearby hill. According to Smith, he received subsequent instruction from Moroni and, four years later, excavated the plates and translated them from "reformed Egyptian" into English; the resultant Book of Mormon–so called after an ancient American prophet who, according to Smith, had compiled the text recorded on the golden plates–recounts the history of a tribe of Israelites, led by the prophet Lehi, who migrated from Jerusalem to the Americas in the 7th century BCE. In Mormonism, these Israelite tribes who migrated to the Americas centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ are considered to be among the ancestors of pre-Columbian Native Americans. Joseph Smith argued that the millennial New Jerusalem was to be built in America (10th Article of Faith). In the Doctrine and Covenants, Smith records God as saying "it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another. And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood" (D&C 101:79–80). To Mormons, this places America as the originator of religious liberty and freedom, while noting a need to expand these American values worldwide. Although officially shunned by the LDS Church, fundamentalist Mormons believe in the White Horse Prophecy, which argues that Mormons will be called upon to preserve the Constitution as it hangs "by a thread". Ordinances In Mormonism, an ordinance is a religious ritual of special significance, often involving the formation of a covenant with God. Ordinances are performed by the authority of the priesthood and in the name of Jesus Christ. The term has a meaning roughly similar to that of the term "sacrament" in other Christian denominations. Saving ordinances (or ordinances viewed as necessary for salvation) include: baptism by immersion after the age of accountability (normally age 8); confirmation and reception of the gift of the Holy Ghost, performed by laying hands on the head of a newly baptized member; ordination to the Aaronic and Melchizedek priesthoods for males; an endowment (including washing and anointing) received in temples; and marriage (or sealing) to a spouse. Mormons also perform other ordinances, which include the Lord's supper (commonly called the sacrament), naming and blessing children, giving priesthood blessings and patriarchal blessings, anointing and blessing the sick, participating in prayer circles, and setting apart individuals who are called to church positions. In Mormonism, the saving ordinances are seen as necessary for salvation, but they are not sufficient in and of themselves. For example, baptism is required for exaltation, but simply having been baptized does not guarantee any eternal reward. The baptized person is expected to be obedient to God's commandments, to repent of any sinful conduct subsequent to baptism, and to receive the other saving ordinances. Because Mormons believe that everyone must receive certain ordinances to be saved, Mormons perform ordinances on behalf of deceased persons. These ordinances are performed vicariously or by "proxy" on behalf of the dead. In accordance with their belief in each individual's "free agency", living or dead, Mormons believe that the deceased may accept or reject the offered ordinance in the spirit world, just as all spirits decided to accept or reject God's plan originally. In addition, these "conditional" ordinances on behalf of the dead are performed only when a deceased person's genealogical information has been submitted to a temple and correctly processed there before the ordinance ritual is performed. Only ordinances for salvation are performed on behalf of deceased persons. Scripture Mormons believe in the Old and New Testaments, and the LDS Church uses the King James Bible as its official scriptural text of the Bible. While Mormons believe in the general accuracy of the modern day text of the Bible, they also believe that it is incomplete and that errors have been introduced. In Mormon theology, many lost truths are restored in the Book of Mormon, which Mormons hold to be divine scripture and equal in authority to the Bible. The Mormon scriptural canon also includes a collection of revelations and writings contained in the Doctrine and Covenants which contains doctrine and prophecy and the Pearl of Great Price which addresses briefly Genesis to Exodus. These books, as well as the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible, have varying degrees of acceptance as divine scripture among different denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement. Revelation In Mormonism, continuous revelation is the principle that God or his divine agents still continue to communicate to mankind. This communication can be manifest in many ways: influences of the Holy Ghost (the principal form in which this principle is manifest), visions, visitations of divine beings, and others. Joseph Smith used the example of the Lord's revelations to Moses in Deuteronomy to explain the importance of continuous revelation: Mormons believe that Smith and subsequent church leaders could speak scripture "when moved upon by the Holy Ghost." In addition, many Mormons believe that ancient prophets in other regions of the world received revelations that resulted in additional scriptures that have been lost and may, one day, be forthcoming. In Mormonism, revelation is not limited to church members. For instance, Latter Day Saints believe that the United States Constitution is a divinely inspired document. Mormons are encouraged to develop a personal relationship with the Holy Ghost and receive personal revelation for their own direction and that of their family. The Latter Day Saint concept of revelation includes the belief that revelation from God is available to all those who earnestly seek it with the intent of doing good. It also teaches that everyone is entitled to personal revelation with respect to his or her stewardship (leadership responsibility). Thus, parents may receive inspiration from God in raising their families, individuals can receive divine inspiration to help them meet personal challenges, church officers may receive revelation for those whom they serve. The important consequence of this is that each person may receive confirmation that particular doctrines taught by a prophet are true, as well as gain divine insight in using those truths for their own benefit and eternal progress. In the church, personal revelation is expected and encouraged, and many converts believe that personal revelation from God was instrumental in their conversion. Relations to other faiths Relation to mainstream Christianity Mormonism categorizes itself within Christianity, and nearly all Mormons self-identify as Christian. For some who define Christianity within the doctrines of Catholicism, Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy, the Churches of the East, and Protestantism, Mormonism's differences place it outside the umbrella of Christianity. Since its beginnings, the faith has proclaimed itself to be Christ's Church restored with its original authority, structure and power; maintaining that existing denominations believed in incorrect doctrines and were not acknowledged by God as his church and kingdom. Though the religion quickly gained a large following of Christian seekers, in the 1830s, many American Christians came to view the church's early doctrines and practices as politically and culturally subversive, as well as doctrinally heretical, abominable, and condemnable. This discord led to a series of sometimes-deadly conflicts between Mormons and others who saw themselves as orthodox Christians. Although such violence declined during the twentieth century, the religion's unique doctrinal views and practices still generate criticism, sometimes vehemently so. This gives rise to efforts by Mormons and opposing types of Christians to proselytize each other. Mormons believe in Jesus Christ as the literal Son of God and Messiah, his crucifixion as a conclusion of a sin offering, and subsequent resurrection. However, Latter-day Saints (LDS) reject the ecumenical creeds and the definition of the Trinity. (In contrast, the second-largest Latter Day Saint denomination, the Community of Christ, is Trinitarian and monotheistic.) Mormons hold the view that the New Testament prophesied both the apostasy from the teachings of Christ and his apostles as well as the restoration of all things prior to the second coming of Christ. Some notable differences with mainstream Christianity include: A belief that Jesus began his atonement in the garden of Gethsemane and continued it to his crucifixion, rather than the orthodox belief that the crucifixion alone was the physical atonement; and an afterlife with three degrees of glory, with hell (often called spirit prison) being a temporary repository for the wicked between death and the resurrection. Additionally, Mormons do not believe in creation ex nihilo, believing that matter is eternal, and creation involved God organizing existing matter. Much of the Mormon belief system is geographically oriented around the North and South American continents. Mormons believe that the people of the Book of Mormon lived in the western hemisphere, that Christ appeared in the western hemisphere after his death and resurrection, that the true faith was restored in Upstate New York by Joseph Smith, that the Garden of Eden was located in North America, and that the New Jerusalem would be built in Missouri. For this and other reasons, including a belief by many Mormons in American exceptionalism, Molly Worthen speculates that this may be why Leo Tolstoy described Mormonism as the "quintessential 'American religion'". Relation to Judaism Although Mormons do not claim to be part of Judaism, Mormon theology claims to situate Mormonism within the context of Judaism to an extent that goes beyond what most other Christian denominations claim. The faith incorporates many Old Testament ideas into its theology, and the beliefs of Mormons sometimes parallel those of Judaism and certain elements of Jewish culture. In the earliest days of Mormonism, Joseph Smith taught that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were members of some of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Later, he taught that Mormons were Israelites, and that they may learn of their tribal affiliation within the twelve Israelite tribes. Members of the LDS Church receive Patriarchal blessings which declare the recipient's lineage within one of the tribes of Israel. The lineage is either through true blood-line or adoption. The LDS Church teaches that if one is not a direct descendant of one of the twelve tribes, upon baptism he or she is adopted into one of the tribes. Patriarchal blessings also include personal information which is revealed through a patriarch by the power of the priesthood. The Mormon affinity for Judaism is expressed by the many references to Judaism in the Mormon liturgy. For example, Smith named the largest Mormon settlement he founded Nauvoo, which means "to be beautiful" in Hebrew. Brigham Young named a tributary of the Great Salt Lake the "Jordan River". The LDS Church created a writing scheme called the Deseret Alphabet, which was based, in part, on Hebrew. The LDS Church has a Jerusalem Center in Israel, where students focus their study on Near Eastern history, culture, language, and the Bible. There has been some controversy involving Jewish groups who see the actions of some elements of Mormonism as offensive. In the 1990s, Jewish groups vocally opposed the LDS practice of baptism for the dead on behalf of Jewish victims of the Holocaust and Jews in general. According to LDS Church general authority Monte J. Brough, "Mormons who baptized 380,000 Holocaust victims posthumously were motivated by love and compassion and did not understand their gesture might offend Jews ... they did not realize that what they intended as a 'Christian act of service' was 'misguided and insensitive'". Mormons believe that when the dead are baptized through proxy, they have the option of accepting or rejecting the ordinance. Relation to Islam Since its origins in the 19th century, Mormonism has been compared to Islam, often by detractors of one religion or the other. For instance, Joseph Smith was referred to as "the modern mahomet" by the New York Herald, shortly after his murder in June 1844. This epithet repeated a comparison that had been made from Smith's earliest career, one that was not intended at the time to be complimentary. Comparison of the Mormon and Muslim prophets still occurs today, sometimes for derogatory or polemical reasons but also for more scholarly (and neutral) purposes. While Mormonism and Islam have many similarities, there are also significant, fundamental differences between the two religions. Mormon–Muslim relations have been historically cordial; recent years have seen increasing dialogue between adherents of the two faiths, and cooperation in charitable endeavors, especially in the Middle and Far East. Islam and Mormonism both originate in the Abrahamic traditions. Each religion sees its founder (Muhammad for Islam, and Joseph Smith for Mormonism) as being a true prophet of God, called to re-establish the truths of these ancient theological belief systems that have been altered, corrupted, or lost. In addition, both prophets received visits from an angel, leading to additional books of scripture. Both religions share a high emphasis on family life, charitable giving, chastity, abstention from alcohol, and a special reverence for, though not worship of, their founding prophet. Before the 1890 Manifesto against plural marriage, Mormonism and Islam also shared in the belief in and practice of plural marriage, a practice now held in common by Islam and various branches of Mormon fundamentalism. The religions differ significantly in their views on God. Islam insists |
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